Learning to learn is key to saving work in the age of automation

Every week I share key takeaways from my conversations about society and technology with some brilliant minds. In case you're new to my series, you might want to check out my conversation with the Chinese investor Kai-Fu Lee, cybersecurity expert Mariarosaria Taddeo, founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman, among others.

Stay in touch with me by signing up for my weekly newsletter Exponential View, following my podcast, or subscribing to weekly conversations with Brilliant Minds on Linkedin.

This week, I have something slightly different in store for you. I recently spent an hour roaming around Tate Britain in London with Joe Iles, Digital Architect at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, talking about the future of work, technological revolutions and how the ongoing exponential development of technology is reflecting on our societies. I'll share with you below the three key takeaways from our conversation:

Social, technological and economic upheavals are colliding to shape the future of economies and societies in the 21st century

I spend a lot of time thinking about where the world is going over the next five, ten, fifteen years. I can't remember a time when there has been so much up in the air. I lived through the social media bubble, I remember the Dot Com bubble very clearly, the run-up of the internet from 1991 through to the Dot Com adverts on every taxi and bus shelter and billboard in 1999 and 2000. Now that I can look back on that time and look at where we are today, I feel that the level of change is much, much more significant and much more fundamental than it was twenty years ago.

The future of work features strongly in that conversation, and I think there are technological reasons for it and there are also macro reasons. The technological reason is that about five or six years ago, there were some breakthroughs in a certain form of artificial intelligence, in other words getting computers to do tasks which we would previously only have thought humans could do.

That’s one part of it, but the other part has to do with the results of the global financial crisis, which has really constructed some fractures within a number of economies which have created tension and uncertainty. Those two themes have come together, and they're all really about: what does the structure of the economy and the structure of the labor market look like over the next 10 to 20 years?

Vested interests will push back against innovation

I think something which is often missed in the discussion about the future of work is the role of vested interests. There are some things which people immediately picture when they think about jobs which are at risk and which people want to protect from new technologies - for example here it might be the cabbie, they're a very visible presence in London.

What is less discussed are all the other protected professions, like GPs or lawyers, anything which requires licensing. They're going to put up exactly the same resistance as the cabbies do when innovation comes along which they feel threatens their jobs, whether it's technically driven or some kind of policy innovation.

So I think the thing that we need to do is be a little bit open-minded about what this kind of innovation could mean.

There are methods of innovation which we can bring to bear on problems to say, 'how else would we do this.' We just have to recognise that any group that's in power is likely to try to use its group power and its structural position to influence policymakers in order to protect its interests by saying 'this is the way it's currently done, and the power that we currently have is the right way' of organising things.

We need to prepare our societies and our workers for new kinds of work

We can definitely prepare people for an uncertain future. The way to do that would be to teach the skills of dealing with change and of learning to learn. That's something I've been lucky at, I've learned how to learn things and that's why I can move and have moved into lots of jobs where there's no playbook. But I don't think education as we currently think about it deals with what is coming down the track, because education has a really long lead time and the syllabus our children are learning from today could be out of date by the time they hit the workforce.

So I think the real question what are the what are the things that are going to hit us in 2022, 2024, and that's less about education and more about re-skilling within the workplace, and how you go about creating the right kind of environment for people to re-skill.

Stay in touch with me by signing up for my weekly newsletter Exponential View, following my podcast, or subscribing to weekly conversations with Brilliant Minds on LinkedIn.