Produced by Futurists Gerd Leonhard and Anton Musgrave

“If you work like a robot, a robot will take your job”

In season 2, episode #5, Anton and I explore what the future of work, jobs, training, education and the impact of artificial intelligence might look like by 2030. Meanwhile, Anton asks: “How do we play with these things, understand their potential and capabilities and then, add another layer of deep human insight and value to the equation2?

A Forbes article by Jack Kelly from May 2023 says that research by Goldman Sachs shows that a possible 300 million jobs might be lost to automation (in the US alone).

Office administrative support, legal, architecture and engineering, business and financial operations, management, sales, healthcare, and art and design are some sectors that will be impacted by automation.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) concluded in a 2020 report, “A new generation of smart machines, fuelled by rapid advances in AI and robotics, could potentially replace a large proportion of existing human jobs.” Robotics and AI will cause a serious “double disruption,” as the pandemic pushed companies to fast-track the deployment of new technologies to slash costs, enhance productivity and be less reliant on real-life people.

BUT!! The combination of significant labor cost savings, new job creation, and a productivity boost for non-displaced workers raises the possibility of a labor productivity boom, like those that followed the emergence of earlier general-purpose technologies like the electric motor and personal computer.

I talked about this back in 2017 at the Economist Innovation Summit in Berlin, i.e. how technology is exponentially changing our culture, society, business, humanity, artificial intelligence, digital ethics, etc. Here we are in 2023 … right in the middle of it.

An audio-only version of this episode is available on SoundCloud.