Over dinner with dear friends this topic turned into a heated debate-will the majority of the skills of today’s workforce  become obsolete much sooner than expected?

John Maynard Keynes‘ prediction that a time would come when technology would be so efficient and people so prouctive that we would have much more time for leisure, like going to the beach and shopping. If you haven’t noticed, that’s not exactly what happened, people still work a whole lot, but we are indeed more productive, and certainly spend our days very differently than we did a few decades ago. But we have found other things to work on. We are investing time in being creative, marketing, traveling to discover new frontiers.. And re-writing the way we do things- think Uber, Facebook and Airbnb. We still work really hard, just not using a hoe or opening doors. 

In fact, in a recent LLAKES seminar I attended looking at young people growing up in global austerity there was a common theme that ran across all regions of the world, young people all believed that there was one thing that triumphs above all else in order to reach success: HARD WORK. Not networks, not the level of education, not your class, race, religion, or geographic location. More and more young people believe individual efforts would pay off more than anything else..

Soooo with that in mind, everyone at dinner seemed to believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) was moving way faster than anyone can imagine-algorithms will be doing it all smarter and faster and in the next twenty years we won’t need vocational skills– like there won’t be a need for plumbers, carpentars, assistants….

Two things then: first off, assuming they’re right, and holding constant the fallacy of Keynes’ prediction, what are we going to do instead? Take a minute to really think about this. What are we going  do do all day? Certainly not build things with our hands, and algorithms can figure out what people’s wardrobe preferences are better than a human profiler, and machines will fold our laundry.. How will we keep busy? 

And more importantly, how will we know how to do whatever it is we are going to end up doing? What skills will we need, and are we already thinking about this too late for it to matter? As I continue to contemplate how to design post-secondary academic opportunities, and complexity of aligning educational outputs with market needs (and the whole merit in the current way we do it) this is quite perplexing. 

And finally, am I the only one incredibly perplexed by this?? I love that people take pride in their skills and craft–think of the difference between a commercially built home and a design by a top architect-skill and craft make a huge difference. Of course, labour is more expensive than ever, and mass production will lose the human touch, no matter the algorithm, I can’t believe that nothing will be lost in translation. 

Oh, and while we gear up to live in the futuristic AI world, we are forgetting that in the meantime, we are neglecting the current demands of the labour market, or, criticized for believing they still matter to the majority of the worlds labour market. Recently, a 24 year old Italian woman, in response to my comment that the current economic downturn is cyclical and it would improve said to me, yea, but I’m alive and young now, I don’t need to get skills that may or may not be in demand 5, 10 or 20 years from now… 

In a world evermore connected and a labour market evermore shifting, how can we jump on the bandwagon without crushing those who are oiling its wheels?  And more importantly, what will people do all day?!