AUTHOR and economic developer Mark Lautman, is looking forward to the decades to come. Mark is the Keynote Speaker at the inaugural the Nth revolutioN event on September 27. His talk, Our Superpower Needs An Overhaul, is part of the Keep It Going series, organised by STORM.SG.
GOOD, bad or ugly, the next 30 years promise to be the most exciting time in human history.
The acceleration of the expansion of human knowledge and productive capacity explodes the scope, scale and value of what is possible in the next several planning cycles. This dramatically raises the value of the future.
In some ways it makes thinking about and planning of it more important than doing.
There are three powerful forces at work changing the economic development game:
1) Artificial Intelligence (AI)
2) A growing shortage of qualified workers
3) The shift to solowork
How we deal with them will determine what kind of economy and what kind of future we have.
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Artificial Intelligence
The speed of change and the rate at which we are accumulating knowledge and productive capacity appears to be non-linear.
By the end of this century, if not sooner, it is quite possible that advances in AI, bioscience and the power of networked systems will allow advanced societies to produce 100% of the goods and services needed for the population to live happy and healthy lives with a fraction of the working age population holding down full-time jobs.
At some point, we may need a whole new economic system.
A full-time, paying job may end up being an artefact of the 20th Century. This transformation is likely to happen in advanced societies first.
Work And Value
So it is not early of us to start rethinking what kinds of human activity should be considered work. How could unpaid work on self-improvement or unpaid work at home raising children or caring for elders, or helping neighbours with their education, health and well being be differentiated, valued and booked into GDP and subsequently traded?
This is one of the most exciting frontiers of what we should call the future-present. It seems like something far off in the future when it is happening right now.
In this and many other ways, AI is changing the underlying fundamentals of the economy and profoundly complicating efforts to manage local economies — in particular, job creation.
Not only is AI beginning to eliminate jobs faster than they can be replaced, but the pace of technological innovation and new business model development is also shortening the life cycle of employers.
As a result, most community leaders are grossly underestimating the rate at which they will need to create new jobs just to maintain current levels of prosperity.
Mark Lautman is the keynote speaker at Keep It Going: the Nth revolutioN. For complimentary tickets to a thought-provoking session email kig@storm.sg and provide us with your contact details and the industry you are in. Seats are limited but you might be the lucky one!
Images: Shutterstock
Nice piece Kannan – in the world described, learning will be more important than knowing – this will rapidly undermine the value of our subject matter experts and highlight the need to build connections with people, to help them learn and for us to learn in the process – it’s why i say that successful organisations will be the ones that operate to learn rather than to provide a product – the approach of providing a product belongs to the industrial age. Dom