AI and The Future of Work: A Foresight Perspective

One of the biggest debating points around the future of work is the impact that technology and automation will have on employment. Over the last few decades, we have seen numerous changes in workplaces and jobs, driven by innovation and technology. As new technology enters the workplace, the constant concern is around job losses. But massive job losses on the back of innovation and technology adoption in the workplace has not occurred. Could the impact of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and other new automation tools change this in the future?

In March 2018, I ran a strategic foresight training workshop which explored the role of AI in the Canadian job market out to 2035. Strategic foresight does not aim to predict the future. Rather, it tries to explore a range of futures and identify where significant disruptive change could emerge from. This approach provides a framework to explore the future and deal with the uncertainty that comes with a rapidly evolving environment. While the goal of the workshop was to train attendees on the use of strategic foresight, the exploration of the question around AI and jobs produced some interesting insights.

During the workshop, participants created four different scenarios around the role of AI in the Canadian job market of the future. What was interesting in these scenarios was that all of them resulted in job losses and unemployment at some level. Even when re-training and new opportunities were available in a scenario, job losses still occurred. And there were scenarios where those losses were on a staggering scale. This suggests that we may be entering a new era in terms of the impact of technologies like AI on the future of work. The ability to adapt to changes in technology and minimize the impact on job losses which we have seen in the past may well be coming to an end.

While unemployment was seen as an inevitable result of AI adoption in the workplace, what was interesting was the fact that some of the scenarios suggested that unemployment may not be a bad thing. Participants discussed a number of possibilities which revolved around the ability of humans to focus on creative areas where AI would have a limited impact, such as the arts. Aligned with this, would be support from the state for these creative pursuits, funded through the returns created by the improvements generated by AI in the workplace. Universal basic income was discussed as a potential support mechanism but grants and other state funding could also be used to support those involved in new creative pursuits.

Strategic foresight is not meant to predict the future but it can provide indicators around major disruptive change that may occur in the future. The findings from this exercise suggest that we may no longer be able to rely on sufficient numbers of new jobs being generated to replace those displaced by technology like AI as we have in the past. Furthermore, the rise of unemployment on the back of AI adoption may not necessarily be negative - it may provide a great opportunity to focus on the the creativity that defines human beings. However the future of work evolves in the coming decades, it looks like we are in for a significant change from what we have experienced before.

I will be running a strategic foresight 101 training workshop in Ottawa, ON on August 28th and my colleague MacKenzie Thorne will lead a foresight workshop on scanning on August 29th.