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Preparing for the Jobs of Tomorrow: What Happens When Change Keeps Accelerating?
Preparing for the Jobs of Tomorrow: What Happens When Change Keeps Accelerating?

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The time from Thomas Newcomen’s first steam engine in 1712 to Stephenson’s Rocket in 1829 via the work of James Watt and others took almost 120 years. Which is approximately the time of the First Industrial Revolution. The Second Industrial Revolution followed immediately, with the electrification of a lot of steam-powered machinery. During much of this entire time, new inventions spread at the rate of 5 miles per year because the primary mechanism was word of mouth. Only with the emergence of the telegraph did the spread of new technology accelerate, and even then it took decades for any meaningful change. If we look back from today, we might describe this change as slow, creeping, and almost glacial - perhaps 'industrial evolution' rather than revolution might seem like a more apt term. But seen through the eyes of people who lived at the time, this phase from the early 1700s to the early 1900s witnessed progress at a blinding speed never seen before. It transformed the world as it existed—socially, economically, and geopolitically, in ways that people, organisations, and governments struggled to keep up with.

Today, we could argue that the world has changed as much or more in the past 30 years. The Internet and ubiquitous connectivity, the smart phone, billions of sensors, the data deluge, and the evolution of AI, mixed reality, and network technologies such as blockchain are all collectively playing out as we speak. But could we not for a moment look at this dramatic change through the eyes of a scientist who lives in 2200 AD and conclude that this change was, by her standards, slow, glacial, and ponderous?

This is our biggest challenge of imagination. Accelerating technology evolution creates exponential change. We struggle to think exponentially, which is why we often underestimate the impact of change over 10 years or longer. And as the rate of change goes up, there are two distinct problems we will need to solve.

First, there is a point of inflexion with respect to change and career spans. For much of the last 100 years, big industrial shifts happened once in your career, and if you were lucky, it happened either very early, so you could adjust to it, or it happened very late, so you could just retire. Today with faster waves of disruption, it's likely that these seismic changes will happen multiple times within a career. As we are all living and working longer, we might see between 3-5 significant shifts within a single career. Mass AI adoption is one such shift, while the widespread use of autonomous vehicle is another. Each of these will require us to retrain significantly in ways that it's hard to anticipate.

A second challenge of displacement will also come our way. It has often been argued that technology creates more jobs than it destroys, which has been true so far. But it's also true that the new jobs created are often geographically removed from the old ones and require a completely different set of skills. The factory jobs that disappeared from Detroit might have resurfaced as robotics and software jobs in Asia or even in California. But these new jobs might not be accessible to the factory worker with a family in his or her mid-forties. Similarly, the Uber and Ola driver might struggle to become the AI engineer or tester in an autonomous driving world, even if there are more net new jobs.

One clear direction is that the technology quotient of all jobs is on the rise. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, executives, and even sports people, artists, and film directors all now need to use technology more effectively to do their jobs better. A second impact is that as every company becomes a technology company – a phrase we hear today – (almost) every job will be a technology job. The range and variety of technology related jobs will explode, and coding might be only a small percentage of these jobs. A third broader societal impact is that the transition will be difficult and will need to be addressed via policy. Carl Frey, an Oxford Economist argues that it takes 50 years between new technology adoption and its widespread benefits being felt by society. And a final implication, one that has been voiced in many places already is that lifelong learning will become a must. It's the only way we will be able to achieve professional relevance over our lifetimes.


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