The Evolution of Identity over Generations with Dr Eliza Filby and Dr Ian Pearson #4

Welcome to The Future of You. Today we are joined by two doctors. Dr. Eliza Filby is a historian. She started her professional life as an academic, writing and teaching on the political upheavals of the 1980s, and she then went on to study for her PhD, which she acquired at the University of Warwick. Then in 2015, she published her first book, God and Mrs. Thatcher: The Battle for Britain's Soul, which explored the social, economic, and political upheaval of the late 20th century Britain. She's taught the history of capitalism to Chinese millennials in Beijing and the history of social democracy to British millennials in the UK. And she's now a speaker and writer who specializes in generational intelligence. What is that? Well, we'll find out more in a moment. Dr. Ian Pearson is a friend and colleague from the world of futurology. For over 30 years, he's been tracking and predicting developments across a wide range of vectors: technology, business, society, politics, and the environment. He graduated in maths and physics and gained a Doctor of Science. He worked in numerous branches of engineering, from aeronautics to cybernetics, and sustainable transport to electronic cosmetics. He has come up with thousands of inventions in the area of text messages, active contact lenses, driverless transport, and even space travel. He was BT's full-time futurologist from 1991 to 2007, but now writes, lectures, and consults globally as a semi-retired person on all aspects of the technology-driven future. In this episode, I really wanted to bring together a historian and a futurist to explore what we should make of shifting patterns in identity. And I was thinking of those patterns changing as a result of generational, demographic, and of course societal changes. Or maybe it's the other way round. Is it generational, demographic, and societal change that is influencing our notions of identity? What it is, how we should express it, does it need protecting in new ways? Does it need protecting at all? So in this discussion, which was fascinating and in a way only touched the sides of what we could have discussed and what I wanted to discuss, but maybe hopefully we'll be able to get them both back again. We did discuss the role of AI in the future and whether it will end up providing us with more personality, more individuality, or whether in fact it's going to kind of bind us together in a collective intelligence or even beget a new form of tribalism. We talked about the future of work and the role of the individual and whether that's getting more powerful as power shifts from institutions to individuals. And can those individuals, who will probably find themselves doing many, many different roles and jobs over their lifetime, can they really shape the moral compass of the corporation? Or is the corporation just a bit of an old-fashioned concept? And finally, we do touch on the existence of class Is it still a thing? Or actually, in the future, will we find that it, it recedes into the background and becomes less important as a marker of identity in the future? Well, let's listen in and find out more. So welcome, Eliza and Ian. I'm delighted to speak to both of you and together as well. I was really keen to get you you know, a brilliant historian and a brilliant futurist together so that we could talk about identity from the point of view of time, I suppose, and generational change, because I think it's something that's really fascinating. And, um, I thought it'd be great to get both perspectives together. So I wonder if actually we'll start this podcast, because lots of people might not know what each of you do, if maybe you could tell me what a generational expert is, Eliza, and Ian, you can explain what a futurologist is.

Yeah, so thank you for inviting me on. And thank you, Ian, as well. I'm really intrigued by what a marriage between a historian and a futurologist looks like in terms of conversation. I think it'd be quite interesting. But in terms of being a generations expert, it's essentially understanding how people are shaped by time, and understanding first and foremost, that generational categories are generalisations, and they are limiting. And they're a limiting form of analysis, especially in the era of big data, when we really can drill down to the nuance and even to the individual, I think generational categories are a useful way of analysing, but they are not the end point and the only point of analysing society. And, you know, I look at the way in which we are, whether you're a baby boomer, a Gen Xer, a millennial, a Gen Zer, and now Gen Alpha, the new generation coming through, how they were shaped by particular economic, societal, cultural, kind of forces, really, and understanding that whether you first encountered the smartphone when you were 13 or 30 actually makes a huge difference as to how you use it and how you integrated it into your lives. Now, that's not to say that, you know, a baby boomer can't be on TikTok, but it's also just appreciating how we are shaped by our time. But I think, you know, I sort of work in 3 areas, really, the future and the present of work, and how the multi-generational makeup of society and the workforce is really— can be a huge opportunity, but quite often is a challenge. And ageism, I think, is a kind of the last acceptable form of prejudice, particularly evident in the workplace. I also work in the realm of consumption, so looking at the ways in which different generations are consuming different products. And then finally, looking at the realm of generations in citizenship and how it's impacting politics, because as we know, when we're talking about Brexit or even COVID, there are clear age dividers on these issues and particularly these experiences. But I just want to finally say is that when you're talking about generations, I think we need to understand that those generational categories are broad, and within each generational category, each individual is really shaped by 5 other things, and that's obviously your gender, your geography, your educational and economic status, your time, so your age in which you fall into that, that generational range. And those kind of areas, I think, really define and provide the nuance and what I'm getting at. And then, you know, in terms of generations, what we're basically talking about is how we're living our lives differently. So I'm principally interested in how is the life cycle being shaped in the 21st century, how we're extending our entry into adulthood, extending our adolescence, how we're prolonging retirement, how we're living longer, how we're denying middle age. What does that look like in the 21st century? Because it's looking very differently from what it did in the 20th.

Ian?

Well, I'm a futurologist, or futurist as most of the world would think of me. I'm really a time traveler. My father was an archaeologist who received the Pomeranz Award for his lifetime contributions in archaeology, and I was really interested in that too. I'm not really interested in history from about 1000 AD to now, it bores me to tears. But the ancient history I'm really interested in, and archaeology and sort of prehistory, certainly very interested in. And so I've got sort of a time travel gene which I inherited from my father, who goes back to 50,000 BC. And I try to go forward to about 2050 AD regularly, and did this, this morning, for example. And sometimes as far ahead as 2100. You really can't go any further ahead than that as a futurist. But really, what I am as a futurist is a technology futurist. My head isn't big enough, my brain's not big enough to cope with the future of every field. So I focus it right down to just looking at the implications of technology and very superficial understanding of an awful lot of that technology. So I don't know very much about genetic manipulation and biotech and stuff, and a little bit. I'm a specialist in IT I guess, and I know a lot about some of the other areas of technology too. So I spent my whole working life at the front end of technology, and I think about the future from that point of view. But when you're thinking about the future of technology, you always have to think about the world you're going to release it into and how that world's going to behave. So you have to think about the future as a whole, uh, systemically. So I think about all the different aspects of everyday life in that, um, so I look at, uh, how people behave socially and politically and so on as a factor in identifying how the new technology might appear. But I'm not a specialist in those areas. And if you ask me details about, you know, what's life like in China or South Africa or something, I don't know very much at all in specifics of those everyday things. So I'm a technology expert, I guess. But it's— going back to what Eliza was saying about generational identification and so on, as part of my profession, I have to try to shield I try to free myself from personal prejudice about what I think I want in all of these different areas. And I try very hard to look at what the whole of society looks like with all of its different tribes and see how all of they will behave regarding this future technology in order to try to figure out what the overall impact of this technology will be. And that really means after having done this for well over 30 years, I don't really have very much of a personal identity in terms of a particular age group, or gender, or social class, or anything else. I try to shield myself from those. So, the world which I grew up into as a child doesn't really change my attitudes, I think, to what I want today. And if I was trying to identify with a particular generation, I'd probably identify with the one, which is going to be born in 15 or 20 years' time, rather than with the existing ones. I think all of the day, every day, in terms of the future and the far future. So I just don't really identify with any of the existing generations we have today. So I find it very difficult to understand what it means to be this or the other.

I love this idea that Ian transcends time. I mean, you could argue, of course, that even your profession is of its time. You know, will we have futurologists in 20 years' time? Did we have them 100 years ago? Not in the same way that obviously you operate. So in a sense, you are a product of your time, aren't you?

I would say that futurology is the world's second oldest profession.

But they used to be called priests.

No, no, no. A long time ago, we might have been called priests or we might have been called astrologers or something like that. I don't believe in astrology. It's something I disagree with. Certain people around here. But I'm not into astrology. But a long time ago, people looked at the stars as a means of predicting the future. It's a good way of working out what the date is or what the season's going to be next week, but it's not much use for anything else. So I don't really 100% agree with that.

One of the things you're mentioning, I think, Ian, there is the— it could be a trend or maybe it's a generational sort of value around activism, which feels very sort of Gen Z behavioral value. I think, is that what you're kind of reacting to, in that there's an expectation now, I think, particularly in society, to take an activist standpoint before one looks at things objectively? And when I hear myself saying that, I can hear myself as a Gen Xer, you know, almost— well, I am passing a judgment on it, but I think that's one of the interesting patterns, interesting changes over time through 2 or 3 generations. Is that what I'm picking up on when you say that?

Not really. I mean, when I was at university way back in the early 1980s, uh, 1981 I graduated, so 1980, maybe 1979, I can't remember which. I was part of university activist group then. We've always expected university students to be activists, they always have been. I don't think that's anything new at all. Maybe the topics are slightly new, and the way they do it is new, certainly being able to use social media, but students have always rebelled against the adult world. They've always grown up with the idealistic teaching at school, and they wanted to try to reinforce that on the existing adult generation, rebelling against them, saying, well, we're now starting to get some power, let's start to use it. To try to change the world. And then they discover as they grow through their 20s that the world isn't quite that simple. And by the time they reach their 40s, they're as jaded as we all are now.

No, I think Ian's right. I mean, it's almost the youth are predetermined to rock the status quo. And I think you first saw that in a significant way in the 1960s, and that was the baby boomer generation. And generation before that, slightly the Silent Generation, that started to challenge massively the status quo. And that's how you got the, the social and cultural economic upheavals of the 1960s and '70s. But the gradual kind of integration of those new cultural norms into mainstream culture. And I think what you're seeing today is that continuation of that trend, but facilitated by technology. And also coupled with the increasingly siloed nature in which age groups are now living. So actually, the '60s generation were the first generation to really spend a lot of time together. The more and more people went to university, the more young people started hanging out with each other, not going to work, delaying entry into the multigenerational workplace, and started hanging out with each other. And that's where you got youth culture, the birth of youth culture. And now you're seeing that played out on the internet. And of course, the thing about the smartphone is that it silos you. It creates these barriers, these walls to really this world, which encourages you to think that everyone else thinks like you and is constantly reinforcing your behaviors and beliefs. And that's why I think you've got a generation now. It's not just students, it's young 13-year-olds marching, you know, in support of activism against climate change. They're getting younger and younger, these activists. And the way in which they are collating and gathering and becoming activists online is, is new, but the process isn't. And I think also one really important factor here is that we are still looking to youth culture as the disruptive force in society, but overwhelmingly now we live in a society that is increasingly divided across generations. And where actually each generation is very siloed. And in the workplace, I think in the next 10 years, talking about the future, you're going to see that activism of youth really disrupting the workplace. It's already begun, but I think it's going to really continue.

I think the technology has had a huge impact over the decades with this. I mean, my grandfather's generation it was very rare if they met anybody that didn't live in the same village. I mean, my grandfather probably met a few hundred people over his lifetime. I would meet a few hundred people in the course of an average day when I was doing lots of conference speeches and so on. So that's changed enormously with social media. You have reach right across the world all the time. It doesn't make any difference whether somebody lives next door or whether they live 10,000 miles away. So we have a big change with the technology, and people, I think, are still driven by the same underlying human nature, but the technology allows them to manifest that in different ways. So people have always wanted to have influence, and they used to have influence in the local pub or the local church or the local school or something, and now they can have influence right across the world. And the people you listen to, now that you've got access to to 9 billion or 8 billion people, it's a bit different from having access to 80 people or 100 people that you used to know from just your local environment. So that's really what's changed. The underlying human nature is still the same. You still want to influence, you still want to have a position in society. The technology's changed the nature of how that works. So you've now got access to a lot more people and a lot more platforms to express what you want.. But at the same time, your influence is diluted because another 8 billion people have also got that ability too. So we've all got our abilities spread right across the world, and the only way you can make yourself heard is to make yourself confined largely to those little bubbles. And so when you're shouting at people who think just like you, they're all backing you up. Oh yeah, that's right, I agree 100%. But if you were listening to the echoes from all 8 billion, you'd realize you're not having any effect at all. You wouldn't get any reinforcement, and there wouldn't be any benefit in doing it. So I think we're going through a sort of a temporary phase where you've only got access to a small number of people on social media. So there is distributed around the world, but you tend to lock yourself into these digital bubbles of people who think the same way, who give you that reinforcement. I think that's going change in the 20 to 30 year time frame when the AI and the new technologies force you to have access to the entire number of people around the world. And then you realize that you're just one very small fish in a very big sea. That will change our identity enormously.

Well, I just, I think that's a really interesting point. I just, I would have looked at it the other way, and I again fully acknowledge that I'm speaking from a position of ignorance here, but I would have thought increasing encroachment of AI AI into our daily lives would heighten the sense of individualism rather than dilute it?

I think, uh, if you were looking at today's AI, that would probably be the case, because today's AI is very limited in its intelligence, and it can only assimilate the views of a very small number of people. If you take that forward 20, 25 years, if you go forward to 2050 or 2052 or something, the AIs that you're interacting with will be able to assimilate the views of the entire global community. So when you're saying something, you won't be just bouncing it off the walls of a very small echo chamber, you'll be bouncing it off the entire global population, the views of which can be represented by a single AI who can say, well, you know, 'You might be right to a point, but there's an awful lot of people think this, and a lot of people think that, and a lot of people think the other.' And that will probably moderate our views in ways which we just don't get today, where the technology essentially limits the number of people who can interact back with us. I mean, even on Twitter, when we talk about the Twitter storms and our Twitter spats, you say something, somebody objects to it, but the number of people who see it is probably only about 1,000 people. My average tweet only gets an exposure to 1,000 people. Some people get more exposure than that, but it's rare to get that much engagement that you get a lot of argument for something that you say. In the future, your AI will take all of that argument from all these people. It'll know all of their personalities. It'll be able to present to you the views condensed of all of those 8 billion people out there that are connected to the net. I think that's bound to change things. It just essentially destroys tribalism as we know it today.

You see, I totally agree with the premise of that argument, but I wonder, how do you make money out of that? Because there's a reason why, you know, Facebook is designed algorithmically to make us angry, to, to make us feel things, because the longer our attention is on that platform, the more they can advertise to us. So how, if they destroy tribalism, how is that an economic model for platforms and AI more generally? Because that's at the root of who we are.

Well, the AI models today are very largely based on advertising, but that isn't the only way you can run things online. Subscription models really haven't been tried very much, and democratic models haven't been tried very much. It's entirely possible that these things could be funded by a future more enlightened version of the UN, for example, where we all pay our international global taxes. We don't have any choice about that. But part of that is funding the social media, which isn't driven by short-termism and tribalism and advertising revenue, but which is funded as a social good. And if you think about how Facebook would operate in a way which is funded internationally by social good, means rather than having to drive advertising revenue, maybe it wouldn't try to force us into these tribal boxes. Maybe it wouldn't try to just wind us up all the time so that we constantly argue with each other. I don't know. I'm just guessing with that, but it's a possibility that it might actually be a better world if we were funded by not a state, but a global subscription-based service, which makes money just by offering a good service rather than by pandering to our lowest common denominators.

Isn't there a danger that we end up sort of having a situation where our avatars or our AI are connecting with each other and we are kind of out of the loop because they're doing a lot of work or decision-making or even, you know, blocking of messaging on our behalf? Where is that going to take us? What will we do with our day?

That's actually an area we looked at 30 years ago, believe it or not, Tracey. It was one of my first reports that I wrote on virtual reality and what we called back then the medium, which later became the Matrix according to the film, but we call it the medium. And we were thinking about having agents where you would have an agent or a number of agents who represent you, which are very clever AIs, which get to know you immensely well and can basically substitute for you when you're not there. And that's how well they behave. And you could interact with them just as if they were you. And of course, that means you could have dozens of these arguing on your behalf across every single aspect of social media. So you could end up with 99.999% of all the global interaction is all of these agents arguing and chatting to each other on behalf of some human beings who hardly ever bother dropping in to absorb the results. It could be really quite messy, but it could be interesting as well. We've never lived in a in a world like that. So I don't think at the moment, given our experiences, that we could really predict how that kind of world would work. You would still be angry when somebody's starting a world war or a potential world war. We would probably all still get angry when someone like Putin, you know, starts some new trouble. We would probably get angry when, you know, pedophiles are doing nasty things to groups of kids somewhere. I don't think that dilution of tribalism would take away those fundamental foundations of the rest of our human nature, our value sets, which are largely common to each other, where we don't want people to be abused and we want a nice fair world, even if we can't agree with what that is. We don't want abuse, we don't want warfare, you know, those fundamentals would probably still stay there. So, I think that we would still have a very viable environment in which we could have these discussions of our agents arguing with each other, and they would still be absorbing the same values from us and implementing those values into that system. So, I'd be a brave man if I was to suggest that tribalism would vanish. I don't believe it does. I think tribalism is a very fundamental part of human nature. But I think that the various aspects of tribalism which are problematic, where we get the far left versus the far right all the time these days, We can certainly moderate those and temper those and more often condense on what we largely agree with, which are the fundamental aspects of basic human rights that 99.9% of us would agree on.

Well, tribalism is kind of inevitable. It's resurging now because we're seeing a decline in literacy, and that's when you are pushed towards more immersive environments where you are less separate. And much more emotional. And I think we're seeing the pockets of that future in the present now with how we are with social media.

Can I just talk personally on that? I have a family member who, in America, who is or was heavily involved in QAnon and all those kind of conspiracy sites. And it's been quite difficult, I'm not going to lie, because in a way It's so off-piste. It's created a real divide. And that sort of conspiracy thinking starts with a willingness, I think, and a willingness to accept that kind of, that language, those stories, those arguments. But even before that, that comes from a point of alienation and a point in which people feel they don't are not heard. And actually, one of the things that modern social media culture facilitates is this weird— which Ian actually kind of alluded to— is this weird dichotomy, is that everyone has a voice, but no one's listened to. So, you know, we have the capacity to speak truth to power, but who's listening? And I think one of the things that conspiracy culture does do is provide a safe and a warm, in many respects, community and a sense of belonging in a dislocated and disconnected world in which people feel, in certain pockets of society— economics and culture has a lot to do with this as well, and politics— that they're just not being listened to. I worry that the next— we've seen it with COVID we potentially are seeing it with the reporting of the awful tragedy that's rolling out in Ukraine right now, where conspiracy actually becomes the main form of dialogue. And that, because of the way that tech culture facilitates that, is so damning to the body politic. Ian's wonderfully utopian vision, which I would fully pay up to, by the way, of this kind of UN sort of overseer of the internet, is, I think, just, just so unreachable if we are going down the road we're going right now, where especially when you're going to see deepfakes quite soon, you know, basically people being unable to trust reality and therefore wanting, almost actually wanting to trust another narrative that fits along with their agenda, their values, and, and their need for belonging. And adhering to a narrative that they can subscribe to. That has horrendous consequences. That's what I worry most about for my kids.

Optimistically, you know, as a futurist, I get accused regularly of being extremely dystopian and sometimes extremely utopian, and sort of 50/50 is probably a good balance actually. But one of the things I looked up a little while ago, which Tracey Follows and another friend, Bromley helped with was looking at what the next generations would look like. So we already know a little bit about the Alphas, but we thought about what would be the Betas. You know, they won't want to be called Betas. So we thought, what will they want to be called? And then we thought, well, actually, you know, bees, everybody likes bees, let's call them bees. And we contrived a few attributes that might apply to them. But one of the ones which we did agree applied very likely to them is rebelling against these completely stupid directions that we're currently going in. You know, we're currently seeing this enormous split of society to the extremes of left and right, and hardly anybody left in the middle. We're seeing the, the bubbles, and we're seeing all the other problems. And I think that the Beta generation, the B generation, will probably rebel against that, and the technology will let them do it.. And I think that it's— I'm not a utopianist at all. I think it's entirely realistic that they will have the technology available to do so, and they will have the willingness to do so because they will see the damage that these problems have caused to the preceding generations and will want to fix it the same way as these current young people are wanting to fix the environmental problems, for example, that they blame on the older generations, the betas will want to repair the social damages being done by what we're currently doing on the net. You know, the technology is introducing these problems which can be short-term if we do it— if you want, you can actually fix those. They are entirely fixable. And I don't believe it's utopianist to believe that that might happen. I think it just requires the willingness of a generation to do so. So we suggested that the generation that comes after the Alphas will be so pissed off with what the previous generations have done, so keen to get back to a sensible state of humanity, that they will bring this about. And they won't see it as utopianist at all. They'll see it in fixing what we currently are labeling the new Dark Age. And they will want to get back to a proper Age of Enlightenment and using the technology the way it should have been. So it won't be a utopia by any means. They'll make their own mistakes, but they will undo those errors which we're currently doing in our quite naive, you know, nouveau internet stages.

It's interesting that you talk about that because I totally agree with you that, you know, the need for the Generation Bs— I've never heard that, that's brilliant— to realign and almost kind of reset the role that technology has in society. It does suggest that we've got a pretty dark 20 years ahead of us. It does, doesn't it? Oh, gosh, as if the last couple of years weren't bad enough. But I do think of, you know, I think in centuries, not decades, and I think of the sort of precedents in this, and I think of the Counter-Reformation. The idea of the Counter-Reformation, of course, was to reinstate still the idea of Catholicism that was completely undermined by the Protestant Reformation, which was quite violently done, by the way. I also think of another example of, like, the aftermath of the Second World War, the way in which we had a New Jerusalem and a welfare state in this— in, in Britain. And we had the formation of the United Nations, which was a sort of rehashing of the League of Nations Union in the 1920s that wasn't very effective in stopping Hitler and Mussolini. And I think of things like the institutions of the BBC, which was designed to centralise and control knowledge. And it was the same with the Counter-Reformation. And I think the problem is, is that you've opened the floodgates. Can you then expect the Generation Bs to even have the facilities, forget the will, to recentralise? And what you're talking about is taking control taking back control of knowledge and technology. And I think you could argue that that is potentially unsustainable and unlikely. Yeah, Calvin Reformation, by the way, wasn't that successful.

Yeah, I, I, um, unlike my, uh, friend that I used to share an office with who was an historian who used to do futurology from historical perspective— that's what he was, an expert on history— and he used to do that, use that to predict the future. I know very little about history. What I know about history, I could write on a postage stamp and still leave some space. So I'm not going to argue from that point of view. But I do think that the future world is so globalized in the sense that the social media allows you to communicate with people right across the world. And even today, We talk about that being the case, but it isn't really the case. When you're on Twitter and Facebook, there are very few people there who are in Africa, for example, very few people in South America. The vast majority are in Europe and the United States, and there's probably an equivalent group in the Far East that do that with China and the surrounding countries too. But it isn't a very global world today. It will be. It'll be much more global than it is. And when you're trying to identify these tribal forces or these new activities in terms of pushing people towards these goals, there are lots of tools which can leverage billions of people in behind those particular goals, and they can make it happen. If you've got a billion people or 3 or 4 billion people, and you can arrange for all of them to use their economic muscle against various corporations or against a particular national government to basically cancel them in the same way as you might cancel J.K. Rowling today or something. You'd be able to cancel entire economies in the future very easily using future cybernetic weapons. That kind of a world is one where you can have these forces manipulated by generations to do these good things and retaliating against them. So we can have warfare on the net on a much bigger scale than you do today, with much worse consequences when it goes wrong too. But I think that does allow us the possibility to get back, to seize back the world from where we're going at the moment, which, you know, a lot of us are terrified of heading towards this authoritarian digital identity enforced world with not allowed to spend anything at the sweet shop unless the state permits it. You know, that kind of a world we're rapidly heading towards. It's possible the future technology can undo all of that stuff. It's possible the technology will permit it. It just requires the social willingness. And if you can get enough people around the world to support those ideals, it is possible to retrieve that back again. And I think that's what the Generation B will probably try to do because they'll be so annoyed with the potential world that they could have had compared to the one which they've been given by the Millennials and the Alphas that have completely wrecked it in the meantime.

I think actually Ian's alluded to something really important there, which is this strange dichotomy today where identity is almost more about your individual rights than your responsibilities in society. It's actually this weird, I think, tension between demonstrating your individualism, but actually an increasing level of conformity. And, you know, whether it be on political issues or cultural issues or speaking out on social media, there's an incredible level of self-centeredness and conformity going on right now. And that kind of flies in the face of this culture of authenticity and us being ourselves and speaking our mind and having our voice and projecting our brand. So I, I think that's a sort of these twin forces that are very much shaping modern identity.

I think that's very interesting, but I think part of that is because of the technology, because the internet is, is connectivity and it's interconnectivity, and so it does kind of stitch people together in a way that one can almost oversee each other's behavior. And so it's interesting, isn't it, to look at whether there's as much conformity when one is offline as when one is online or when one is using sort of technology that allows one to communicate online. I think that's one of the things we just don't quite know yet, and we're waiting to see how it pans out.

I think too many people are censoring too many parts of their outputs today, self-censoring it. Because they don't want to give an impression to their company that might want to sack them, or they don't want to give an impression to their Twitter following that might mean that they'll unfollow them or argue with them. People self-censor all the time, and I think there's a limited amount of time and patience that we will have for that. We won't continue to have the patience to self-censor ad infinitum. Eventually, when we get offered the the potential to get rid of that by whatever future technology, we will jump at that potential. We want to get back to being our open selves and being free to express ourselves as who we are and not having to censor every other sentence just in case someone might deliberately take offense at it and use that as an excuse to cancel us or sack us or whatever. I think that's a really important impediment that we have in our current identities, which future technologies can help to eradicate, maybe by having parallel AIs which get to know you, which you can have completely anonymous, which can go out there and proselytize all your— all the rest of the aspects of your personality. That would be a reasonably short-term way of doing it, but future technologies will offer other ways of doing it too. So we have the potential for the beaters to grab back the freedom to be be who they want to be and not having to self-censor themselves just to stay in a job or to keep a social media following.

I was going to ask you, Eliza, off the back of what we've just been talking about, what you think this means for sort of identity in the workplace, because you mentioned belonging earlier, and that's a phrase or a word that's being used a lot in sort of corporate communications and HR, or whatever the new kind of way of doing HR is now in the workplace. But My understanding was really that there's so much power in some senses flowing from institutions to individuals, and given what we've just been discussing, is there actually going to be a way of working in which individuals have a lot more power and actually more say over their identity in these sorts of environments?

Such a good question, and I think the first thing is, and obviously post-pandemic, we hear a lot these days of the Great Resignation and the idea that it's the pandemic prompted a pandemic epiphany in us all when we realized we were in a job we hated, and that sort of encouraged this sort of swathe of resignations. I think the story is much bigger than that. And I would urge anyone, by the way, interested in particularly hiring young people to get off LinkedIn and get on TikTok and just do #GreatResignation or #HR or #BadManagers, and you will see see there how young people are discussing work and particularly corporate culture. And it's not good. It's an incredibly creative medium, and the satire is brilliant. But I think it speaks to the fact that we have in the workplace increasingly had these twin forces of my career is my identity, and I'm on a journey in my career carving out work that reflects me, So that's been happening really since the '60s, actually. The boomers were the first people to— generation to talk about purpose in the workplace rather than just money. And then at the same time, this needs— because actually corporate culture has been arguably in decline since the 1960s as well, in the types of benefits and security that big corporations give to their workers, they've replaced it with corporate culture and this need for belonging. Now, I think a lot of that is arguably bullshit, and a lot of those kind of shiny values on their websites are now in complete conflict with the values and brands that these 21-year-olds have been building online since they were 13. And so, you're getting these new young recruits going in, going, "I don't subscribe to that," or "That doesn't reflect my values," or "That's not who I am," and "This office doesn't look like the world I inhabit." and actually are really pushing up against, or even just rejecting corporate culture. And combined with this is a lack of deference. And, you know, again, this is not something that has just happened. This is something that deference, a culture of deference, has been eroding in society arguably since the Reformation, but definitely since the '60s. And, you know, I saw it in universities. And when I was teaching at a university, I used to be called Dr. Philby, and then really within 5 years, I was suddenly Eliza. By my students who didn't call the professor by their professorial name, and there was no deference in the educational system. Now, I argued actually and thought that that was a good thing. Students were now customers, and there was a sort of much more egalitarian approach to university culture, but it was hugely different from when I was at university and certainly when the professors that were teaching now were at university. And that's now happened in the workplace. You've got a generation of kids coming in who actually for a long time and see it ingrained in their brand as being able to speak truth to power and have a voice. And that is particularly challenging in the workplace where there is actually still quite a rigid hierarchical structure. And then finally, I guess the thing is, is that what careers you have and how you navigate that is going to look very different in the future. So it's been estimated and this is just an estimation, of course, that Gen Z, that's those born in the late '90s, early '00s, will have 17 different employers over the course of their working life and 5 different careers. 5 different careers. Now, people listening might think, "5 different careers, that's crazy." Well, I'm a geriatric millennial. I'm 40, and I've had 3 different careers, very distinct different careers before I'm 40. So, you know, it is possible and more likely for the people coming up under me because they are going to be living in a very changing, agile, less secure workplace dominated by technology and AI, and they're going to have to be nimble, agile workers that are constantly upskilling. And that is why they know they can learn more on YouTube than probably at university. That is why it's ludicrous to saddle them with a load of debt with a degree when they're 21, actually need to be learning throughout life. And it's why actually I don't think retirement as a concept is gonna survive the 21st century. I think it's a 20th century invention, and much more likely is that Gen Z won't retire in the fixed way that people are now, but they will probably gradually seep out of the workforce gradually, and probably not have a pension, but a social care fund for when their mind and brain stop working. Working, but their avatar can continue.

Yeah, exactly. Is there an argument to say that if you've got 17 different jobs, or whatever, over the course of your lifetime, rather than career, you're actually self-employed?

Well, that is the thing. That is the thing. And, you know, 50% of Google's workers are contractors, and I think that's going to be the norm across organizations, because actually what young people want to do is build their own brand, and their own skill set, and then rent that out as and when and whoever needs it.

On a global basis, presumably. Ian?

I would like that to be the case, but I'm still thinking there's an awful lot of people out there that weren't born with the enormous privileges of being very smart or very pretty or very fast at running and whatever. An awful lot of people, unfortunately, are just very ordinary, and it's difficult for the ordinary people people to excel in any particular area that just haven't been given those natural gifts that allow them to excel in a particular field. And they don't have any choice but by doing a really boring job, whatever it's paying today, in order to pay the bills. Some of us are very privileged that we've been able to carve our own careers and do whatever we want to do in life, and we can change that every decade if we wish. But that is a privileged position. And I'm fortunate that I was born reasonably smart, so I've been able to get a nice well-paid job and reached a state of semi-retirement. I'd agree that retirement has disappeared as an idea. I don't know anybody that's truly retired in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Most of us carry on working after we don't start charging for our work anymore. So I do most of my work for free now, but I still do just as much work as I did when I I was working. So retirement doesn't really exist anymore for most of us. We just carry on doing what we like. But only if you've got that privilege of having a reasonably prestige position in society. A lot of people don't have that luxury and have to do whatever work they can get. They look for a job anywhere as long as it pays the rent and pays for the grocery bill. They're not in the same category. They don't have the same degree of freedom.

But you see, I completely agree, and actually there's two elements to that point. Obviously, I was in the context of my last point, I was talking about graduates, but actually, as we've seen post-COVID, there's a widening divide, an inequality between those who were able to work from home during the pandemic and those that weren't able to. It used to be you called them white-collar and blue-collar workers, but actually that's not quite clear-cut distinction. But I think it's, it's very clear that agility for both sets of workers is gonna be the way forward. But you're right, the ability to be agile, and also therefore go and be in search of security and gain security, is gonna benefit those that are gonna be able to educate themselves and predominantly be knowledge workers. Where I think there's a responsibility for government is to ensure that, like they didn't pretty much during the deindustrialization of— I'm talking about the UK here, but it pretty much happened throughout the world. When we basically deindustrialized the Western world, we did nothing for those workers. I mean, look at the coal mining communities in the northeast of England and the south of Wales. We did nothing for those workers. We left them to basically fend for themselves on the scrapheap. There was no reskilling, there was no investment in adult education, there was nothing afforded to them. And my worry is, is if you're entering a future of work where it's all about flexibility and agility and upskilling, where's that money coming from? Because it's not going to come from the individual, it's probably not going to come from the bank of mum and dad or the family, it's potentially not even going to come from government. Which means it's going to have to come from the companies themselves. Well, the track— recent history of work hasn't really demonstrated, I think, a kind of confident precedence on companies showing due care and commitment and investment in upskilling their workers when they need to change what they do. And that's what really worries me. And this is why, you know, the whole push to get everyone, or as many people as we possibly could across the world, to university was, yes, responding to the birth of the knowledge economy and the need for those workers, but actually what it did was create a massive divide between blue-collar and white-collar work, and actually I think saddled the graduates with a mistake— with a lot of debt and a mistaken belief that they had an easy access into a stable middle-class professional life, and it actually as we know across the world, graduate unemployment is a big problem, has been found wanton. So I think there's a real need, if we're looking to the future, to have a complete overall and understanding and a new consensus of what education is, how it relates to work, what skills we need to be teaching our kids from the youngest of ages, and, and crucially, who's going to pay for it.

I think that's very interesting. Maybe the question to you both is, what are these new skills? Because maybe they're not things that you can learn or have as if they're credentials. Maybe they are services that you rent from the technology platforms, and maybe that's the way they get paid for because they're almost on a license. So if you want to learn a, I don't know, a new language, or there's a skill that's required to, I don't know, collaborate with a robot of some description, maybe they're almost serviced to you through the technology. I don't know. What are these new skills? How will we What's the answer, futurologist?

I think I would say personality is the biggest one. We see that already happening to some degree in the influencer platforms where these people get $2,000-$3,000 for a single picture on an Instagram account. People buy personality, and as you replace more and more aspects of an average job with AI, roles. All the administrative stuff can be done by AI, the physical stuff can be done by robots, more and more and more of it can be done by machines. What's left is the basic human stuff, and really what that comes down to is the personality. It's the caring skills, the empathetic skills, the leadership skills, motivational skills. All of those basic human skills, as we call them, really come to the fore. That's what's left once you've machinized all the rest of it. And it's all been taken over by your PCs and AIs. So I think some of those professions that we see today, like the influencers or the top personalities that you see on TV or the pop stars that you actually listen to or whatever, the reason you do that is because they've got particular kinds of personality that appeal. And those are very saleable and they will continue to be very sellable. And you'll have AI ones alongside competing with those which are designed according to various criteria by the big AI labs. But the, the ones which appeal to people most will probably for quite a few decades be the actual basic human people underneath. It'll be at least 2050 before AI overtakes humans in terms of basic personality. So we've got another 3 decades of what I call the care economy, where it's the caring human skills which will dominate the emotional skills. And there are some winners in there. I mean, women generally have better emotional skills than us men. Most people would, would think that's the case. There's certain kinds of people have got more caring aspects, and some of us really don't care about other people very much at all. We'd rather just deal machines. So I think, you know, that will be a big differentiator over the next 2 or 3 decades as we see AI and robotics rolling out through the workforce and taking casualties here and there. The people with the best personalities and the most caring, the most understanding of other people, the highest EQ, if you like, they will be the ones that will really flourish during this next 3 decades.

We're coming to the end of our time together, but two very quick questions. Given everything we were just talking about with work and institutions versus individuals and the way in which this will morph and evolve over time, do we think class is going to be a parameter which it becomes more defined or disappears altogether? That, that I'd really love to know what you think about that in the era of sort of future of work for these generations.

I don't know, man. I grew up in a world I wasn't really very aware of class. I mean, I suppose my grandparents were very working class, my parents were in between, and I was the first generation of my family to go to university, for example. I don't perceive that I've changed very much myself through my life going through those different shifts. I'm not really very aware of a class system around me. Maybe it exists in some areas, but I don't recognize the people that I know as being of a particular class. To me, in my social circle, I would say it's pretty much evaporated. I wouldn't claim that that's the same everywhere, but I'm not very aware of class anymore.

I would totally disagree with that, respectfully disagree with that. I think we have been predominantly consumed by, in a good way, in a positive way, gender, sexuality, and racial difference. And I think that if you analyze the dynamics within those movements, you will see that class is actually the predominant factor driving a lot of those conversations and actually a lot of those internal divides. I mean, I am someone who grew up in a working-class household, was also the first person in their family to go to university. And I see in my generation, a generation that was told that class wouldn't exist and that education would be the great leveller and that opportunity was there for all. And I think there's a growing dissatisfaction amongst my generation with certainly our lot, our opportunities. I think there's a growing recognition, particularly post-pandemic, because of the divide in people's— where they can work and how they work, of those social inequalities, I think there's a growing awareness, and I think that will be intensified by climate change, about global inequalities. And I think when you've got billionaires zooming into space, and you've got the kind of situations you have in, you know, developing in Ukraine now, but also Syria and Afghanistan, you realize how much inequality, not just class inequality, is driving so many of the political conversations in this world. So no, I don't think class has gone away. I think the problem is, is the left-wing political movements have ignored class for far too long.

Okay, I've got one final question for you. Given all of that that we've talked about, and in particular thinking about these new generations, these emerging generations that, uh, you know, might be called Gen Z or Gen A or even maybe even the Gen Bs. What action for identity do you think we need to take? Maybe as our generation sitting here talking, and we might be two, two or three, maybe two different generations here, what actions for identity do we need to take to, to help, to preserve, to enable future generations to explore and maybe even protect or control their own identity? We're going to come back for the answer in a second. We're just going to take one quick second for a ad.

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Okay, shall we start with Eliza? Action for identity, what do you think?

So I think it's learn to live in your body, because as things become more and more virtual and we almost disconnect our minds from our bodies, we're doing it already. You watch people on their phones, they're fully unaware almost of their bodies. And I think, you know, that's combined with rising obesity rates across the world, particularly amongst children. I think there's a real desire and an understanding understanding of the way in which we need to live in our bodies, use our bodies, look after our bodies, and to recognize if actually if we are tackling mental health, part of the answer to tackling mental health actually is to live in your body, because relying on just your mind actually can be a really negative way of living.

Brilliant. Yeah, thank you. Ian?

I'm in deep trouble if that's correct. I've lived in my mind for the last 50 years. I'm 61. So I'm not aware of any problems that it's caused doing that. I've never associated myself with my body at all. If you were to replace my body with an android tomorrow morning, I really wouldn't care. I can honestly say that. I just do not identify with my body one iota. I think what I have a lot of fun with is I'm very aware of just how much I'm being monitored online doing everything. I spend quite a lot of time every day just deliberately annoying all of these the cookie monsters, you know, collecting all the information on us all the time. I go to some lengths to make sure that Google and Facebook and all the rest have got no idea who I truly am. So, I mean, you know, Google probably thinks I'm a middle-aged woman living in the middle of the United Arab Emirates at the moment. It's that kind of a world. I go to great lengths to conceal my identity sometimes. And, you know, I've got my real identity, which is visible, but it's diluted across several fake identities as well, which I just try to make sure I click on all of the wrong adverts and try to make sure that Google and Facebook have got no real idea who I am, so that'll make it more difficult for them to pigeonhole me digitally and to force me into a particular digital box. Come a couple of years when we're forced to have a particular government identity, I will have at least two legal identities that I can take and just oscillate between those. I'm trying to figure out how I can create more than that. I just don't know if I've got enough energy to do so. But I've met people in social media that have got 15 or 16 different identities that they use in different forums. So it is possible to do that, especially actors have got those abilities to stream those and keep them separate. And I play a lot of computer games, which helps, but it's— I don't have a strong identity of myself, and that probably helps me to dilute all of the information that might give Google the idea that I've got one, so that Google really has no idea who I am. Neither is Facebook or Twitter or anybody else, and I want to keep it that way.

Can I sum up those two things maybe then as be more physical and be more deceptive? I think that's not a bad recommendation. Together. I know we've got to wrap up, but, um, I have to say, this conversation, I've kind of in a way left with more questions than answers. Not that we haven't answered lots of the questions, but it begs so many questions about so many different areas. And we haven't even talked about whether there's intergenerational friction or how the generations even understand each other. So maybe at some, some point in the future I'll get to speak to you again because there's just— it's such a rich topic. But thank you so much for joining me today. It's been fascinating. Thank you, Eliza and Ian.

Pleasure.

Thanks ever so much, guys.

Great pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.