People, Not Machines, Will Be Driving the Future of Work
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A vision for a#worldpositive future
While the agricultural and industrial revolutions took decades, centuries, and even millennia to unfold, today’s changes are happening before our very eyes — and will likely accelerate in the years to come. With a business playbook and policy environment designed to maximize for short-term returns, the implications for this pace of change could be profound.
A recent White House report detailed that nearly 62% of American jobs may be at risk of being automated. These numbers alone can lure us down a dark path of mass unemployment, idle classes and creative stagnation.
We at Obvious are choosing to pursue an alternate path. Last month we convened entrepreneurs, academics, policymakers and other leaders to discuss how the re-imagination of work will impact us all, driven in many ways by recent advances in deep learning.
Our hypothesis: working together across disciplines — and world views — will ensure the best opportunity to positively shape this transformation.
The conversation sparked more provocative questions than clear answers:
- Foregone Conclusions? Are massive unemployment and the impending socioeconomic safety nets we might need to create (e.g. minimum basic income) a foregone conclusion? How might we reimagine education and equip people with adaptable, resilient skill sets?
- What is the goal? What goal does work play in our lives, and society, beyond the paycheck? If we automate everything, then what? How might we incorporate longer-term thinking into our everyday decision making?
- Rethinking Assumptions. How might our assumptions (technology/capital = asset, human/capital = cost) be reframed to incentivize different business behaviors in this new world order? How might we imagine a new human- and planet-centered capitalistic system, across sectors and borders?
- The Future, As Designed By _______. How will our future be engineered and designed? Will it be by a tiny elite, the empowered masses, or both?
- The Pace of Change. How quickly will the pace of change accelerate, the implications thereof, and how we choose to respond? (e.g. What happens when 3.1M truck drivers are moved out of their jobs by companies like Otto — not over decades, but potentially years?)
- Government and Policy Experimentation. What should be the role of government, especially in experimenting with new approaches to policy? How can policy keep pace with these changes, and protect itself against manipulation? Who should be taking the risk, and how might alternative financial instruments play a part?
- A New Social Contract? What is a new social contract we might consider between policy, business and citizen? How is it threaded across the private, public and social sectors?
The Paths, and Choice, Before Us All
With uncertainty as the only certainty, we have the opportunity to react in one of two ways: eagerly, diving into the unknown by placing bets on people and transformative ideas; or with fear and complacency, giving in to inertia and the existing paradigms, which could result in billions being left behind.
We are optimists who believe that the future is ours to shape with new business models and novel investments. We have already backed #worldpositive companies that are engaging with business leaders, policymakers and consumers to create the economic, political, and social models of the future. Here are some examples of what #worldpositive looks like:
- Dale Dougherty’s Maker Media: Adaptable and resilient skills will be essential if our workforce is to thrive in this work environment. Maker Media, through an emphasis on empowering its community of DIY enthusiasts, is transforming what we think of as education.
- Gusto, Breezeworks, and Workpop: More successful small and medium-sized enterprises means a world with more creative, dynamic products, services and overall innovation. We must give them the tools to compete on a global scale. Gusto, Breezeworks, and Workpop are helping entrepreneurs focus more time and energy on their ideas than on the cumbersome infrastructure it takes to run a business.
- Change.org: Uniting people around causes is essential to putting pressure on policymakers worldwide. Change.org is helping to ensure governments and companies are more responsive and accountable.
- Learners Guild: The problem to them is clear: a high demand for software developers without the supply to meet it. Their goal is to give people necessary skills without burdening them with student debt.
- Medium: Peoples’ ideas can truly shape the future. Medium has democratized the op-ed page, giving voice to those who previously had no other channels. They’ve demonstrated that there is a place for a product that moves the world forward through civil discourse and dialogue at scale.
The socioeconomic results of our world’s movement toward automation are not yet fully known. We cannot know for sure how the continued introduction of artificial intelligence will affect our civilization and the principles upon which it rests.
What we do know, however, is that we have to support those disruptors and innovators who have bold vision around utilizing these emerging technologies to positively impact humanity and the sustainability of our environment.
Below are a selection of categorical opportunity areas that we believe are ripe for entrepreneurial exploration. We welcome you to add to this list, so that collectively we can shape a #worldpositive future.
Personal Economies
We believe in nurturing personal economies, where someone’s skills, attributes and assets can be leveraged to create a respectful living. We are excited about models that reduce friction to connect someone’s skills to fulfilling work and/or underutilized assets that can help generate a meaningful income. Upwork, Honor, and Airbnb are great examples.
Cooperative Business Ownership
Shared ownership models that build robust culture and mutual accountability are approaches we hope to further invest in. REI is a great example of a membership-oriented business model that builds a sense of community. Juno is a more recent example — a ride-sharing company choosing to share ownership with drivers, setting them apart from the more traditional models of Uber and Lyft. Honor, mentioned above, does the same.
Human-Centered Software
We hope to see more from software that fosters transparency and frictionless collaboration, specifically in ways that elevate the most impactful ideas no matter where they come from. Machines should be augmenting our human efforts, helping us perform better — not simply replacing us. Small businesses, perhaps more than any others, need powerful, playing field-leveling tools to start and scale their companies such as Slack and Gusto.
Resilient Business Models
Many of our industrial business models degrade our environment without accountability, and/or are prone to other risks related to questionable social and financial practices. Building new, resilient models — decentralized versus centralized, clean versus dirty, and local versus global — should mitigate these risks and create new possibilities. Distributed energy and storage (e.g. Tesla and SolarCity), localized and data-driven manufacturing (e.g. Poka and Sight Machine) and agriculture (e.g. indoor vertical farming, soil microbiome and outdoor robotic services such as Blue River Technologies) are a few examples.
Reimagining and Redefining Education
Our higher education system needs to be nimble and responsive, more able to pivot to meet the needs of employers demanding specific skill sets. We must also support models that build adaptable and resilient skills to help people thrive in an era of breathtaking change, such as Learners Guild and lynda.com.
Improving Human Health and Longevity
Our healthcare system is a wrought with suboptimal user experiences, perverted incentives and skyrocketing costs. We need to reimagine the system in its entirety while continuing to explore preventative health care that rewards individuals and businesses for keeping people healthy, not penalizing and profiting off the sick. This could include a deeper understanding of genetics, the microbiome, computational biology and smarter interventions (e.g., Virta Health).
Mass Affordability
We need to focus on technologies that drive abundance, not scarcity. This kind of orientation would enable us to improve affordability for the masses, ensuring everyone will have access to quality lifestyles. Two innovations can drive this: human-machine collaboration that reduces waste and maximizes efficiencies (e.g., the IIOT), and synthetic biology that enables access to environmentally intensive products that are scarce (e.g., Muufri, Gelzen).
Tremendous opportunities exist to build transformative companies that will help humans lead in a world soon to be awash with machine and AI-driven technologies. We need leadership and vision that utilize the power of capitalism to transform lives of the people and health of the planet.
We will also need to adopt progressive public policies that incentivize people and planet-centered economics with business that are otherwise driven by quarterly profits and treat humans as liabilities, not assets.
Working together across disciplines — and world views — will ensure the best opportunity to positively shape this transformation.
We hope you’ll join us.
