Will Smith won't save your job

Aliens attack Earth. We are surprised. We fight back, unsuccessfully. As hope fades, Will Smith finds the single weak point of our advanced adversaries and saves us all. 

This is how alien invasions are commonly portrayed: Surprise attack, seeming certain defeat, hard-won victory.

But what if instead we had fair warning?

This was the question posed recently by Andrew Halls, the brilliant Head Master of Kings College where my son attends. He put it this way “Imagine that instead of a surprise alien invasion, they sent us a letter. And the letter says: “Hi, we are aliens and we are coming to Earth in about 10 years. We are smarter than you, stronger than you, replicable, we work harder than you and we never get sick and make far fewer mistakes. You can’t stop us. We will change everything about your way of life, so we thought we should let you know we are coming, so you can properly prepare””

His message was that we have in fact been sent such a letter from ‘aliens’. That with the rise of automation and AI, children starting at Kings today need to be prepared for jobs that don’t yet exist, while the jobs of their parents are fast being replaced by algorithms or robots.

Last year the OECD published a report on “Automation, Skills Use and Training” that measured the automation risk by job type, and the overall automation risk by country (based on how they index in the risky industries). Here is the ranking by job type, summarised by The Economist.

For a little more detail, and a focus on the USA, here is an infographic from Bloomberg using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, clustering jobs on two axes: how much they are paid, and likelihood for automation. Check it out online, it’s interactive so you can find your own job.

You can see that we’ll still have human dentists and childcare workers and lawyers, but the concerning quadrant is the mass of people and roles in the bottom-right. These are jobs that are being replaced the instant that the cost to do so is low enough and the quality high enough.

Of course it is not just about how you will earn money, but the impact of the nature of that work on you and on society. I recommend reading The Job: Work and its future in a time of radical change by Ellen Ruppel Shell. Shell delves into the second aspect of this fascinating question – the nature of a ‘job’, the impact of the ‘gig economy’ – showing how our education system, our politics and even our sense of self have been held captive by an outdated notion of what it means to get and keep a ‘good job’. And if you can’t make the time for a book (you should) here is the author in conversation with the fantastic Kara Swisher on her Recode:Decode podcast.

So how do we prepare our teams, let alone our children, for this new dawning Machine Age 2.0? Well, the same OECD report also notes the barriers to job automation, or as they put it, “identified engineering bottlenecks”. Here is a summary of them: 

And this is where there is some luke-warm comfort for the Marketing industry. 2 of the 3 categories of bottleneck are fundamental to it: Creative Intelligence and Social Intelligence.

I say only luke-warm for two reasons. The first is that these are only bottlenecks until technology addresses them, and it will, and the second is that there is a lot of evidence of redundancy in our value chains already today.

One of the fastest growing parts of our business is dynamic content based on data from consumer journeys. Data signals identify consumer profiles, and the tracked behaviours of those profiles give us a propensity for them to take an action we seek (such as to consider a brand, purchase a brand, advocate a brand etc..). Content is dynamically generated and served to them in a relevant channel to nudge them along their individual journey, constantly A-B tested to optimise the efficacy of the work. The consumer takes the action sought, and we repeat for the next best action on their journey. Millions of consumers, with tens of trigger moments, each with thousands of permutations of content.

We still have many people involved to make this work, but I’m watching the machine learning algorithms catch up rapidly and can readily imagine how very soon this objective-signal-content-response loop will work without anyone except for the people who build and service the algorithms, until they are self-replicating and self-healing.

Creative intelligence and social intelligence therefore are not only strategic competitive advantages of any marketing firm today, but of every worker in that firm to focus on developing. We need to constantly evolve the humanity behind this social empathy and unreasonable commercial power of creativity. It of course won’t stop the automation tide, but it will give us time to develop our teams for this new age. 

We’ve had very fair warning, the invasion is approaching and Will Smith is not going to save our jobs.