I was recently interviewed for a Cover Story in the Canberra Times. Read the full story below.
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With technology changing at such a rapid rate, there are huge implications for everyday life – at work and at play. Michael Ruffles takes a look at what lies ahead for our schoolkids
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Smooth, sleek and metallic, the device is designed to fit perfectly in your hand. The best technology of its day, however, already seems quaint. Twist, and the ballpoint emerges, ready to strike paper and leave its impression.
While there is a certain degree of joy to be found in sitting, focusing on a page and hand- writing a letter, a diary entry, or a shopping list, 70 years after the first Biro patent, for many the process is frustratingly slow, inefficient or unnecessary for their work. This has been particularly so since the explosion of email, instant messages and chat rooms at the turn of the millennium, and the social networking phenomenon known as Web 2.0 that has come about in the past five years.
And given that change is almost certain to continue its accelerating pace, what comes about in the next decade is likely to make browsing the internet on your BlackBerry or opening documents on your iPhone seem just as tedious as putting pen to paper.
When children who have just started primary school think about their careers in 12 years time, whether entering the workforce in 2021 or preparing for university, they will be considering jobs that do not exist yet. Humans will always need food, clothes and shelter, but beyond that, what industries will there be? What tools will they need? Should they be learning HTML with their ABCs?
Sydney futurist Craig Rispin says many of the jobs around today will still exist, but many new ones will be created to solve problems we are yet to encounter, let alone fix.
"We’re identifying problems to solve all the time," he says. "By 2021, I see a trend [emerging]: the best jobs I think will be in the creative industries and medical technology, and with medical technology you can see that that’s being tied in with telecommunications now. I met the president of the Da Vinci company that makes a robot surgery system, a robot controlled by a doctor, and they can do it from the other side of the planet if they need to . . .
"What jobs emerge changes so rapidly now. I remember just a few years ago one of the top jobs was being an Oracle database manager, and that’s an entry-level position now. Things change very quickly. You’re not imagining it, change is getting faster, it’s getting more complicated."
Those who thrive on change will do well in the future; those who are resistant are "going to have a big problem". One of the changes Rispin predicts is a move away from valuing knowledge and information, in employment and society more generally, in favour of wisdom, creativity and innovation.
There is a fear that humans are already being overwhelmed with information, and the pipe will only become wider with the National Broadband Network and other telecommunications advances. The attention that communications policy now gets, such as the decision to split Telstra, exemplifies the importance it now has over our lives.
The switch to wireless is also on, with many consumers dumping their landlines in favour of mobile broadband and mobile phones, the newest of which are capable of surfing the internet at speeds home computers were incapable of only a few years ago. However, information overload is not something Rispin worries about, saying humans arealready adapting to having all the world’s knowledge on tap.
"In the future all of the world’s information will be available to us in milliseconds, like it is today with Google. The difference is we will be able to get that information and we won’t need a PC. We’ll just ask for it and an outsourced technology delivery system will deliver it. I don’t know if we’re going to plug a computer into our body or anything like that. We’ll have the equivalent of Google but we won’t have to sit down at a PC, it will just arrive."
This has implications for employment and education.
"If you knew that you had access to all the world’s information in a millisecond, would you learn about things? You wouldn’t, you would know you could get access to information instantly. In the future knowledge will be less valued compared to creativity and wisdom. Information will be cheap."
This is also why Rispin believes creative industries will be secure, as they cannot be outsourced or automated. There are already signs people value highly direct human contact above digital entertainment, and he cites the willingness to pay huge sums of money for rock and pop concerts after downloading the music for free.
"There’s not going to be a computer program that can create a new jazz piece, or a robot that’s going to do interior design any time soon. Writing is not going to be automated any time soon."
The speed of technological change has long been the subject of speculation and calculation, with the often wrongly cited Moore’s Law prominently referenced. Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore said in 1965 that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years (not that computers double in speed). While this has largely been correct, more recent Intel research suggests 2021 will be the year that law reaches a fundamental limit. A 2003 paper said transistors would not be able to shrink much smaller than 16 nanometers, a size likely reached in 2021, and other advances would need to be made.
Even if that proves to be true, there will still be advances in the way information is used and shared, and the speed at which humans communicate globally. Rispin is confident, based on the same field of mathematics as Moore’s Law, that high-definition, real-time communication screens and systems that currently cost $250,000 will be in homes and cost less than $1000 by 2021. And, like the most popular websites, the systems will be used for socialising – Facebook meets YouTube on a massive plasma.
"That will be a killer app[lication] because you’ll be able to see the people you want to be in contact with in full resolution," Rispin says. "These things were predicted many years ago, but now they’re really coming to fruition."
Melbourne futurist Peter Ellyard, author and former head of the Australian Commission for the Future, goes further in describing the types of jobs likely to emerge in the coming decades. He sees humanity as having evolved from modernism, when progress was valued above all else even with often disastrous consequences, to postmodernism, where useful old ways are kept and adapted along with innovation. He says there are signs the next step is an ideology that puts the planet first, which he has labelled "planetism".
"Postmodernism is a halfway house to a new paradigm I’m calling planetism," he says. "This is the whole new discussion of the 21st century, that the first allegiance is to the planet itself because we’re all members of the global community. We can now describe ourselves as people who are inventing ways to live on this planet forever, and that’s the 21st century economy and that’s the 21st century jobs.
"The analogy I use in my book is that we’ve gone from being cowboys to cosmonauts. We all now live on Spaceship Earth and we all need to learn to live and not stuff up this home of ours."
The 21st century billionaires will be those who work out how to usefully harness the sun’s energy, and create a "perpetual solar income" as well as those who can turn humanity’s voluminous waste into food, according to Ellyard. While he makes the predictions based on what society will value, and therefore will create markets of demand and industries to supply them, exactly what today’s primary school children will be doing when they enter the workforce is naturally less certain. He expects as much as 70 per cent of the job categories, products and services of the year 2029 are still to be invented.
"If the world is going to change so much that most of the things that we’re going to be doing in 20 years time have yet to be invented, that means all the kids are going to have to be flexible and job-makers not job-takers," he says.
"Kids themselves not only have to think about what kind of work they are going to do, but they have to prepare for a world where they are going to have four jobs in a lifetime and they’re going to have a career path that is quite different to what their parents had.
"You think about the kind of library that’s available to them compared to 25 years ago. Now you can go online and find out anything about anything, in detail and very sophisticated knowledge, a virtual library of the most awesome size. They can plug into the knowledge of some of the wisest people on the planet instantaneously, without ever having to go to the library."
Given the bulk of human knowledge can be accessed through pocket-sized devices, the challenge for businesses, and ultimately those who will run them and be employed by them in the future, is to be flexible and adaptive to new technologies while anticipating the future. Velteo is a new Australian company that helps businesses make the most of the latest technologies, such as the trend to online applications and cloud computing. Co-founder Con Georgiou is always reading about the latest trends and thinking ahead so clients can plan for the future as well as the present.
Of the reports he has seen lately, an increasing number suggest email will soon be gone, less useful perhaps than the pen and paper it is now upstaging.
"By the time my children, my daughter’s 13, by the time she hits employment age after uni, email will not be around," he says. "There will be things like wikis which enable real-time one-version collaboration on a document."
Georgiou anticipates a move to corporate social networking, not where employees update their colleagues on their coffee habits but rather tools to bank a business’s experience and knowledge to save staff from reinventing solutions to their, and clients’, problems.
"All of these platforms for social networking and social media that are available to the retail consumer, to the average person, is more and more becoming a reality internally in an organisation. A lot of organisations are opening up internal blogs, internal wikis, internal forums and internal Q&A platforms. What that does is empower employees with information at their fingertips, more self-service."
Citing an example of someone in Sydney taking 70 per cent of a French colleague’s work and adjusting it to the local context, Georgiou explains these tools will improve efficiency, productivity and ultimately better relationships with customers. Any company that uses such networking tools internally would also be likely to use them to engage with customers and develop online relationships. This would allow companies to be more in tune with their market, and be better able to fulfil customers’ wishes.
Georgiou thinks the jobs are trending towards the freelance, with independent people coming together for specific projects then disbanding to find their next employment. Building a brand and reputation for themselves will be more important to the next generation than working for "that big old company my dad worked for for 25 years and got the gold watch".
The generation growing up in a rich social media environment will adapt to this change naturally. But will being online constantly, with endless information constantly at hand, diminish other aspects of our humanity?
"I know there are opinions out there that there’s a cost to it, or a tax to it, but I actually don’t agree," Georgiou says. "I never cease to be amazed by humankind’s ability to adapt. I’m 41 now but I grew up with a PC from when I was 13, and I thank my lucky stars because I understand the language. Our kids don’t know any different. They do know, deep in their hearts, there’s a difference between online communication and face-to-face communication. As much as we fear that having 1000 Facebook friends will replace what true friendship is, they all know the difference."
SOURCE: The Canberra Times (Forum pages 4 & 5) - 26 September 2009.
Monday, May 31, 2010 at 1:40 PM 
I was recently interviewed by the UTS Radio Station along with Glenys McLaughlin about looking into the crystal ball for a living. Later in the conversation we were joined by digital artist and designer Ian Gwilt who is working on a project to bring the future of mobile technology - augmented reality - to the UTS campus.
