RenAIssance 2.0 - Part 1

Part 1: The Most Important Skills for the Future… and Nobody’s Talking About Them

We are currently seeing a surge of new types of jobs related to AI such as Prompt Engineer, AI Trainer, Algorithm Bias Auditor, Synthetic Data Engineer, among others but we are also seeing AI being incorporated into the workplace and even beginning to replace existing knowledge worker roles. New technologies such as AI are being seen as a way to uplift current output and increase performance. This is happening in several fields, from computer coding to consulting, architecture to marketing. These diverse fields have one common factor; they are clearly all examples of knowledge-based industries. It therefore makes sense that these industries are the first business sectors to directly begin to adopt the technology of the Age of Intelligence, productively in their businesses operations.

This is beginning to have knock on effects to the workforce in these sectors, but this is by no means restricted to ‘knowledge’ workers. Indeed, non-knowledge or service-based roles are also becoming ever more endangered. Autonomous driving is the focus of this trend and though it still may still be ahead in the future, its impact on economies and jobs will be huge, eventually making the ability to drive no longer a potential employment opportunity.

The Age of Intelligence is showing us that the old norms and processes will not be relevant, and to stay competitive workers will need to explore new types of learning, skills and abilities to stay valid. This transformation will require a huge shift in society as such upheaval will not only have impact on the world of work but ultimately will transform our society. This is because the economic impacts of technology on work and working patterns has always had an associated social impact.

Haven’t we’ve been here before…

Though we are currently going through this major technological transformation, it should be remembered that such transformations are not entirely new. In fact, there have been many such transformations in the economy throughout history.

The Industrial Revolution was one such dramatic, highly transformational change (which the Age of Intelligence will probably be on a par with, in regards to overall impact), but there have been others, more recently such as the Information Age and the rise of the Smartphone Era within it. These various transformations had numerous impacts on the workforces of their times. In many ways one can see a job that is created in one age, directly transformed or removed in the next era.

A sample of some of the employment roles that have been transformed or replaced during various technological ages.

But one thing is clear, though there are undoubtably winners and losers in each of these transformations, on the whole they have often elevated overall human living conditions massively and allowed people to lead better lives accordingly.

During the industrial revolution factory jobs drove urbanisation, which allowed cities to grow and to develop the necessary infrastructure (railways, sanitation, etc) to support them. The spread of computers and the internet democratised information in the Information Age. It allowed knowledge to flourish and research to grow at an unprecedented scale. In turn this enabled globalization and new digital industries to appear. While the smartphone age has allowed connectivity and access to services anytime, anywhere. It has also given individuals more agency in terms of social interactions, media engagement and commerce than ever before.

So as these transformations have taken place, they have also unlocked new opportunities for society with the added benefit of helping to raise human living standards. In fact, seen in this light each step could only take place once the last had elevated society to an overall level of development that allowed it to progress.

What might be new during the Age of Intelligence is that as a society we may have to evolve in completely new ways to be competitive, so rather than the gradual evolution during the previous ages we may be looking at a drastic sea change in terms of the skills and abilities that we need to succeed.

Learning from the Past

Another such drastic change in working patterns was the shift away from manufacturing to the services-based economy that has taken place in the UK over the last 60 years or so.

The historic shift in secondary versus tertiary employment as a percentage of total UK employment.

This policy has had a dramatic effect on certain parts of the country, particularly those that had been strongly reliant on manufacturing. Some communities and places are still feeling these effects today, through high unemployment, the rise of gig economy, low-wage service jobs and the loss of industrial cultural pride.

The shift towards from secondary employment towards tertiary service/knowledge-based work was particularly challenging for industrial or manufacturing workers. These jobs typically relied on what I call ‘hand’ learning (practically applied skills that utilize the efficient use of physical labour and manual dexterity) and typically those workers often lacked the qualifications needed for service roles. Service based jobs typically utilise ‘book’ learning (theoretical skills that may not need practical world outcomes/products but can be carried out abstractly) and are often based on a university level of education, meaning that factory workers could not simply transfer their skills across.

This fundamental difference in approach for skills acquisition and learning between each the secondary and tertiary sectors effectively means that we have a situation where even though technology and policy are changing, sometimes at a rapid pace, the abilities and skills of people do not change overnight. This mismatch often leads to resistance and unrest, no matter the era or the age. Usually, this resistance comes from the skilled workers (e.g. the Swing Riots, or the Luddites), whose expertise took years to develop and grow, these are the workers who see the new technology as a direct threat and competition to their livelihoods and are thus concerned about what the future holds. These skilled groups have often been left to sort it out for themselves, often facing the proverbial scrapheap, while the rest of society looks away and reaps the benefits of the new age.

Taking the shift from secondary employment to a tertiary based employment economy as an example, we can see that this laissez-faire strategy has been hugely unsuccessful and wasteful of human capital. As an approach to the impact, we are facing in the Intelligence age, both technological and social, it is safe to say that such a strategy is totally inadequate to deal with the potential changes and upheavals that will be caused.

So, to learn from the mistakes of the past to and avoid negative human impact, as well as potential unwanted political and social upheaval we need to plan a fair equitable transition for all. Rather than leaving it to chance or blind luck, we need to create an environment where this transition can occur in a measured and mannered way. A strategy for transition so that we can ensure that human living conditions are an integral part of the transformation equation we utilise, and that we allow time for people to grow the right skills and abilities.

Each new wave of technology transforms the job market faster and with less lead time for adaptation so having a clear strategy in place will be even more vital during the Age of Intelligence as we will need skills and abilities that go above and beyond what we have currently equipped society with. If not addressed with a clear strategy certain aspects of the transition could have detrimental effect on society that goes far beyond how the economy works and instead instils itself in the people and places we call home, as we have seen before during the shift from secondary to tertiary employment.

The Deluge of Data

How should we be readying society for this transition? The most obvious and visible change between the information and intelligence ages is the ubiquity of data. During the information age data was restricted and controlled, its creation was a time-consuming process and often needed skilled works to produce it. This is no longer the case, and we are now living in a world where data is everywhere and being generated on an unprecedented scale every minute of every day. Complex content is being created in tandem with AI, sometimes even negating the need for human skilled expertise or knowledge during the process.

This means that rather than being gatekeeps of data, as per the Information Age, we instead need to hear through the noise, ultimately finding the right and relevant data in the most effective, efficient and timely manner. It also means essentially moving away from the role of actual production of information and content and towards oversight, prompting, and managing information.

These two aspects mean that we must be more strategically focused and look at ways in which we combine and recombine data in new and novel ways, investigate how we produce and create information, so that we can interpret it in new ways but also generate insights and correlations, that would not have been possible during the Information age.

These are new skills and methodologies that currently doesn’t exist at scale within society at large, but they will be required eventually by everybody because instead of fully replacing people, many of these AI-driven jobs will transform what the human does and our relationship with technology.

How can we achieve such a transformation, or be ahead of the curve when we still don’t know what the outcome will be?

We realistically can’t perfectly predict what jobs or industries/businesses will be created but what we can do is predict what skills and learning will be needed in the intelligence age. One thing for sure is it won’t be rote learning and the memorisation of facts, instead it will be creativity, ingenuity, collaboration and strategic thinking that will be the skills in demand.

Such a dramatic shift in skills means re-examining not only our current workforce and their abilities but also re-examining the foundation of our very education process and asking the question, ‘are we realistically the equipping the next generations with the tools and skills to succeed in the Intelligence Age?’

The Impact of Intelligence on Education

Our education system has been developed over the last 150 years or so, to meet the labour market demands of the time. At the start of compulsory education, the typical jobs, required people who could read instructions, follow timetables, and handle basic arithmetic. Typical roles were, factory workers, miners, clerks and domestic workers, and they required literacy and numeracy. This drove the emphasis in education towards providing basic literacy and numeracy for the masses, and was essentially the foundation of the famous three Rs (Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic) that still forms a significant pillar of our education system today.

Since the Victorian era the education system has adapted to the largely clerical and professional roles required post WWII and then during the 80s towards delivering workers equipped for the tertiary, service-based economy. This means that our education systems reflect the 20th-century economic goals of producing individual workers who can pass tests, follow rules, and specialize in ever more narrow fields.

These final requirements through useful during the Information Age are unlikely to be the keys to success during the information age. Now it is not just the traditional three Rs we need to teach, we also need to include skills that endure no matter the situation, environment or technological revolution that happens to come along.

The three Cs

The three Cs are a series of meta-skills. Skills that provide benefits that go beyond a single aspect of employment and instead are applicable in a variety of way, not just to working life but also to personal, emotional and cultural life as well. By acquiring these meta-skills, workers would have an adaptable skillset that would be useful no matter the sector, field or industry, unlike the shift from secondary to tertiary based economies which.

I believe that these meta skills are:

Critical Thinking, Collaboration & Curiosity

The three Cs - meta-skills that will be required in the Age of Intelligence.

Critical thinking

When data and information is no longer a scarce resource it will often be the ability to determine what is ‘good’ data versus what is ‘bad’ or potentially malicious data that will determine success.

Critical thinking will become a vital tool in our skill set during the Age of Intelligence as it gives us the ability to analyse sources, question received information, understand its validity or biases. In turn having this as a foundation to work upon gives us the potential to make assessments, judgments and interpretations from various data sets to create new insights. Critical thinking also gives us the ability to apply reasoning and logic to novel situations or environments.

Collaboration

Collaboration and its equally important corollary, communication, are some of the most powerful skills we can learn in life. The workplace of the future will need people who can work well with others. It will need people who can collaborate and communicate effectively with each other but also increasingly with technology as well. The rise of Agents and their growing utilisation in the workforce, will mean that AI acts as a teammate and will drive new types of collaboration that is not just human-to-human, but human-to-machine.

Collaboration essentially allows us to network our minds with each other or with technology to create results that lie outside the realms of our capability as single entities. This is particularly useful for complex and demanding tasks where effective team work often outperforms individual results.

The difficult problems of today, climate change, global trade, growing inequality, are multifaceted issues that are too complex to be solved by one person’s expertise alone, they need collaborative approaches, in addition to this they typically require multidisciplinary knowledge, that once again reinforces the power of collaboration. Such problems will increasingly lead to similar collaborative approaches through all aspects of work as the results will far outshine those who ‘go it alone’.

Fostering collaboration and building relationships through communication also helps to build a sense of community and shared responsibility that can also help to reduce loneliness and help nurture a sense of shared place in our communities.

Curiosity

Curiosity is often overlooked, especially when compared to critical thinking or collaboration, but ultimately, I think that it is the most valuable aspect and is in fact the engine that drives both to success.

Curiosity pushes the eternal ‘why?’ question, and the everlasting ‘what if?’ scenarios. Curiosity is the key to unlocking creativity, as it opens the door to imagining or exploring new ways of thinking, seeing the word or wondering what happens if something everyday and mundane is just a little different. Every innovation, every discovering and every scientific breakthrough that exists today started because someone, somewhere got curios and asked a question.

It is the foundation and fuel for a successful career but also a resilient and adaptable one, that can be sustained over a lifetime. Curious workers are more flexible and likely to explore new skills and opportunities when industries change or go through technological upheaval.

The three Cs form a powerful skill triangle that gets more valuable as routine, repetitive work becomes increasingly automated. In addition to this the three Cs also have the secondary impact of helping to nurture engaged, informed and responsible citizens that are actively engaged in their communities.

Decision-making Triangle formed of the three Cs.

How the three Cs drive solutions to an innovation scenario.

Skills like typing or operating machines have come and gone with each industrial wave, but the three 3Cs are meta-skills that will last a lifetime because they instil the ability to learn how to learn, question assumptions, be adaptive, be creative and work with others. Creating an education system that teaches these skills will be transformational on our workforce but also on society.

A New World of Possibilities

The recognition and valuing of all human creativity and ingenuity has never been a possible or achievable previously, but it could be feasible during the Intelligence Age. This means a whole new world of possibilities can erupt not just from certain locations but from anywhere. The concept that the more people are actively engaged in fostering their curiosity and exploring their unique creativity, passion and skills than has ever been physically possible in history before will make our society all the richer for it. Such an unleashing of human creativity and ingenuity will generate new economies, professions and process that we could never have dreamed of. It transforms the concept of simple, static jobs into unique careers that grow and adapt with a person over a lifetime.

This could also mean it is easier to change career mid-stream, focus on other aspects or try something new because there isn’t just one job but instead a learning process of a lifetime that builds up the most unique and rewarding experiences and knowledge.

Could this transformation give us the capacity to ‘play’ with our careers, the opportunity to experiment and try different things because there isn’t the fear of failure or a wrong choice to be made? Could we become flexible vectors of employment or instead serial entrepreneurs?

Through these new technologies we can finally do away with jobs that are uninspiring, meaningless, monotonous and that waste valuable human potential and instead replace them with jobs that have meaning, impact, value and that celebrate human creativity, ingenuity, collaboration and innovation. These new careers will allow people from all walks of life express themselves in new and creative ways but also give meaning and purpose to their careers, thereby unleashing the potential of whole new demographics and people into a transformed world of work.

With the changes taking place in the Age of Intelligence, we can finally achieve this, but we are going to go have to against history and make sure that we transition everyone, so that we can all enjoy the benefits of technology. Creating a shared future for society that, once again raises the standard of living and the human condition to levels as yet unimagined.