How The Future Works: Why your ultimate job is to be HUMAN. A film by Gerd Leonhard – Transcript

00:00the future are you excited are you worried because the next 20 years will bring more change than the previous 300 years technology is rebooting the very idea of work how we work when we work where we work and sooner or later why we were

00:33you know computers are no longer stupid they're watching they're listening they're speaking they're learning and they may even be thinking science fiction is becoming science fact and the end of routine work is only one of the outcomes so how much of your work is routine you know the searching invoicing filing organizing checking updating

00:59monitoring need I go on rest assured anything that can be automated digitized or virtualized will be this is as certain as music as in the cloud cars are driving themselves and money is going digital automation is reducing the need for rote and manual labor everywhere and smart machines will soon do the knowledge work as well blue

01:24color white color whatever color your work is it is going to be disrupted over the next 15 years in few technological limitation will virtually vanished imagine virtually unlimited processing power global access to real-time data machines that can move around like we do quantum leaps and battery technology and then even faster breakthroughs in

01:50artificial intelligence and deep learning clearly competing with such powerful machines on their turf has no future working like a robot has no future learning like a robot has no future it's a recipe for permanent unemployment when artificial intelligence meets human intelligence it's the end of routine as we know it you but take heart this is not the end of our jobs is not the end of our work

02:17it's not the end of our purpose rather a new age of human only work is beginning let's be honest few of us enjoy menial work and boring or teens even if we may like the security that comes with jobs like this you know increased automation is a certainty in all industries but very few jobs are hundred-percent automatable a hundred percent routine humans can easily deal with unforeseen

02:44events complex challenges requiring judgment intuition and improvisation whatever is easy for a computer is hard for humans and vice versa this will be true for the foreseeable future yes there is a life beyond automation but only if we are prepared and if we work together only if governments start to plan for the kind of education and training we

03:10need and provided we can have a serious conversation about if and how we should tax automation and what a universal basic income may look like now imagine a world may be 2030 where we only work 3 to 4 hours a day but for the same money because our machines are taking care of their routines picture a world with the cost of energy water food healthcare is

03:36dramatically lower because technology has brought abundance see yourself in the future where work is no longer the same as purpose where we can get purpose from what we can and what we are meant to do not what we have to do to make a living what if education actually helped us to discover how we can thrive as humans not as better robots what if routine work was replaced by the

04:02adventure of vocational careers what if learning were actually live long and full of reinvention so how will we get ready for this future leave your choice to the software and the bots focus on those purely human things that are our future move up the food chain to become indispensable in this hyper connected rediscover those talons and traits that

04:27make you unique as Oscar Wilde once said be yourself everyone else is taken become comfortable with being uncomfortable warm up to the discomfort of permanent evolution this is the new normal we're entering a constant state of bucha volatility uncertainty complexity and ambiguity but you can meet volatility

04:52with velocity you can fight uncertainty with unorthodoxy you can answer complexity with creativity and you can defeat ambiguity with awesomeness don't perfect you're dying routines and don't let your kids even get started with learning them downloading information to our hard drive is a dead end instead train them in understanding

05:17intuition imagination foresight storytelling and empathy strong skills in STEM science technology engineering and mathematics will be essential but achieving excellence in humanity ethics creativity imagination will become equally decisive the more we digitize our world the more you and we can and we must become the future works differently

05:45but that might be the best thing that ever happened to us