Don't panic about the future just yet
Source: Michael Naylo
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TVNZ's What Next? programme debuted on Sunday night with a look at how technology may soon take over a good percentage of New Zealanders' jobs. Unfortunately, the show did not address basic concepts from the field of change and skipped far too lightly over important issues.
Viewers would be excused a rising sense of panic that may well be unnecessary. Here are some vital issues to understand.
Jobs are not replaced, activities are. Some activities will be replaced but the impact on any job will depend on the mix of activities in that job. Some activities within most jobs will be untouched, and demand for the remaining activities may even expand.
For example, truck drivers do not just drive, they also load and unload and offer customer service. Truck drivers may become delivery assistants. For long-distance drivers, where driving is a high proportion of the job, the impact may be large, for around-the-city drivers, probably not so much.
It is also vital to understand software is not robots. Physical robots are still quite backward and cannot do many jobs. Software advances will be far more transformative.
Software has two strands: sequential software and algorithms. Most software so far has been sequential or yes/no task based. This type is unable to handle complex tasks like driving.
Algorithm software (or artificial intelligence) is quite different. It uses iterative equations to input data and analyses it by "learning" what factors are important. This enables algorithms to handle very complex tasks.
Widespread use of algorithm software is fairly new and is only now working its way through society. It can easily handle huge complex databases and find answers that exceed the ability of humans. This is what will transform society in much the same way the first industrial revolution did.
When you take a big-picture view of employment it looks very different to the impact on individuals. When weaving was mechanised, weaving as a home-based manual occupation did disappear. However, the price of clothing dropped by 1000 times, and demand for clothes boomed. The population went from buying a few changes of clothing over a lifetime to owning many outfits. Employment in the clothing sector, as a whole, rose 20-fold.
It's estimated 70 per cent of all current jobs will be affected by technology and over 50 per cent of jobs in 2050 may be ones we have not yet heard about. While society as a whole may gain, not every worker will - so we need large social and retraining programmes to support displaced workers.
The education system is changing as students move towards learning thinking skills and learning how to re-learn. Knowing facts is irrelevant when computers provide instant recall.
Knowing how to cope with, and analyse, an overwhelming mass of information is vital. Students need education that equips them to create activities that have yet to be invented. This education needs to extend into adulthood, as most people will have three or four occupations over their life, with periods of re-training in between.
We are entering a period where the pace of change is increasing, but that change will still be incremental. For example, driverless cars are now being introduced but we will not move immediately to all cars being driverless.
It's not just a one-off change, but a change to the rate of change. Even so, society will need to get used to continual transformation.
Many professions are already changing. For example, most of the activities accountants did in the 1970s, like book-keeping, are no longer done. Accountants now use the outputs of software to discuss how firms can improve their businesses, which is more interesting and more profitable.
Accountants will thrive in the future, as they will have a larger, deeper, richer, stream of financial information to do a far better job.
Initially lawyers were worried too, as case analysis software started doing the work once done by hordes of young lawyers. Legal firms found however, that the cost of "discovery" dropped so much that demand for discovery boomed and more lawyers were required.
In much the same way, personal computers destroyed typing pools, but clerical work has boomed.
Societies that embraced the changes of the first industrial revolution grew richer, healthier and happier. Societies that resisted change fell behind. New Zealand needs to focus a lot more attention on how to maximise what is to be gained from this massive transformation of society, rather than panic about what will be lost.
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