By Rohit Talwar, Steve Wells, and Alexandra Whittington
Will any of the jobs that exist today still be around in 20
years? Is automation destined to rewrite all our futures?
Across society, we are beginning to acknowledge that smart
technologies could transform every aspect of business, work, government, and
our daily lives. We are already used to seeing faceless robots undertaking
repetitive manufacturing tasks, and smart applications determining our credit
ratings, autopiloting planes, and delivering an array of functionality to our
mobile devices. But this is just the start; the next waves of development will
see the coming together of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, big data,
and cloud services. The combinatorial effect of these exponential technologies
is really what creates the opportunity for machines to interact with humans
through the provision of services rather than simply delivering us data,
analysis, and decision support.
If we look further into the future, the workplace of
tomorrow is going to be very different from today. Imagine a workplace with
humans, augmented humans, robots, holograms, and display-based AI
manifestations all working in the same space. As a human, do you trust your
robot colleague? What happens when the robot is smarter than you? How will we
respond when the AI application working 24/7/365 complains that we are simply
not learning or working fast enough to keep up with it? As a Human Resources
Manager, how do you manage and monitor such a work force?
The Future of Work
It seems that whatever the country, whatever the economic
context, the critical question is becoming ever more pertinent: What is the
future of work in an era of exponential technology development? Artificial
intelligence is arguably the big game changer and becoming more commonplace. We
already see narrow AI in use in internet searches, customer targeting
applications, and in predictive analytics. But AI has much greater capability
that will emerge into every aspect of our lives in the future. Increasingly
devices will learn more about us, provide an ever-increasing range of support,
and take on more of our tasks. We are automating a lot more activity in
literally every sector, and that is set to continue at an accelerating rate.
Future of Business
At Fast Future, in our book The Future of Business, we
identified thirty different trillion-dollar industry sectors of the future
which we grouped into clusters. We expect these clusters and the under- lying
industries to be impacted radically by exponential technology developments:
- Information and communications;
- Production and construction systems;
- Citizen services and domestic infrastructure;
- New societal infrastructure and services;
- Transformation of existing sectors such accounting, legal,
and financial services;
- Energy and environment.
So, we can see the significant disruptive potential that
technology offers to emerging sectors and the new players within them.
The McKinsey Global Institute forecast which technologies
will drive the economy of the future. They predict that mobile internet, the
automation of work knowledge, the Internet of things (where many factory,
office, and household devices and appliances are connected to the internet),
and cloud computing will all form part of a transformative information
technology (IT) backdrop and be the most significant creators of new economic
value. They also singled out advanced robotics and autonomous vehicles as
playing a significant part in future economic growth.
Future Skills and Management Challenges
Given the importance of the issue, it is not surprising that
there have been several research projects exploring what this scale of technological
change could mean for the future of work. Pew Research (2014) posed the
question, “Will networked, auto- mated, AI and robotic devices have displaced
more jobs than they have created by 2025?” Their key findings were:
- 48% of respondents said that robots and digital agents will
displace significant numbers of blue-collar and white-collar workers;
- Society would see increases in income inequality,
significant numbers of unemployable people, and breakdowns in the social order;
- Conversely, 52% said technology will not displace more jobs
than it creates. Lost jobs would be offset by human ingenuity creating new
occupations, and industries; and,
This group also pointed out that current social structures
(e.g. education) are not adequately preparing people for the skills needed in
the future job market.
A 2013 study on the Future of Employment by Carl Benedikt
Frey and Michael Osborne of the Oxford Martin School explored the probability
of computerization for 702 occupations and asked, “Which jobs are most
vulnerable?” The study found that 47% of workers in the US had jobs at high
risk of potential automation. The most at-risk groups were transport and
logistics (taxi and delivery drivers), sales and services (cashiers, counter
and rental clerks, telemarketers, and accountants), and office support
(receptionists and security guards). The equivalent at risk workers were 35% of
the workforce in the UK and 49% in Japan.
A 2016 McKinsey Global Institute report looked at the
automation of the global economy. The findings were based on a study that
explored 54 countries representing 95% of global GDP and more than 2,000 work
activities. The study found that the proportion of jobs that can be fully
automated by adapting currently demonstrated technology is less than 5%,
although for middle-skill categories this could rise to 20%. It also said that
based on current technologies, 60% of all jobs have at least 30% of their
activities that are technically automatable. The research found that,
ultimately, automation technologies could affect 49% of the world economy; 1.1
billion employees and US$12.7 trillion in wages. China, India, Japan, and the
US account for more than half of these totals. The report concluded that it
would be more than two decades before automation reaches 50% of all of today’s
work activities.
The World Economic Forum’s 2016 study into The Future of
Jobs saw an increasingly dynamic jobs landscape. It estimated that 65% of
children entering primary school today will work in job types that don’t yet
exist. While the study saw job losses in routine white-collar office functions,
it saw gains in computing, mathematics, architecture, and engineering related
fields. The report identified several job categories and functions that are
expected to become critically important in the future:
- Data analysts – leveraging big data and AI;
- Specialized sales representatives – commercializing and
articulating new propositions; and,
- Senior managers and leaders – to steer companies through the
upcoming change and disruption.
So What for HR?
We are heading into a world of wicked problems that will
require not “Ordinary Management,” but “Extraordinary Leadership.” The leadership and management
style required when working in uncertain situations can be challenging. For Ordinary
Management we apply accepted best practice approaches; it’s the domain of trend
extrapolation, tame problems, and technical challenges. But in the increasingly
disruption filled world we are heading into, we require Extraordinary
Leadership because our challenges are difficult or impossible to solve due to
unpredictable trend paths, incomplete and contradictory information, and
changing requirements that are often difficult to define or agree upon. We need
the ability to navigate a rapidly changing reality, make decisions with
imperfect information, and to tune our intuition to “sense and respond” when
surrounded by an array of relatively weak signals of what might happen next.
A critical requirement here is to determine the
organizational capacity to work in new ways including envisioning the future
and making sense of complexity—it seems to us that HR could play a big role in
developing these core capabilities.
We are in a rapidly changing world, one that is increasingly
technology driven, one that will host more generations in parallel—with their
divergent work/life wants and needs—than we have seen before. One that is
highly likely to see a revolutionary change in jobs as we know them today, one
that will see the birth of new jobs, and the demise of others. One that could
ultimately see not working as the new normal.
Here are some questions that HR directors and senior leaders
might want to consider:
- How is HR helping to create a generationally and
technologically diverse culture?
- What role is HR playing in driving culture changes that help
align the organization with the constantly evolving interplay between customer
strategies, their resulting requirements, and our own business propositions and
capabilities?
- How is HR using technology to streamline and automate
activities such as performance management, learning and development, resource
planning, and sourcing and thus free up time for these more strategic tasks by?
- Is there an opportunity for the Human Resources function to
transition to one of Resource Management—adopting a more business–wide
strategic role—to meet the organization’s business objectives?
This article is based on an excerpted chapter from the book
Beyond Genuine Stupidity – Ensuring AI Serves Humanity (Talwar, R., Wells, S., Whittington, A., Koury, A., & Romero, M. (Eds.). (2017). BEYOND GENUINE STUPIDITY: Ensuring ai serves humanity. London, UK: FAST FUTURE Publishing). To read the full article, click here.
Image Credit: Gerd Altmann /
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