 Hello, this is Gerd Leonhardt. Welcome to the Future Show. Today's topic is the future of work and jobs. This is the topic, of course, that concerns many of us because, you know, what kind of work will our kids do in the future? And what possibilities will we have because of education? How do we have to get ready for this kind of work? Some of the key trends underlying work, of course, are demographics, including the fact that we're all going to get older. In the 1800s, we got to live to be 31 as males, and now we get to live to be 81. And it's quite likely that in 20 years we'll get to live to be over 100. The other thing is that we're all moving to cities. So rather than having, you know, 20 or 30 global cities, there'll be 150 urbanization, and we'll all be connected, and that will really impact the future of jobs. The thing that's happening with work, of course, primarily the driver is technology, is that we'll be able to offload a lot of work that's kind of robotic, you could say, or working with facts and numbers and, you know, menial, simple work, all the way up to, say, bookkeepers or data analysis or so. Computers and robots will take up a lot of that work, and there's lots of research on this, including from Oxford saying that 44% of all jobs, we're talking about one billion jobs, are going to be automated away in the next 25 years. And this sounds like an alarming message, and I think it could potentially be considering that, you know, if you're a taxi driver, you may fall prey to the Google automated car, self-driving car, but there's also an upside to this, because in this work of creating new jobs, there'll be entirely new jobs that we haven't even thought about today. And some of those will be, for example, like digital curation, you know, taking content and putting it together for people to understand and translating all that stuff that goes on around it. Social engineering, which sounds kind of suspicious, but being able to take social relationships and make sense out of it in a business relationship, that's already happening with social media a lot, artificial intelligence designers, you know, people who are helping software and others to get to that point that they're able to assist them. But primarily what's happening with jobs and work is that we're moving to the right brain, which is creativity, imagination, storytelling negotiations, feelings and emotions. So one of the great examples of how jobs are changing is when we look, for example, at the airline business, where it used to be a manual process of searching, now that can be done on any website having access to a database, we can compare prices and buy them and automate this entire process and change the way that people work. So travel agents are no longer doing what they did 10 years ago, but change in their way into more of a creative job, you know, putting packages together, advising people and more on the right side of things. And this is a trend that we're seeing in general when it's about jobs and work, we're going to lose all of those jobs that are essentially jobs that a machine can eventually, you know, a smart machine can eventually do, for example, there's a new robot called Baxter, which has been invented by a company in California that costs $27,000, and this machine can be taught to do something at a work environment that only people could previously do because you can guide the robot with your hands and make it do what a human did and actually learns. It's a deep learning machine, and that will take over a lot of assembly line jobs that couldn't be automated until now. And then we have things like virtual pets and rather than having a real dog, people are having a robot dog, which of course by any means is not the same thing, but they seem to like it. I think the primary brunt on this change in the future of work will be on men because they're not used to this kind of work to be valued differently also because of metrics. For the role of women in our society in the future, I would say that they have many arguments about technology sort of womanizing society because what is happening here is that traditionally, which I don't really believe is true, is only female skills, understanding, negotiation, discussion, all these things are not considered to be hardcore skills like mathematics. We're moving over to that part of society as an emphasis. It's much harder for men to do this because we're used to doing more sort of factual efficiency jobs. Education is already to a very large degree disconnected from reality in that we're learning things just in case we may need them later. Most times we don't. Now today the situation is, even if you're already in business for some time or in the economy, then you always have to learn something new. Science is one of those critical areas where you need ingenuity. It's a craft. It's not just adding up numbers. A computer is not a scientist. So we're going to see more craft people, more programmers, more hackers, more therapists, more cooks, all these kind of people who are doing things machines can't copy yet. So the definition of employment and what it means in the future is going to dramatically change as a consequence of this. The system ultimately tops out at a certain point when robots are taken over half the jobs and automation, and the other half is subject to restriction because of environment and all these kind of things will have to come up with a solution that values us as people rather than as producers. What is related to this, of course, is a discussion of education, of knowledge of how we're going to get ready for this, in the next episodes. Thanks very much for listening. I'm Gerd Leonhard.