Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: future of work

  • Breaking the ennui – thoughts on new projects

    Breaking the ennui – thoughts on new projects

    To snap myself out of the current ennui that has swamped me, I’ve a few ideas for a crowdfunded project. I’m interested in what people think of them, the first two are Australian focused while the others are more international.

    All five of them revolve around the changing global economy and its effects upon societies, communities and individuals.

    These are the ideas and I’d be delighted to hear some thoughts on them.

    True Australian stories

    Australia is in a time of transition. The upcoming Federal election may well determine the nation’s development over the next half century.

    The idea of this project is to get out into the regions and suburbs which aren’t being covered – if not outright ignored – by the mainstream media and talk to the communities, people and businesses about how their worlds are changing and what they are doing to deal with it.

    Re-inventing Australia

    After a quarter century of continuous growth Australia has to make decisions on where its economy goes next. Successive governments have identified resources, agriculture, tourism, finance and education as the ‘five pillars’ of the economy.

    This project talks to the people trying to make Australia’s five pillars work along with looking at those trying to build alternatives.

    The future workforce

    How does the global future workforce look? Will we be all contractors for Uber or Upwork or are there other models developing around the world.

    What does the next phase of the industrial revolution look like for workers in both the developed and emerging economies? This idea is inspired Sebastião Salgado’s work.

    The Second City project

    Every major city has a less prosperous neighbour – Sydney and Newcastle, Melbourne and Geelong, London and Birmingham, Beijing and Qingdao, San Francisco and Oakland are examples.

    How are those second cities faring in a global economy that’s increasing the wealth of the rich? What are the leaders of those communities doing to reposition themselves.

    The next Silicon Valleys

    While we’re focused on today’s global centres like California’s Bay Area, London and Shanghai there are other emerging industrial centres that will be the next generation’s Silicon Valleys. Who are they and what do they look like?

    I’d be delighted to hear readers’ thoughts on these projects and any other ideas for similar ventures.

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  • Small business in the future workforce

    Small business in the future workforce

    While the discussion of the workforce of the future focuses, quite rightly, on the role of workers how employers and businesses fit into a changed economy is important as well.

    For businesses, the future of work affects not just the staff they employ but also the markets they cater for as those workers are also their customers. This is even truer for small businesses catering for local markets.

    The Committee for Economic Development Australia (CEDA) report issued last week describes some of those shifts in the economy and they are as important to businesses as workers.

    Where the money is

    The key thing from the report is that some communities are going to be more seriously affected by automation than others. The map of Australia that accompanied the CEDA report showing the likelihood of jobs being lost in across the nation underscores that imbalance.

    australia-likelihood-of-losing-jobs-to-automation

    In those areas expecting large disclocation, business is about to get tougher as workers find their skills are no longer valuable in the face of automation.

    Similarly, if local industries are becoming more automated then businesses servicing those industries are also going to need the skills to meet their customers’ more advanced needs.

    Consumer facing risks

    So small businesses in those districts of great disruption have to consider their markets; if they are consumer facing then their customer base could be shrinking while if they cater to other businesses then capital investment and finding skills in the new technologies are going to be required.

    Even there, the picture is cloudy as upstream industries will be affected. A town that serves as an agricultural centre, for example, will see smarter farms using less labor.

    In that town, those businesses servicing other businesses that serve local consumers will see their market getting thinner while those servicing the smarter farms and processors will need to buy new equipment and find workers with the skills to operate it.

    This isn’t a new phenomenon, it describes what’s happened to rural communities around the developed world as farming became industrialised through the Twentieth Century and the process is continuing as combines become self driving and automation replaces a lot of tasks currently done by labourers or manually operated machines.

    Challenging the commuter belt

    The question though is not just for rural enterprises, it applies for businesses everywhere as the workforce changes. It may well be the areas affected the most are commuter belt suburbs where white collar workers are displaced by artificial intelligence and algorithms creating problems for the local economy that’s based on services the needs of those middle class households.

    It’s difficult to say for sure and that’s why the CEDA measures are based upon probability. For business owners and managers though, they’ll need to watch shifts in their marketplaces closely and watch for the opportunities that will undoubtedly arise from a changing economy.

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  • Creating a new class of worker

    Creating a new class of worker

    With the ‘sharing economy’ becoming more widespread and freelance workers possibly being the norm in the future, the question of how are they defined arises.

    The simple answer is they become contractors after the California Labor Commission ruled for an Uber driver in a dispute over expenses incurred on the job. However it’s still possible that the level of control many of these services exert over workers may see many defined as employees.

    For the ‘sharing economy’, the definition is important as the business model depends on shifting all the costs onto the contractors and customers. The service, like Uber and AirBnB, is only there ostensibly as a platform to match buyers and sellers.

    Buzzfeed’s Caroline O’Connor suggests a third definition of worker, a ‘dependent contractor’. Under this category contractors would receive social security benefits, insurance and other features of permanent employment with the flexibility of being on call.

    In many ways O’Connor’s suggestion is similar to the national insurance schemes of many European countries where workers contribute towards their eventual retirement or for the benefits they may receive should they be unfortunate to become sick or unemployed.

    While the suggestion is worthwhile, it’s still not hard to see how the ‘sharing economy’ companies would want to put their contractors in whatever category reduces their costs and risks.

    The discussion about workers’ protection and social security benefits needs to be had as we enter a period of economic change not dissimilar to the 1920s or late nineteenth Century where work patterns changed and there was substantial dislocation.

    As the 1920s saw the start of concepts like unemployment and sickness benefits, we will need new employment and social security concepts develop to cater for the new economy and modern workforce.

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  • A generation free of poverty and labor

    A generation free of poverty and labor

    How will the future workforce look? A report by Australia’s Committee for Economic Development seeks to give a picture of how employment might look at the end of next decade.

    Australia’s Future Workforce is a weighty tome covering the current structure of the nation’s economy, its trends and the factors affecting employment over the next two decades.

    The report makes it clear the economy will be very different observing 40 per cent of Australia’s workforce, more than five million people, is likely be replaced by automation over the next twenty years.

    In the opening chapter, Reshaping Work for the Future, Professor Lynda Gratton of the London Business School describes the share of the future workforce where roles are more specialised and automation increasingly takes over less complex jobs.

    An important aspect Professor Gratton also flags is the aging population which in a rapidly changing economy will require frequent retraining.

    From a technology perspective Professor Hugh Bradlow, the Chief Scientist of Telstra, suggests the workforce will be more mobile and employed in fields less amenable to computerisation involving skills like social intelligence, creative talents and social intelligence.

    Those without those skills are deeply at risk with Bradlow being the first in the report to cite the likelihood that two fifths of the workforce are at risk of losing their jobs.

    Bradlow concludes his analysis with the observation that if we work to satisfy our basic needs then machines looking after these requirements free up the workforce to address higher intellectual pursuits.

    Rethinking management

    Belinda Tee and Jessica Xu, both of IBM, agree with Bradlow that technologies like IBM Watson will help skilled workers like doctors and teachers deliver their services more efficiently.

    Xu and Tee suggest change in the workforce will need to start at the top with managers needing to enhance collaboration within the organisations and build diverse teams working on open data.

    A two speed economy

    How the effects are distributed across the workforce is probably one of the most important aspects of this report with a team from the soon to be abolished National ICT Australia mapping the regions that will be most affected by automation.

    The news for many of the country’s regions is not good with the survey finding workers in most areas have more than a fifty percent chance of losing their jobs to automation.

    NICTA’s bad news for the regions ties into a recent PwC report that found Australia’s economic power has been increasingly concentrated in the nation’s capital cities.

    A mixed future

    In many respects the CEDA report is disappointing, while it flags many of the issues facing today’s workforce and the forces shaping it, the survey doesn’t identify the industries and occupations likely to benefit.

    Despite not stating the growth sectors, the report’s overall view of the future workplace is optimistic as Telstra’s Hugh Bradlow says: “The change could result in a new generation free of poverty and the burden of labor, thereby unleashing the next wave of human innovation and creativity in directions we can never imagine.”

    This may be the case but the to achieve that will require, as the report later suggests, a new social compact.

    It’s building that new social compact which could be the greatest task ahead of us.

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  • Let the algorithm do the investing

    Let the algorithm do the investing

    Investment advisers could be the next occupation to face automation reports Bloomberg Business with the prediction two trillion dollars worth of investment funds could be managed by computers by the end of the decade.

    An important aspect of the change to computerised investment advice is the reduced fees that makes professional knowledge far cheaper and more accessible.

    The downside, as Bloomberg points out, is that there may be fewer investment advisers enjoying corporate hospitality and conventions in future so there may be other industries feeling the job losses too.

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