The Robots Are Coming!

by Andres Oppenheimer

  As more companies look for workers with soft skills that allow them to constantly adapt to new technologies, the motivational gap is likely to grow. Many workers who don’t have the will or the discipline to expand their skills will lose their jobs, whereas those who have a passion or are constantly updating their skills through lifelong learning will fare much better in the job market. Self-motivation, along with education, will be the name of the game.

  A WORLD OF INDEPENDENT WORKERS AND “FLASH ORGANIZATIONS”

  Most of the jobs of the future won’t have a single fixed employer or a nine-to-five daily routine, like in the past. They’ll be independent jobs. Until recently, those of us who wanted to just work a few hours a day or a few months of the year—mothers of young children, for example, or retirees—had to be lucky enough to find an employer who was willing to allow us to do that. But today, thanks to websites like Upwork or Uber, any of us can find employers who are willing to hire people for flexible hours. And thanks to sales platforms like eBay or Etsy, any of us can become a self-employed salesperson and work whatever hours, days, or weeks we want.

  These websites allow us to connect with people we never had access to before. As we discussed in a previous chapter, algorithms allow for a rock band from South Korea to find a huge fan base in Chile and perform sellout concerts there. In much the same way, sellers on eBay or Etsy can find out where the greatest demand for their products is and even what reviews other sellers have given to potential customers. The scope of our market is not our neighborhood, but the entire world.

  The new digital economy is also giving rise to so-called part-time companies, modeled after Hollywood movie productions, which are created for a specific project and then dissolved. In Hollywood, producers, directors, writers, actors, costume designers, publicists, and other professionals come together to make a film that is sometimes worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and then they go their separate ways once the movie is completed. These sorts of companies used to be rare outside the film industry because the costs of setting up a working structure—including hiring and training new employees—were prohibitive. But with websites like Upwork.com and Freelance.com, which allow entrepreneurs to hire independent contractors from anywhere in the world, it is becoming much easier—and cheaper—to create what some are already calling flash organizations.

  Business Talent Group, for example, brings together teams of independent experts to tackle specific projects in the pharmaceutical industry. Much like in the movie industry, when a pharmaceutical company launches a new drug, Business Talent Group brings together part-time public relations specialists, marketing experts, independent journalists, publicists, pollsters, and lawyers to launch the new product. “We’re the producers,” Jody Miller, one of the cofounders of the Business Talent Group, says. “We understand how to evaluate talent, pick the team.”

  Two Stanford University professors, Melissa Valentine and Michael Bernstein, have created the website Foundry.com, where the process of creating a flash organization can be done entirely online without the need for a single phone call. According to The New York Times, “There is some evidence that the corporate world, which has spent decades outsourcing work to contractors and consulting firms, is embracing temporary organizations” as a way to eliminate headhunters and middlemen and cut costs.

  TODAY’S CHILDREN WILL BE WORKING IN JOBS THAT DON’T EXIST

  “Sixty-five percent of children entering grade school this year will end up working in careers that haven’t even been invented yet,” wrote Cathy Davidson, professor of cultural history and technology, in her 2011 book Now You See It. Indeed, a child who was in elementary school in the early 1990s could not have anticipated ending up working as an iPhone app programmer, or a social media administrator for Facebook or Twitter, since neither the iPhone nor Facebook nor Twitter existed at the time. The iPhone was released in 2007, Facebook was born in 2004, and Twitter debuted in 2006. Today tens of millions of people designing websites or buying or selling things online are working at jobs that didn’t exist when they were young. And with exponential technological acceleration, this will happen increasingly often in the future.

  The big question, then, is what to teach our children so that they can acquire useful skills for the job market. It has become commonplace to say that it won’t matter what you know—it’s all available in your Google search engine or in your virtual assistant’s memory—but what you do with that knowledge. But what does that mean in practical terms? Among other things, it means that schools will have to help children find their passion and teach them soft skills such as creativity, empathy, teamwork, and communication abilities, so they can turn knowledge into productive work.

  Finland, a nation that always ranks at the top in international student tests, is changing its school curricula. Starting in 2020, it will be replacing traditional subjects with new ones that emphasize four key competencies: communication, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration. In an automated world, where most people will be working independently either as contractors or entrepreneurs, these skills will be much more important than memorizing what year Columbus arrived in the Americas or who invented the printing press. The best-educated students will be those with the motivation and skills to reinvent themselves every so often so as not to be left behind in the wake of technological changes.

  “FIND A BIG WAVE AND PUT YOUR SURFBOARD RIGHT ON TOP OF IT”

  One of the most interesting people I interviewed about what advice to give to young people was Benjamin Pring, the cofounder and managing director of the Center for the Future of Work. I called him up to ask him what specific career he would recommend young people to pursue, considering that most higher education institutions don’t have programs or degrees that emphasize soft skills. Pring, a fifty-five-year-old British-born philosopher turned technologist, has been spending much of his time looking into this issue in recent years.

  Pring majored in philosophy at Manchester University, and later became a technology consultant for Coopers & Lybrand and other big firms. He became a leading analyst of cloud computing in the late 1990s. In 2011, he joined Cognizant, a consulting company with more than 250,000 employees, and was later appointed director of the company’s think tank, the Center for the Future of Work. Perhaps because of its ties to Cognizant, the center is optimistic about the future of work, and predicts that, in coming years, many more jobs will be gained than lost.

  When I asked Pring what career advice he was giving to his two children, who were then aged fifteen and seventeen, the futurologist said, “I tell them the best thing they can do—and what I did—is to find a big wave and put your surfboard right on top of it. When I was twenty, back in the mid-1980s, I wasn’t really that focused on technology, but I knew that it was going to be a great big wave. I worked my way into it, and thirty-some years later, that’s still my career, because the tech industry has grown so enormously that it has created huge opportunities and taken my surfboard along with it. If you’re twenty now, find the big new waves of the future and go surf them.”

  So what will those great big waves of the future be? I asked. Pring specifically mentioned the fields of biotechnology, quantum computing, cybersecurity, virtual and augmented reality, space exploration, and—as life expectancy increases—preventive medicine and wellness programs that will improve people’s physical condition. He said he wasn’t too worried about his children not finding a place in the workforce of the future. “When you and I started working, we managed it, we figured it out. I don’t see why my fifteen-year-old and seventeen-year-old won’t be able to do the same. The world was changing a lot when we were young, and it continues to change today. The real trick is, as I said, finding those big waves. Don’t get into an industry that’s collapsing, don’t go into an area or a skill set that’s in decline.”

  At first Pring didn’t want to single out which industries are collaps
ing—perhaps for fear of antagonizing some Cognizant customers—but said that they are in plain sight, and include many of those that have been disrupted by the Internet. My interpretation was that he was referring, among others, to the retail, music, and newspaper industries.

  I told Pring that I was surprised that when he had mentioned the leading waves of the future, he had not included the sports and entertainment industries. Won’t people have more free time to watch movies or read poetry or go to yoga classes, which will give a boost to the entertainment industries? I asked him. Pring didn’t buy my argument. “Yes, people will have more time, and maybe people will be motivated to, as you say, read poetry and take yoga classes. That’s great, but I don’t think that’s going to be a source of income. The notion that there will be a renaissance in the monetization of poetry I think is unlikely,” he responded.

  Pring cited an oversupply of labor in the entertainment business and said much of that industry faces an ominous future. He cited music as an example. “The real issue at the heart of the music business is that the economics don’t work like they did back in the sixties, when there were probably a hundred rock and roll bands split between the U.S. and the UK, and they all sold a lot of records. But nowadays, there’s thousands and thousands of bands out there. Demand plateaued, and so—on a purely supply-and-demand basis—there’s more supply than demand. Unless you’re a superstar, the money that each individual band makes just isn’t there.” He added, “I think we’ve almost reached this point where we’ve had peak music, peak poetry. There’s just too much of the stuff, and I think that might be the danger with television in the next few years. There’s so much on television…and I think the Netflix boom at the moment is unsustainable.”

  MY RECIPE: FIND THE WAVES YOU LIKE, PICK ONE THAT HAS A FUTURE, AND SURF IT

  While I like Pring’s advice for young people to seek out the big waves of the future and surf them, I find his examples of careers of the future a bit too techno-centric. He is probably wrong to exclude the entertainment industries, which are likely to thrive as people have more free time thanks to automation, and as we live longer lives. But more important, young people should prioritize the passion factor or at least put it high on their list of considerations when choosing a career. Before identifying the waves of the future, we should look for the waves that we like the most.

  If I was to offer advice to a twenty-year-old, based on my own experience, I’d say that the first thing you should do is identify your passion. A person who isn’t passionate about his work is much less likely to succeed than someone who is, even it’s not in one of the industries of the future. Self-motivation will be the rule of the game in the new labor market, and it’s hard to be motivated if you are not doing something that you love. So my recipe would be “find the waves that you like, pick one that has a future, and surf it.”

  How does one identify a passion? One good barometer is doing something you enjoy, even if you’re not always entirely satisfied with the results. During my career, I’ve had the opportunity to interview thousands of famous people of all stripes, from presidents like Donald Trump and Barack Obama to megamillionaires like Bill Gates and Carlos Slim, to entertainers like Richard Gere and Shakira. And with a few notable exceptions—like Trump, an egomaniac who boasts about successes that in most cases exist only in his mind—the vast majority of these people are passionate about their work and yearn to do it better every day. Many of them are insecure overachievers: people whose self-doubts drive them to do their job better than anyone else. Perhaps the best yardstick for judging whether you are passionate about your work is to ask yourself whether you’re doing it perfectly. Only those who aren’t much interested in what they’re doing or the charlatans are fully satisfied with their work. The most talented people are never completely happy with what they have achieved.

  One of the most talented insecure overachievers I interviewed over the years was late Peruvian painter Fernando de Szyszlo, one of Latin America’s foremost artists. At more than ninety years of age, he was still painting frantically eight hours a day. Szyszlo had both fame and money. At the time of his death in 2017, his work was among the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico. During an interview on my TV show, I asked him what motivated him, at his age, to be preparing four exhibitions of new works in the United States, Europe, and Latin America in the coming year. He could be traveling the world receiving honorary degrees or do anything else he liked, I told him. So why is it that, in your nineties, you are still working so hard? I asked.

  Szyszlo looked straight into the camera and said, with a mixture of resignation and pride, “Because I still haven’t painted the perfect painting I have always dreamed about.” I thought it was a wonderful response. The same thing happens to most overachievers who dedicate themselves passionately to their job: they feel they are doing it well but have yet to do it perfectly. Perhaps it was not just coincidence or good genes that Szyszlo lived an active life until a fall down the stairs at his home resulted in his death at age ninety-two. He loved his work, and while the perfect painting never quite came, the quest for it kept him alive.

  WE MUST HAVE A PLAN B, A PLAN C, AND A PLAN D

  It’s good to encourage young people to choose the career they like the most, but what about middle-aged people whose jobs will be increasingly threatened by automation? The answer is, at least in part, the same as it would be for young people. First, they will have to be flexible and constantly update their skills. As MIT president Rafael Reif told me, universities will become lifelong learning centers. People should not walk away from them after graduation. And second, we will all have to have a Plan B, a Plan C, and a Plan D and be ready to reinvent ourselves both in and out the jobs we’re currently doing. Luckily, there are more opportunities to do that than ever.

  Many of us know someone over the age of fifty who, after having spent all his or her life working in an office, suddenly reinvented himself as a reiki instructor or independent salesperson. Others indulge in things they were never able to do before, like Richard Erde, a seventy-five-year-old New Yorker who had always loved opera and who—after working nearly three decades as a computer programmer—retired in 2005 and auditioned to become an extra at the Metropolitan Opera. “I’ve been on stage at the Met literally hundreds of times with world-famous singers, and I never sang a word,” the Brooklynite said, chuckling. “I’ve worn all kinds of costumes, from Buddhist priest to Russian soldier. It’s ecstatic at times, plus I get paid to do it.”

  More important, Internet platforms that connect buyers and sellers of goods and services have opened a world of new possibilities for middle-aged people exploring new occupations. Currently, only 15 percent of the roughly 162 million independent workers in the United States and Europe have used digital platforms like Upwork, Freelancer, Etsy, or other related sites to find customers for their products or services. But the “on demand” economy is growing daily. Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform where anyone can raise money to finance a creative endeavor, reported that in 2018 alone, over 138,000 projects had been funded by more than 14 million sponsors.

  At the time of this writing, one of the projects looking to raise funds on Kickstarter is a book titled The Photo History of the Black 95th Regiment in World War II, which has already raised nearly two thousand dollars in online preorders. Most of the soldiers in the 95th Regiment have passed away, but Stuart Bradley, the project’s creator, thought their descendants would want to have a book documenting the service of their grandparents, who made up one of the few black regiments in World War II. Another project on Kickstarter is Taller Nu, which offers fashionable shoes and purses designed and manufactured by female prisoners in Mexico, and which has topped 170 preorders. Many of the projects posted on these crowdfunding platforms are relatively modest, but not all of them: the Professor Einstein teaching
robot raised $850,000 in just a few weeks. And the Pebble smartwatch, promoted on Kickstarter as better than Apple’s smartwatch for having a seven-day battery life, raised over $20 million from 78,500 buyers.

  In the new digital economy, entrepreneurs no longer depend solely on bank loans, venture capitalists, or personal connections. Anyone with a good idea can offer it up to the world. And increasing numbers of people want to be their own boss. A recent survey showed that more than 70 percent of people who work independently, whether full-time or part-time, prefer working on their own to more traditional jobs. Respondents said that, in addition to having more flexible schedules, independent work gives them greater opportunities for growth. While automation will kill millions of jobs, more middle-aged people will be able to reinvent themselves as small-business owners and entrepreneurs in the expanding digital economy.

  THE WORLD IS GETTING BETTER, BUT TURBULENT TIMES LIE AHEAD

  When people ask me whether I’m a techno-optimist or a techno-pessimist, I try to avoid the cliché of saying I’m a techno-realist. I prefer to say that I’m pessimistic in the medium term, but optimistic in the long term. The world will continue getting better, but over the next two decades we are likely to go through turbulent times. Technological disruption will probably create significant unemployment among the lesser-educated segments of the population, and greater social inequality. Only those with the greatest motivation and best academic credentials or special skills will have access to the best jobs of the future. It will be hard for many of today’s cashiers, servers, and cabdrivers to reinvent themselves as data analysts or video game programmers. There will be a huge mass of socially marginalized, hopeless, and frustrated people. Some will spend their lives getting high on drugs or watching movies in their virtual reality viewers, while others may join growing anti-robotization protest movements. It will be a traumatic transition, and—in some cases—even a violent one.