 No, no, please stop, please, please, that's so much You all invited your friends, right? They're all on their way here. Okay, good Good morning That's just not gonna do good morning Okay, you got to be double as loud, right? You got to help us sort of fill the volume of the room So because I know there are people just waiting with bated breath to just hop in so I'm Gary Bowles the chair for the future of work for Singularity University the Co-founder of e-parachute.com which focus on bringing tools for career exchangers and job hunters based on what colors your parachute the enduring career manual and I'm also a partner in charrette and we're and top of everything else a co. I'm a co-founder of Socap and is my wife Heidi who is also a co-founder would say blah blah blah blah blah, so that's enough about me So our focus this morning is on impact of what I've called the digital work economy and explore why I used that phrase I want to first introduce my guests and then I want to just run through a series of what I call sort of fire starter ideas And so these are sort of ideas statements contentions that we can use as a jumping off point and Hopefully we we not only want to agree on everything. We'll have a real healthy discussion about The seismic changes in the world to work and how that affects the the world of impact So I want to show you why I've invited these amazing people to Germany. So so Vivian Ming Is probably one of the smartest people on the planet about machine learning which unfortunately keep calling artificial intelligence? and and the impact in how we think about work and so You know, it's going to give us a bunch of her insights about the ways that technology is sort of reshaping The world of work and because I sort of linked them together work and learning and then Kristen Sharp is executive director originally for the shift commission now shift labs through New America Foundation and Kristen has done an amazing job of shepherding a recent report that I hope you all have read if you haven't you should Go out and read it after this It talks about future scenarios related to the world of work and especially has they've developed a number of insights about the impact of the seismic changes in work and especially communities and some of the issues related to different populations So so I want to just jump through these fires that are real quick and and then we can be off to the races so One of the learnings when you focus on this arena the future work is that first You know two takeaways one is we've been talking about these issues for a long time This is a series of books articles that have been around for decades you know, we've gone through transitions in the workforce and in the dynamics of work for a long time and one of the takeaways you should also take is Don't write a book with the title the future of work because it's already been taken I love the idea that the future of work is defined by whether you have a cashmere sweater on or a suit Yeah, exactly. So right. Yeah, usually. Yeah, it usually shows a you know, fairly, you know, well-dressed professional and Looking deep in thought as to what their future Career is going to look like as opposed to the you know, massive people All around the world whose lives are being affected And so the other thing you find out about the future of work is that it's it's sort of you know The traditional you know the parable about the blind man in the elephant sort of problem. It's so huge It's such a broad landscape. This is just a few of the different topics that people Come at it with I've got some friends who just recently wrote a book on the future of Augmented reality and virtual reality and they do are doing a series of talks on the future of work Specifically on what what you do when you walk around with a headset on your head So which I don't think we're all going to be doing but maybe maybe a few So a quick quick the fires that are so we have been through this kind of process before we called it The shift from an agriculture to an industrial economy This time it's happening in a blindingly short period of time and the pace and spread of the change is Perhaps even more dramatic and because we don't know where it's going we the popular press has Article after article with headlines about robots and software taking our jobs I think says his work is becoming unbundled I tend to use that phrase a lot in a lot of the papers that I've written on this this topic And it's important to understand that as we change the dynamics of work What we think of as a job of one person one job is actually an industrial era construct and And that may be going the way of the dodo. I talk a lot about that that work is actually sort of three things When we've paid to do work, it's actually we solve problems. We're all problem solvers How do we solve problems we perform tasks? How do we perform tasks? We we use our skills So it's just those three things we solve problems. We perform tasks And we use our skills and so as you think about the changes in the world of work It's really helped to come back to these really three sort of basic constructs And just so you know if you're taking notes, I'll post these on slide here I always have them on slide here after I talk so when we talk about robots and software They don't actually replace jobs usually what they do is they perform tasks So remember it's solve problems perform tasks use your skills They perform tasks and then a human decides do all those sort of add up to a job going away And so it's really important to think about that we're really talking about human decisions here This isn't some you know sort of inevitable future apocalypse We also need to think in terms of that there's a lifestyle that people want to have and in the past We've said that's a job and there's a certain amount of money that they make but lifestyles are actually the combination of how cheap things are that you want and The amount of revenue that you bring in so that's one context is that it's just what's the lifestyle that? 7 billion people on the planet each want to have and how can they have that lifestyle, but then the other aspect is work is also You know the underpinning of work is that it's the channeling of human energy, and we many of us have a deep need for meaning insight the sixth is that this is something I'm gonna ask both Vivian and Kristen to talk about is We keep worrying about this Job apocalypse, you know in the future about you know robots and software taking all sort of all jobs in the 2050 But but really one of the reasons we found at Socap is that we felt that there are things you can do today Because the dynamics of the change you want to see actually exist today, and so what are those strategies? And that's something I want to ask For insights as well, and finally I tend to use this construct over and over again I say it's individuals organizations communities and Countries what are the strategies that help each of them people in each of those? Context to be able to understand these seismic changes that we're going through today and tomorrow, so that's it Those are the fire starters, so now we can be off to the races So does that give us enough fodder to be a great great launching point? I did interesting number one and a lot of this conversation around it's happened before I Wish I could remember I'm terrible at actually citing the people I quote But this great line which I'll just paraphrase about two horses looking at a Model T and One of them saying yeah, you know the plow the wheel they all created new jobs for horses This will just be just like that again and you know obviously like you said the question is is it a kind of fundamentally different ship this time Or is this nothing even more complicated than? Completely different or just a rehash of the same and what's your thesis? You know, I think that there are great examples I don't want to jump ahead of the big thing that I mentioned to you earlier But we're putting a lot of money behind programming initiatives a lot of money behind programming initiatives and You know in my world I know a number of people that are building some amazing tools that will allow designers to Directly produce their own programs So literally just talk to the computer You know, I need an app that does this and it leverages this data And it's in blue with this design ethic and in five minutes you get a prototype out the other end And if you're a designer that is a massive job expansion you take this Incredible hurdle to getting your job done which is a bunch of people that don't understand design And they don't understand people but they got to write the code for you and you've taken them out of the process Right and but it's not just out of the process. It's a part of this idea of jobs being transformed is You know five minutes later. You've got a new prototype instead of weeks or months later You have a new prototype. So certainly as a scientist I know the difference between how quickly you can prototype out Let's say a new machine learning program is becomes a big transformation in what's possible So I think that's a great example of a very of a that kind of a shift in the economy where there's an explosion of new creative jobs Replacing old ones, but the old ones aren't farm workers They are the very computer science jobs that we've just dumped 1.3 billion dollars Into training people how to do And we'll we can come back to the specifics of that number But you know, it's I feel like there's a wild misalignment between how we are talking and planning for the future in concrete terms and The understanding that we need more creative work And there's a real distance there. Okay. I don't know that it's necessarily just creative work that's the the Point of contention But your example of direct designers is an interesting one because when we did an overarching look at how the future of work is being changed by automation AI and Emerging technologies over the last year or so what we found was that most Emerging jobs are self-motivated in some way and so direct designer is one example of that But there are many others it can be in a creative field or a care field or craft beer Whatever the thing is, but it's an individually motivated Requirement that that you as the individual Identify an emerging opportunity figure out how to get the skills and training for it prove to someone or some Contingent of people that that's a worthwhile use of your time and skillset and then you know figure out how to do that And that's not what our education system is structured for and it's not Ironically what people say they want in a job when you pull people and focus group people and talk to workers Across the board at all income levels all demographics all Geographic locations across the country the number one thing people say that they want in a job is stability stability of income knowing that they have a job six months from now and knowing Approximately what it will pay a year from now it isn't the sort of creativity and ingenuity and Autonomy that comes with having a very flexible workforce and so one of the questions that that drives for us is What are the ways in a new economy where everything's self-motivated? What are the ways that you can create clear paths to doing some kind of work at all right? So I tend to talk about sort of the old rules of work and and so we have an education system that was designed for that era So and my father wrote a book called three boxes of life where he talked about this big chunk of education that big chunk of work Then a big chunk of leisure so we have an education system as you said that's sort of designed for these old rules And then we thought oh, we're all going to be working in a relatively static work environment for a long period of time So it didn't require a lot of you know What I call agency, but you know Self-motivation and so now we've got this new work economy and the challenge is that you're talking about a set of attributes that We not only didn't teach people about in our schools But they're pretty much everybody's going to need to do that because they're going to be a vanishingly small number of jobs That will not require that level of agency So one of the groups that you looked at was truck drivers, right? So everybody's reading all about self-driving trucks You know literally truck drivers are in the headlights of autonomous vehicles There's three and a half million truck drivers in the United States Half of them long-haul half of them short-haul and that was one of your focuses. So what how did that population think about this transition? I mean it was it was an interesting discussion We had a number of focus groups mostly in the Midwest that were both long-haul truck drivers and delivery drivers people who delivered for Peapod or or FedEx or something And most of them when asked whether there would be major technological changes that would affect the industry said potentially in 40 to 60 years and so the time horizon was a totally different one than people in the technology world Think about so that was sort of the number one thing that we thought of and the number two thing was when when you flagged for people that new training or needing to get into an agency-driven aspect of the work or get yourself into a new thing like It's not that they were unresponsive to that. It just didn't occur to anybody naturally to do it And so like that was a it's a it's a major juxtaposition between what the economy is driving people towards and what people are used to doing So so Christian think about a good point is that there's a new technology comes out and Typically people that are going to be affected by the technology think it's this very long horizon Technologists think exactly the opposite everybody's going to be using it tomorrow And so when you look at the kinds of technologies that are replacing tasks or you know have the combination of robotics and AI How do you think about the time horizons and how do you how should we be thinking differently as to? What that means in terms of planning for its impact on different populations are helping different populations to be able to navigate that transition You know interesting that that the difference of opinion Is important because one of the biggest barriers to the entry of these sorts of technologies? Isn't the technology itself or the inventing of it? It's really its integration into a broader system So if we had Tesla I think just announced that they'll have an electric truck and you know the plans of making itself driving and a number of groups are working on that In theory if we built a strong infrastructure to support that It could be out on the roads within a couple of years And now if we don't and if that differs across different state lines So you hit a line and they have to have someone come in and jump inside the cab and drive the truck Onto the other side of the state if we're talking transnationally, you know This is one of the biggest job verticals around the world. So if you're moving goods throughout Africa You can imagine again building these very robust long-haul transportation systems But it's not simply inventing an AI That could actually execute the job that tells you when it's mature and ready for market. So some of these are really hard to identify but Because they're complex it also means that Some of them come in very quickly and much faster than you would have thought so the disruption of the travel industry and When we call this short haul the taxi industry and so forth happened very very quickly much faster than people would have predicted Largely because they found ways to go around the infrastructure and just you know directly integrate into the system. So You know, it takes me roughly two years Let's say to go from a concept to the execution on some sort of robust new machine learning system But to get people to use it is a totally different creature And and that that actually in some ways is the heart of the story on both sides If you're the technologist the industrialist Understanding that dynamic the infrastructure the changes that are needed, you know, if we can build systems that can replace You know, I think that most susceptible The biggest impact job displacements will happen in professional services. So things like medicine and and law and Financial advising largely because although there's an enormous amount of complex judgment necessary for those jobs That's majority of what you do is complex but wrote and it turns out that is perfect for the sort of things if you've got robust data Diagnostic imaging data Lots of examples of risk assessment for financial advising you know The typical lawyer as someone walks in the door as soon as they walk in the door, you know This is gonna be a will and it's gonna be this kind of will so Most of that then it's sort of just a human bottleneck Where it's complex making the judgment, but it's not actually in the end a whole complex series of outcomes So building an AI that can do that is really easy to do building an AI that can do that and then actually has a place in the process Of this it's been extremely difficult to get artificial intelligence into the medical industry Despite the obvious value of it There's also resistance in the legal industry again for good reasons, but Inevitably it will happen, but the questions are a lot more about social dynamics than technology, right? And I think at some jobs, too, there and potentially in the professional world Will augment people's capabilities and it won't be an either or it'll be a a sense of humans they you have to have a human that has a Enough knowledge of the landscape to be able to assess whether the AI is being helpful and But so as a result of that, you know, there's some room for morphing and changing that the Industry that I really worry about is the retail industry and that the industry where the people are cashiers and things in the service industry that employ huge numbers of people in our economy, but but you know six million people in our economy But are I sort of on the cusp of being able to be phased out? Yeah, I mean I agree in in absolute numbers. It's certainly easy to imagine that You know Amazon foods becomes a largely automated system and a lot of what are supposedly some of the best jobs in the country disappear For people that don't have some amazing technical skill that they can sell but the one thing I will say about the previous example is that I Truly believe that there is this amazing place For for me when we talk AI it's augmented intelligence and everything I build is in that space Can we just to really shorthand it can we build super doctors and super lawyers and recruiters and and augment all of these people and I Not of course, I believe it's possible because it's what I do But I also believe that it is a an economic reality. It's something we could move towards But I do have to say in my opinion the overwhelming economic trend is the other direction Yes, we can build these amazing diagnostic systems to take your your your GP and it means they can do amazing stuff right there and then and we have this sort of data scientist doctor That has amazing capabilities. I love that vision. I think it's a real possibility But right now, you know, you go talk to a CFO of a major health organization And their opinion is I can hire three lab techs to do that same job leveraging the same technology and we'll get greater throughput And I think that is also a real possibility and it's a one that has a lot of economic momentum behind it so one of the underpinnings of The this whole transition is that you've essentially got always think in term of Venn diagrams with these things So it could dramatically oversimplify which my economist friends hate if you got, you know One circle is all the demand in a particular economy for Problems to be solved and another is the supply like all the people that can solve those problems We've gone through this oscillation over and over again, you know throughout modern history What what the the decisions about the people that are left behind or the skill sets that are no longer being used as much in the marketplace and then the new skills in the past it's the pace of change was not that rapid and And we also didn't have technology that could augment people to do that additional work and so the the challenge for in more modern economies is that we've sort of kind of already sort of calibrated around Existing sets of jobs and there's a certain pace that we've gone through in the past But now the pace is accelerating and so is technology one of the things that can help people with that process Or do we have to go back to the education system and say, okay? We're all have to be lifelong learners This is the only way we're gonna get there is if we're augmenting ourselves We're continually upgrading ourselves and continually upskilling ourselves. I have a strong opinion I think it's both things I mean I think you need to equip people to be able to take risks in their own life in a way that we don't equip people for now either intellectually through school and being able to get new skills or you know providing the the Policy structural support that enables people to do that you have to be able to say like I'm gonna Deviate from what I know in the current job that I have in order to get a new skill and jump into something new Okay, and we we're not set up for that so One of my favorite education findings comes not from an education researcher, but a rather famous economist Raj Chetty, it's who's now at Stanford and he had this great finding which was He was looking at the long-term impact certain teachers had on students as an economist, he's looking at the economic impact and One of the interesting he found is some teachers really had a big outsized impact but more interestingly Those students the students of those teachers that went on to earn more money and go further in their education In the immediate subsequent years actually performed worse. It's slightly lower standardized test scores slightly lower grades Which tells you two things simultaneously One the things we're assessing kids for are not actually the things that are associated and probably causally related to long-term positive life outcomes and two We have an incentive system in place that actively discourages the teaching of these types of skills for like a better term Now I'm not one to dump on the education system. I think it gave us this amazing world that we have It's really easy for a lot of you know Tech CEO types to come in say education is broken. I'm here to fix it and you're like Have you studied anything about education ever and I went to school? You know my wife runs research for the San Francisco school system. We look hard about both You know what how we idealize the capabilities of people and technology, but also about what you can really do I built an AI She and I published these papers showing that it could By listening to students talk to each other It could predict their answers on standardized tests and our vision was Why ever waste the time on those standardized tests? We know they're biased We know that they're not predictive of really interesting long-term outcomes. They take time. They cause stress What if the learning itself and this is part of the idea of using AI to augment the experience? This is augmenting education itself And then we we brought that to a number of schools from universities to others and they were like this is Amazing and this is scary and what the hell am I supposed to do with it? And what they really wanted was a technology that could cut the grading time in half And I'm not saying this to dump on teachers I'm saying it because It's a this forces it into a policy space where if we're so obsessed with these short-term assessments that don't have a lot of impact in the long run And that's how we're incentivizing our teachers whether it's a formal incentive or not Then of course what they're gonna teach is you know, do you know how to factorize the polynomial? Do you know when the treaty of Versailles was? Whatever's on the test that becomes the whole of my job when what we need to focus on is Stuff that has nothing to do with any of that. It is about creating those self those creating agency. Yeah teaching kids self-motivation Collaboration, you know following a passion, you know, which the system is not designed to uncover it is profoundly Misaligned with that. Yeah, but I also think we need to think carefully about whether the current structure that we have where oriented towards Everyone having a job and having it be like a pretty structured approach to a job is one that we want to have going forward if we have technologies that are enabling new approaches like Should we start thinking about people in the care economy and you sort of family and community and identity and other things that That have to do with a full life and not just like your actual income We had a number of potential futures that we looked at in the report that the shift commission put out and they weren't Predictive they were just possible things that might happen 20 years from now and one was a world in which In which there were fewer jobs as a result of automation and technology, but that because there were fewer jobs the things became Production became more efficient things became cheaper and people sort of transitioned to a world in which one person had a job And the other family member worked on other things and or they did that at different times in their careers And it wasn't so structured towards everybody had to have a job all the time the way we think about it right now No, that's what I was talking about this lifestyle thing It's if you got a target lifestyle in any economy whether it's developed or developing economy There's a sort of bar you're thinking about that you want to hit and either your costs come down The lower the bar or your revenue goes up to reach the bar and so It's entirely possible I mean we don't we don't factor in that's one of the reasons that productivity numbers are just a fairytale Nowadays because we don't factor in things like that. We're all carrying around these supercomputers that have more power than than a mini computer did even even 30 years ago and so The problem is as we're thinking about the policy and the processes that we're trying to support is well Actually, we really do want people to have a target lifestyle They want to be able to whatever it is that they're going for and is that possible for seven billion people on the planet? Well, I I strongly agree, you know the nature of a Panel on jobs is to talk about jobs in my work We look at long-term outcomes in terms They're all cited at recent paper income wealth Seven different biomarkers of health outcomes social connectedness which has become such an overwhelmingly positive associated Input that we just take it as an desirable outcome nowadays subjective and objective measures of happiness So yeah, we really want to look at these really rich and robust outcomes But the funny thing is I think shifting from a defined job to other types of things Actually even argues more strongly in favor of agency No one's telling you what to do if if what you've got is time on your hands and access to resources there is a huge swath of the population that Has led a life that has not prepared them for that whatsoever And it's it's deeply problematic You know, we kind of I'll maybe jump ahead of something that's gonna come up later But when we talk about things like a universal basic income It's based on this presumption that freed from the burdens of rent and food People would just go out and be creative all the time. Yeah, right in the creative class They'd be that already we don't pay artists shit. We you know, if you want to be a scientist go be a scientist Right, this is we're presuming humans are a different creature than they actually are and and that's why I think when we talk about The scary side of these issues it isn't what's scary about it to me is not artificial intelligence It's the phenomenal lack of understanding of people That that really drive a lot of the heart of these problems. So and another and another underpinning is that and this is something that's okap focuses on has focused on from the beginning is At the end of the day We're talking about a significant amount of employment happens within organizations and organizational decision makers are the ones that decide who they employ and when they employ them and We can say that a lot of those are rational decisions But the truth is that for it's certainly public corporations and certainly in the United States The purpose of an organization is to generate value for its shareholders Well, you're many of you are here because you believe that there's actually a wider range of stakeholders. There are customers partners communities in which organizations work In the planet that are also stakeholders in the activities of organizations and should be and that those all need to be factored in and so the inevitable results that We're talking about about, you know continuing to automate things Are not inevitable if humans are involved and if humans make different decisions That is there's a different calculus if they have customers and shareholders who actually want them to continue to employ people So I want to make sure this is also a dialogue So I just admit I'm gonna open up to to questions from from you folks as well But one other question so I know a number of the people that are attending so kept care a lot Not just about the US economy, but about developing economies as well. So CK Prahalad old friend who was author of fortune at the bottom of the pyramid was famous for saying that Developing economies have a number of disadvantages. They don't get to pollute as much as we did when we were developing But they also have a lot of opportunities in that they can leapfrog They don't have to go about for instance in many cases building a Wired telephone network because we have mobile phones now And so are there opportunities that developing economies have to leapfrog some of the structural issues that we've got and Be able to themselves be better prepared for this rapidly changing dynamic in the world of work I focus is domestic and so that's that's sort of the primary lens through which we look at things But in talking to people who do similar things in other countries in some ways That's all it's already happening in other countries that that particularly in the developing world that people already are forced to be entrepreneurial and is sort of a lower level economy then then is the case here and so You see that I think there's some opportunity for looking at some of Those programs and seeing if there are lessons for the United States from that So I have the opportunity to work in various things. I've done a lot of work in South Africa Some in Kenya and an Indian other spots around the world What's interesting is it like everywhere you go? Everyone brags about how entrepreneurial they're they're local people are You know, look look at them out there on the street the selling fruit and washing cars and You know that I have to say there's a certain part of me that says, you know, what else are they going to do? You've sort of they're forced to go find these things because the unemployment rates for young men They're often upwards of 40 to 50 percent and so this is it It gets a little bit worse when big, you know Multinationals come in and then bring their own talent with them to do construction or to do oil work So then you feel even more disenfranchised and you're forced even more to go into these spaces The funny thing is one of the strong parallels with these very self-motivated Self-described as entrepreneurial cultures is that they tend to be parallel paralleled with Extremely traditional school systems that are obsessed with standardized attestment. So when you see in India and in a lot of East Africa certainly in China, which is a slightly different story these Like paralyzing obsession with getting your kids the highest score possible in these standardized tests because they just decide everything So it's interesting that there's this Real contrast between what the local institutions are doing at least the the more government institutions And then this sort of inevitable Culture that grows up in these communities Where people are doing something and I use the term creative very loosely here but doing something creative with their lives because they need to do something with them and So I actually do think that there's Something slightly different to be leveraged here because you have these two things often running in parallel And if you could break some of the stranglehold that these very Static institutions have and get them to keep pace with this change Really, you know if there is something to be treasured and all these people having to create their own their own work their own experience then You know, can we can we actually leverage that? Yeah, instead of just having it be You know, let's turn a brutal reality into a positive self-description And if we could move away From I don't even know what these schools are training people to do You know, I'm worried that we're over obsessed with a fixed skill set like programming When that isn't going to be a well-employed job in the not too distant future They are You know, they don't even have that job. So what these formal systems are training people to do is largely Sit down and take it and we need something that's rather dramatically different than that So there's an example in Ethiopia. It's just profiled in New York Times last week. There's a startup that is the model is they Essentially our private college but but with nano degrees. They have a very based in Ethiopia they have a Although they have an American co-founder They they take they have a very disciplined process of testing So they only kind of skimming the cream, but they then once somebody has successfully applied for their program They put them through a training program to become web programmers and web developers and designers and project managers The those people sign up. They basically are guaranteed work for the next two years And then all that work is packaged up and sold as services from remote teams to mostly US tech companies Very successful model very well-funded startup starting to move to really substantial scale And so that's one example of routing around the existing education system and saying let's just leapfrog it And let's come up with a business model I think it includes an important additional element, which I think is actually just as valuable in the first world which is Stop separating out Development sort of development of self from work. Yeah, you know, so You know here we'll send you to a six-week career training and maybe we'll pay for it Or maybe you'll have to pay for it, but you go do it You won't get paid during that time you got to cover the cost somehow and then somehow in six weeks You've learned a whole new career and you go get a new job as opposed to kind of what you're describing Which is the actual experience of doing the work is development itself And this sort of thing can be much more strategic than just you know, here's a job go learn on it We can really leverage a lot We are working on projects like this at one of my company shift gig Which is an on-demand workforce company and I will freely acknowledge to start my affiliation with them I'm very skeptical of the on-demand Economy as a way of advancing anybody's life if you're on the worker side of that equation Yeah But if you transform that into thinking we're gonna pay you we're gonna create value for our customers We're gonna increase our margins by adding value into you over time and in two years You are set up to move on to something You you our goal is to make you overqualified for our company And that is in becomes an integral part of the business there's not a lot of Landscape analysis evidence right now about what works and what doesn't in those kinds of things Anecdotal evidence I agree with you on that when you make the when you integrate the learning into part of the job And particularly when you integrate it into the learning with part of the job with a defined outcome at the end People are much much more likely to go into it and stay motivated to participate as they're going through it but it's this concept of your your Holistic approach is your both the company or the individual is getting something while you're doing it and the sort of train and pray model like Doesn't keep people doesn't keep people with it because they're taking all of the risk on themselves without any Potential payoff at the end. Yeah, right. Yeah, and it's it's a I mean it's a really broad and huge problem And we keep doing it one of my favorite sets of interviews. I think I mentioned this the last time I was on the stage with you was NPRs interviews with former coal miners in West Virginia following the election and it was coal miner after coal miner saying listen, I Don't actually believe Trump, but at least he said he get my coal mining job back I've spent the last ten years with people promising job retraining and it doesn't happen and it doesn't work I just want my job back So I'm not saying that that explains the election, but it kind of gets at the heart of this where a lot of our hand-waving is around You know why young women don't enter The tech industry or the STEM fields is because we need a bootcamp for them You know why coal miners are stuck in their coal mining jobs because they need a bootcamp to teach them how to program We can run a bootcamp anywhere and do all these sorts of things and In this case, there is a fair amount of good evidence that those sorts of camps are not very effective There are some been a couple of isolated positive cases, but for the most part they're not very effective and and really Give me the idealized person we've been talking about and Six weeks and I bet we can give them a whole new set of skills that are transformative But they are effective when they're paired with an outcome that's clear to the worker in advance They know that there's right. Yeah, yeah, we do have great evidence that especially with older workers that We're advising a group out of the government of Singapore and they have a universal education fund That apparently older workers simply don't take advantage of and the major reason is because unless they see a Fairly guarantee guaranteed result at the end of learning. Well, I went to school, you know, that's why I talked about the three boxes thing I did the education box now. I'm in the work box I don't want to go back to the education box And so so if you've got a so really part of the dynamic that we're talking about is a difference between a fixed mindset And a growth mindset the old rules of work were focused on a fairly fixed mindset You you over it you made a big investment in education early on or in training in a field And then you amortize that investment over a long period of time You got a law degree at a medical degree that amortization window is shrinking and so for workers though who got Educated that old system and are following the old rules of work. What's the incentive to go back to school? They don't know they've actually got a job on the other end It's only when programs for instance with coal miners where it turns out that the skill set There's a certain skill set that actually is fairly transferable to climbing Propeller towers That that actually they know there's a job on the other end They're far more likely to engage in those programs And if there isn't they're not that motivated. Yeah, that's right. And then okay, so I want to open up to your question So who's who's got you're just going to shout it out. It's good. Please Just introduce yourself. Please you have a mic coming. I'll give it to you. Yeah, okay. Please introduce yourself Hi, I'm Elizabeth Pavigio and I've worked in the digital space for the last 15 years And I'm interested in your perspective on From a society perspective with the AI and robotization people with So it's Taking away some of the tasks in the jobs And really focusing on the soft skills and that's what's really going to enable people to be successful but we're not all born with the same capacities and And it feels intuitively that this new Prism is going to increase the divide with people who were born and can't make it You know can't change what they were born with And could find a job with like just simple tasks that they could do And what as a society are we going to do about it? And I know there's that the universal income is one idea, but I'm I'm not sold on it. And so I was wondering what your perspective is on this That's an interesting question because there's some research on sort of inborn personality traits of of people who appreciate a more hierarchical set out approach in advance versus people who are inherent instinctive risk takers and that's true like we're we're sort of in a Education structure societal structure right now that favors people who are hierarchical and have a Set path in front of them and we're moving towards something. That's a little that may be favors people who are instinctive risk takers a little bit more I think that we'll need to think through both of those things as we go forward and that there will need to be some Mechanism for identifying what the pathways to more secure jobs are for the people who want those things and whether that's a you know sort of baseline set of jobs or you know sort of a new WPA program or something that's that's an option or that will all Move into a world where some people have a fixed kind of job and other people Jump around more I don't know how you solve that but I think that we'll end up with a world where both things are in effect because You're right. There will always be people that need That need a clearer pathway, which is why we're we're all trying to think through right now. What are how do you identify emerging pathways and identify clear paths into them for people who want a more secure approach so I am actually going to throw out something completely different In my work, we look at not a python reference. We look at um, I do everything from grains through large-scale economic development and two areas I see huge parallels in my work, which is in education both in the home and formal education and in work and in both cases We look at and I won't have the time to go through all of the the background behind this But we look at the traits that are predictive of long-term life outcomes So I already listed those outcomes. I'm interested in so what things are predictive of that that Are about you so And are intervenable or changeable And it turns out we track about 45 different traits probably everything you're thinking of in the soft-skill space Is intervenable at some point in your life Poor cognitive stuff Largely only when you're a fairly young child But even then the way someone gets raised the stress in the household the the exposure to language These have causal impacts on these long-term outcomes, but the rest of them and I'm not going to go through the individual constructs, but Metacognition creativity essentially social skills and emotional intelligence should just give them really broad labels Everyone of those is develop all throughout people's lifetimes now. What's interesting in agreement with what you said is Nobody is good at everything nobody What's interesting in our work and it actually parallels some strange work done at red bull that studies this stuff also is Yes, no one's good at everything but people that have strengths um Have substantially better life outcomes and They pair them with complementary skills So in other words You have really strong cognitive abilities and metacognition and creativity. You're a great like inventor by yourself You don't have maybe great social skills and you don't always make the right choices in life The people that are successful with that skill set end up with compensatory skills Which should include finding other people that are strong at those abilities to compliment them Or maybe they learn not to make rash decisions. So this they transfer their emotional intelligence into metacognition um All of which is to say and I say this with absolute conviction in my work Everyone is changeable So i'm not saying everyone is equally changeable or everyone we're all just a blank slate, but At any given moment in anyone's life. There's something about you that's ready to improve It's just a fundamental tenet to my work So so i just i'll i'll hop into so a couple of quick things first off Um, just playing off what both of you said If if our commitment In going through this transition is no human left behind Then that's a growth mindset what that means is that we're not going to suddenly decide that IQ 100 everybody above it's going to be successful in the future and everybody below it is toast Right and needs a universal basic income Instead if we all have a growth mindset, um, as Vivian was saying then then we continually think of people as being able to adapt It's just whether or not they have come from a context in the past where that was not enabled We know from over 40 years of work with what colors your parachute that people there's three things people need To determine in the ways that they go about making career decisions. They need to know What? Makes them unique the unique mix of skills and other attributes They need to know where the different kinds of opportunities they can either find or create and then they know mechanics of how to do that We're actually at a tremendous time in our history Where people we can actually we know how to help people to go through that process Tremendously effectively and with a wide range of populations and one example I'm going to give you I'm speaking at a conference at Cornell On disadvantaged populations in the future of work in just a couple of weeks and One of the populations that is often talked about is people with spectrum disorder issues And well, it turns out that there's a bunch of attributes That are really really, you know, sort of center the target for programmers It turns out that that's that there's there's a bunch of traits that actually are biased towards success With programmers that fit a number of spectrum disorder aspects and that's just one example And so if we're thinking about well, that's a interesting match in terms of traits and capabilities and Potential challenges as well, but and in terms of work opportunities There's a range of other opportunities. We can think of exactly the same type of process and then make the determination How do we help people to get there? Like what are the things we could do to help to upskill them or give them the kind of nano training that they need or Help them to be able to develop that agency and if we have our commitment is no human left behind We're going to figure all that out. So another question, please. Sorry. Who's next? Yeah, we've got one here. Yeah Introduce yourself, please. Hi, my name is Ed McGregor. I I work with A digital company that does social selling called Regenerus And can you hold it up a little closer? So I I'm interested in your Philosophical stances around personal value and the necessity of labor versus expression It seems given physical and mechanical automation and the onset of things like lab grown meats and indoor agriculture That the base necessities of life may be increasingly offset to automated systems And so how do you view the necessity of labor to Personally actualize some of that self-worth And are we all essentially becoming artists in 100 years? Are there no more necessary jobs? How do we personally account for that philosophical change in the way that we view what we're doing now? That that was one of the things that I was most surprised at when we got together groups repeatedly in cities across the country of workers CEOs tech leaders people from traditional industries policymakers really in every sector of people who Are shaping the world that we live in right now I expected everybody to focus specifically on jobs or technology in talking about things and what came up over and over again Was the importance of identity in a job and it wasn't necessarily so much the actual job But the sense of community and identity that one got from both going to a place and being part of a specific profession Like I am a trucker. I am a coal miner Whatever the thing was that was the defining characteristic for their life It was that that was important to them not not like I don't think people actually cared if they were trucker or not They just cared that they were part of a community of truckers and that was central to their identity So I think that that is potentially Shiftable it's just that when Gary was talking about the three things that people need in order to find their purpose sort of People don't have a clear answer to what the where is right now Like where are the new opportunities? What can people do to to define themselves anew either from Either personally or through their communities or through their jobs and I think we're all sort of exploring that right now So two of the constructs we track one we were referring to earlier, which is growth mindset So lots of Carol Dwork works and others in there. By the way, I'll just add in It's not just you if your parents have a growth mindset The child has better outcomes if teachers and managers have a growth mindset their employees and students have better outcomes So the belief that people can change is is really fundamental, but Um in this context purpose is actually another construct we track now all of these may seem very soft But you know, I'm a hard numbers scientist the research on purpose. It's another very clear one with strong positive life outcome associations Um, here is my feeling about purpose And and I think you'll understand why it's answered my at least my philosophical answer to your question One human beings have to have a purpose Period it's it's not a choice you make You have a purpose right now For a lot of people they have the shitty substitute of their job Or maybe Manchester United or who knows why? But and if they don't get that they will go buy a purpose from whoever is selling it and a lot of bad people sell purpose And that's a big issue in the world But here's the thing about purpose. There isn't one thing you're meant to do in your life There isn't just this one thing to go find find yourself find the thing you love Um purpose is a constructed thing I'm sure there are purposes that are going to resonate more with you that you're going to have strengths You know purpose is something that really has a resonance cycle to you So you're successful and it feeds back and you get better and you become successful again The I frequently joke that the mating call of the american middle manager is who you with Um another version is what do you do? What if it was instead what's your purpose and that is what defines you in the world? I'm a pretty fundamentally lazy people person If you know my work that may sound funny, but I don't value arbitrary work at all Um, I don't value it in my life. I don't value it in my kids life When I see their homework has them write the same thing over and over and over again I say do it once and then I'll sign it to let them know that that was good enough for me Um what I wrote stuff just doesn't interest me do actual constructive work in the world and grow with it So uh in answer to your question, um But also keeping in mind, what is this world that we have a world that allows Seven to eight billion people to actually live out their idealized life. Well, no I mean not in in the not now Not medium term long term Maybe i'm not enough an idealist to to think that it's gonna happen, but maybe it's a possibility um But I still think it's possible For anyone anywhere to be able to construct a purpose Um, but I think it takes that's actually a thing it it takes us Constructing people that can construct their own purpose that don't just wait for it to come to them Uh, whatever that world looks like of eight billion people that can construct their own purpose or maybe three billion Um, I my philosophical stance is that's a better world than I want my kids to grow up in So just to come to really quick points and I want to go to next question. So first, um Chris you're exactly right People have uh, there's a significant portion of at least the american workforce that gets identity from their work The problem is that that has a number of challenges In helping them to go to do something in the future. So we try to help people In our in our workshops, uh through through e-parachute We try to help them to say not I am a truck driver or a lawyer But I am a person who Uses these skills To do that kind of work because if your identity is rooted in a certain kind of work and that work is no longer available Then you're on opioids and sitting on your porch waiting for the mind to come back. That's what's happening and so so instead we have to help people to unbundle to Anchor themselves from that identity because even though they want it We have to help them to to reconnect around new identity It is far more about solving certain kinds of problems as opposed to being in a particular industry or field because It's going to change the other thing about just values and purpose So we tend to focus a lot we talk about purpose because that's really Helpful conversation for a lot of people, but some people actually react negatively to the word. So we use meaning From some people, especially following the old rules of work Putting food on the table and a roof over the heads of your family is meaning and that's it They don't feel that they need it to come from their work Now when we've gone through and helped people to go through career planning and we give them a choice Here's a job or here's work with everything that you want Including very high pay, but it isn't really about your meaning or purpose Here's another opportunity for work and it has not this good pay It's a little harder, but it has everything you want in terms of meaning and purpose Except for personal circumstances like no, I have to keep the thing that keeps paying me more We find people choose this almost every single time They want to choose the meaning or purpose if they have the flexibility To make that kind of decision people in developing economies often don't have that luxury But if you give people that option to infuse purpose and meaning into the work that they do We find that they choose it almost every single time. There's a question in back here Interest yourself, please at john shell from toronto. Hey gary. Hey gary at the beginning You talked about how this is a long-term trend that has now led to You know difficult jobs part-time jobs contract jobs gig work And then christin you talked about the need for stability that's almost universal in the work that you've done Are there any things other than universal basic income and portable benefits that exist to help create stability That isn't available in good full-time work anymore Yeah, that's a great question. Um, and I think that that's what we're Really at the beginning of trying to figure out as a society. I mean universal basic income is one potential um answer to that as is A sense of sort of portable benefits that helps provide people with baseline health care fmla or whatever the thing is But there are private sector products that people are developing right now too to help smooth out intermittent and volatile income There are apps that you know different sort of worker advocacy guilds have developed to try to allow people to to Combine different sources of income into something that is a clearer And more stable approach to things there are sort of Social and community based services that are important in helping shepherd people through the job training process That are enormously helpful in the outcome and that really you know when you sort of wrap in the holistic Helping somebody train and helping them with soft skills and helping them Understand how to get transportation and child care like those things all contribute to that kind of stability What i'm talking about isn't necessarily Stability of just a job that sort of prescribes all the things for you It's all the different ways that we need to To transition to in a new economy that help provide the kind of stability that a job used to provide itself That doesn't anymore And I should be clear I'm actually i'm not a libertarian. I'm actually in favor of a lot of universal benefits I just don't think it's a solution to the problem. We're discussing right now Um having said that Rather than give specific examples I think there are certainly some things it needs to have These these solutions need to have in common and they're largely about not dumping all of these externalities Right on the head of the individual and say It's your job, you know, you need to upscale You need to take care of all of the the details of your life You know, maybe we're here for a job or a gig when you're ready Uh with realizing that that very short term, you know share maximizing attitude is actually Doing a real long term harm to a variety of things including the the job market that you're looking into You know, we there are these funny dynamics. We see over and over again about saying, hey, you know There are not enough let's come back to the programmer thing, but in a different vein here There are not enough programmers. We need more high-skill programmers. There's this constant hunger for high-end talent in the bay area um Yet I marry that with the fact that there is a constant hunger for jobs amongst programmers in the bay area So what's going on? Uh that there are not enough people qualified for the jobs Amongst the the huge number of qualified people that already exist And one thing I would contend is it's not whether you know python or java that matters It's these other things we've been talking about and if you don't have it Then we pick up on that another is Stanford and MIT only turn out so many employees or students And really let's be blunt a lot of first line Filtering for recruiters is do you have that pedigree? So, you know a transformation in how we value people in a really broad sense And I don't know, you know, this could feel like a call for a lot of government intervention Uh, I would love to see something lighter weight You know, I don't think for example that Blockchain is the end all be all but there are some interesting new trends in distributed trust networks and things like this that Hey, is it possible for there to be something? You know on which our social capital can get exchanged in a meaningful way That living your life sort of in the right way actually In a sense paid for itself I'm not certain what these are all I know is that whatever the existing institutions are they need to start moving more quickly than they are Right, right. So so John, we've had this conversation. So and I think we're at the point where we're gonna have to wrap up Um, but um, just really quickly for the group So first off, um, I obviously universal basic income is the right answer to the wrong question The question is not that we need to basically figure out how to help people who are all Disrupted by robots and software taking their jobs. The real question is should any human being go without food on their table or a roof over their head? That's the question. That's the one to answer So think worrying about some dystopian future where we have to sort of come up with these constructs Um, the the reason the reason we have this conversation so many times to sort of jump to this endpoint is um, What I call high tech dancing in the end zone So you know football references so so in Silicon Valley people just sort of basically assume Robots and software take everything or the automation takes everything. So we have to jump to This this future where we can't and we have a failure of imagination We can't envision what all that work people are going to do is and so At scale it matters on an individual basis It matters less because what really needs what each individual needs to have is agency So they're going to either find or create meaningful compensated work for themselves in the future And so that there are strategies, you know as john and I have discussed that that are ways to distribute capital more effectively Then the way we do it now especially with startups, which is a venture capitalist and a couple of founders make a ton of money And nobody else Benefits no uber drivers has stock in uber unless they bought it themselves And so there's there's a variety of strategies to think about in terms of ways we recalibrate value That is distributed in in more effective ways to build the kind of economic benefit that we have and impact capital is Is one of those it just has to have a different set of intentions Then the way a lot of capital and organizations are are currently calibrated So I think we're out of time maybe one last question one last question Introduce yourself, please. Thank you so much. Uh, my name is quaku. Oh say Uh, I run cooperative capital. I'd love to bug you guys later But uh my question is three part and I'll try to be swift with it. Okay. Yeah, try to keep it as tight as you can So the first question is um, you mentioned earlier that there was hard data that you had Supporting purpose and the benefit of that could you tell us where we might be able to find some of the good research that you've You've come across with that The second question is um, what are the things that you guys are currently working on? Like your biggest effort and then the third is like What is the way that anyone in this room? That maybe wants to assist you all in any way Would be able to tap in and plug into what you're doing to help assist your efforts You make this a lightning round thing and you guys want to just answer real quick So I know you got to talk about the data thing, but do you want to talk about efforts and About shift labs and assisting Very quickly. So next steps on shift shift labs are to go And take the national level conversation about what the future of work looks like To specific communities and cities around the country and say What what kind of future would you like to have in your city and types of jobs that you would like to see here And then connect all the different players in that community Everything from the business community to the workforce development to the schools community colleges everything that that is part of the community of Developing new opportunities for people and connecting those pieces together to to look at that as a holistic thing Then what action steps people can take or I think like if you Thinking both carefully yourself about how to Transition and augment your skills and and sort of be proactive in your own life and then I thought that Vivian you had a great point that the community of people that you're around That's a changeable thing and inspiring creativity and inspiring Sort of new thinking in the people that you're around whether it's your kids or your co-workers or whatever Is it is a helpful thing that everybody can do Okay, so some specific Excitable stuff the easiest thing for me to say in the moment is go to socos learning So socos is spelled up there socos learning calm We have a section with a whole bunch of research links our research others research I referenced a PNAS paper it has a title of something like health wealth and well-being They did research on 8500 people in the uk For that so you might be able to use that enough to find that particular link But if you look in our stuff, you'll find a bunch on purpose So two really quick things pure data side working on a big project now with Accenture I get to be a mad scientist and just use the data on 425,000 people to do whatever the hell I want to do with it What we're working on is something called employee lifetime value Can we actually measure informally without Without annual 360s or surveys or assessments how someone is contributing to the organization Including all of those informal soft emotional labor impacts Um and then present it back out and some of the initial stuff is really exciting To someone like me because you see things like women are Overwhelmingly systematically undervalued but actually more accurately Collaborative leaders are overwhelmingly systematically undervalued compared to hierarchical leaders. So that's that's a very tangible for example Lots of math lots of complicated stuff. It's I love doing that sort of thing. Um The other oh, I was going to mention one other thing uh to finish with Well, we do a lot of education work And and it's pretty fundamental to who we are and and where we focus and one of the aspects that's another mirror between education and work Comes from behavioral economics. It has the boring title of belief-based utility But it boils down to this the belief that your hard work will pay off Why do people want sure things? Why do they make these choices towards sort of a more static guaranteed? because of a very Genuine lifelong learn lesson that Yes, I am in theory qualified to do that thing But I don't actually believe it's going to pay off in my life. We see this In Underrepresented students getting full scholarships to top universities and then not taking them You see it in women dropping out of executive ranks. I think this is the defining characteristic there You see it again and again and again People's Sensitivity to risk it does vary in the population, but it's actually uncorrelated with these these decisions It's not that you're sensitive to risk. You actually just don't think there there's not risk here It will not pay off if we could change that At scale across broad swaths of the population Um, you would see massive changes In particularly in targeted populations, but when I talk about targeted populations I'm talking about the vast majority of the world's population. So this is my big wish list thing so just really briefly so um I want to thank my guests. So, uh, we have an initiative called fulcrum You can email me. Um, uh, try to see I don't know if we can bring up the last slide But um, you can email me at gbolls at gmail.com or stalk me on linkedin and mention socap But we've an initiative called fulcrum. And so we kind of think of it as our as our next socap We're bringing together a network of networks Wide-ranger stakeholders to focus on strategies at the layers that I was talking about individuals organizations communities and countries And uh, so we're at the the front end of bringing a range of stakeholders together We're going to do a series of convenings. Um, and we see it You know tremendous opportunity to be able to help cross fertilize between amazing initiatives Uh that are out there that are focused on this arena because it's such a huge ocean That that uh, you know, we're all trying to boil Uh, but we think we think that it's these attractable problems We think that we can actually if I liken it to global warming if we don't do something We're going to get the dystopian future. So we need to get active. We need to pick, you know, um as christ was saying that what part of The the elephant we each want to focus on and just coordinate our efforts a little bit better So anyway, please thank my guests. Thank you all for your attention and do around for a few minutes Awesome