Spark GL Interview With Stuff(NZ) Work, Jobs, Automation And More

Yes, I'm Gerd Lingenhard, I'm a futurist author and I have my own company called the Futures Agency. And basically as a futurist, I look at near term future scenarios and I help companies, organizations, governments and people to reinvent, to basically form a business model or a concept for what they're going to be in the future. Mostly 2020. So looking backwards from the future, it's not about predictions, it's about foresights, observations, developing a new view of what is coming, understanding and discovering stuff. I've been here for a couple days working with Spark Telecom company about their future scenarios and developing a battle plan for the future and helping them understand what's happening and talking to their people about what's coming and so on. Well, technology is very powerful now. So the power of technology companies is worrisome because they are offering us a kind of scenario to where we are living inside of their world and they're using our data to a large degree without any real constraints. So there's things like privacy. Those are huge concerns. Becoming naked, digitally naked, losing my rights, the end of anonymity, serendipity, the end of being human in the end, right? Because machines are running everything. Well, it's only logical to say that if technology becomes so good and so cheap and so powerful that we will lose jobs like fast food places, checkout clerks in the supermarket, truck drivers driving long distances. I mean basically vast amounts of jobs that are repetitive will be completely automated. Financial advice, that's machine work to a large degree. You know, just putting together data. So it's safe to assume that a lot of these jobs will be automated, which means that eventually we may have 40, 50% unemployment. Well, I think one thing is I'm very excited about the possibility of our system changing what I call post capitalism in a way that will require us to work a lot less, have more free time, not worry so much about money because resources will be abundant. The concept of a guaranteed minimum income, which is quite likely to happen as a result of technology doing all the work. We may not have to work like this and a switch to the right brain, so becoming more human as a consequence of technology.