Hassan Rashidi, USA

PROFILE SUMMARY

Dr. Rashidi is an engineer. He provides seminars, keynotes, lectures, and insights on engineering and technology, product development, process improvement, manufacturing systems, technology selection, advanced manufacturing, nanotechnology, medical technology, lean manufacturing, automation and robotics industry, automotive industry, research and development, engineering education, engineering major and career knowledge, innovation, advanced technologies, academic and industrial projects.
He features advances, innovations, and trends in engineering and technology and their impact on people, society, and industries. He provides individuals, teams, educational institutions, and companies with knowledge and insights on how to benefit from these advances, innovations, and trends and how to stay relevant in this rapidly changing world.
Dr. Rashidi gives talks on how emerging and advanced technologies such as nanotechnology, 3D printing, robotic and automation are improving the quality of life, health, and environment.
He provides industries, engineers, entrepreneurs, and students with knowledge and insights on how to turn ideas into reality through product development process including research, idea generation, concept development, design, prototyping, and manufacturing. Also, he provides them with knowledge and insights on process improvement, opportunities for innovation, how to improve efficiency, and how to make things better.
Types of academic and industrial projects advised by Dr. Rashidi include manufacturing, automotive, nanotechnology, energy and environment, foods and agriculture, renewable energies, heating and cooling systems, logistics, personal transport devices, wearables, medical devices, machinery, autonomous machines, robotic and automation.
Dr. Rashidi was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He earned his PhD in Mechanical and Control Engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Dr.Rashidi@WiseMedTech.com

Solar Will Be ‘Sustainable’ in 2014

 

 

 

This is a good example of TechCast’s ability to forecast breakthroughs with accuracy. The following article and our forecast of solar power in 2010 proved remarkably prescient as solar did actually take off about 2015.

 

There are no shortage of headlines trumpeting various advances in the solar energy industry. Those have been adding up, and now the European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA) is reporting that the global capacity for solar has passed the 100GW line.

Germany still leads the way (thanks to government subsidies) but the American, Chinese and Japanese markets were the primary growth areas in 2012. China is expected to add 32GW over the next four years with America adding 27GW and 20GW each coming from Japan and Germany. According to the EPIA, the global capacity of solar is now on par with about 16 medium sized nuclear power plants, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts global capacity to exceed 200GW in less than five years. The IEA’s forecast is for cumulative, grid­connected photovoltaic capacity and doesn’t include concentrated solar power, which means total global capacity of solar should be even higher.

All of this is leading Deutsche Bank to forecast that the global solar market will move from subsidized to sustainable next year.

Thought Power

Using brain-computer interfaces, scientists have taught a monkey to “walk” a robot by simply thinking.  

Researchers at Duke University trained a monkey (Idoya) to walk on a treadmill, and electrodes were implanted in her brain to capture electronic signals. The signals were translated into computer instructions and sent via high-speed Internet to the lab in Kyoto, Japan, where the robot “Computational Brain” (CB) resides. The monkey could watch the robot on a large monitor and was instructed to control CB through her own walking motion. As Idoya walked, CB also walked at roughly the same pace with minor time delays. The lead scientist, Dr. Migeul Nicolelis, said “We have shown that you can carry brain signals across the planet to control devices in the time scale that a biological system works.”  

But that’s just the beginning. The researchers stopped the treadmill, leaving the monkey standing still and continuing to stare at the video of the robot. Whereas before Idoya was merely thinking about its own walking, now it was asked to make the robot walk using its thought alone.  For 3 minutes, Idoya “walked” the robot using sheer thought power. The team plans to demonstrate that human thought can operate an exoskeleton (robotic body suit).

TechCast was first to identify this exciting new technology and to define it as “Thought Power.” We forecast that intelligent brain-computer interfaces enabling people to communicate mentally with distant objects and people are likely to arrive commercially in about 1 decade.  

Technology Giveth and Technology Taketh

Uber’s disruption of the taxicab industry is the latest case in which IT “disintermediates” a business sector, driving out the middlemen and making huge profits. This article brings together a few of TechCast’s 130 international experts to analyze this economic upheaval and outline where it is going.

This is only a short essay, rather than the type of in-depth forecast we normally do. But it illustrates how our research method can provide the value of collective intelligence on almost anything.

 
Creating the Digital Economy

These economic upheavals caused by Uber, Airbnb, and a host of new ventures are now possible by harnessing the growing power of information technology (IT). The first mover, Uber in this case, creates a new communication system to automate some process, giving them an unbeatable competitive advantage. 

But the smashing success of Uber, has, in turn, attracted about a dozen competitors. Even cab drivers are building IT apps that offer the same flexibility in bringing together passengers and drivers. With the playing field leveled, what determines who succeeds and who fails? Will it be the first mover advantage of Uber? If it’s reputation and safety, cab drivers could come back fine. 

These industry transformations leave no question about it — IT is an irresistible force, one of the ultimate realities of nature, which is why controlling it confers great power. But this power is temporal and passes in time. A wave of tech disruption yields to a successive wave, and then another does the same again.  Film cameras were replaced by the digital camera, which were replaced by the smart phone. To put it in biblical terms, technology may giveth, but technology also taketh.

Here’s what some TechCast experts said:

Mark Sevening, Northrop Grumman Corporation  “Good point about how technology gives and takes.  In essence, it enables change and innovation, and those who stand still are left behind. 

Tom Abeles,  On-The-Horizon  “Both Uber and Airbnb found a market niche that grew so rapidly that even the standard participants such as cab drivers found that they could bypass the middle parties. It’s the same deal with e-insurance.”

Rupam Shrivastava, ePlanet Capital  “Both Airbnb and Uber are a direct result of the drive for market efficiency. The stock market went through this process in the â??50s, commodities in the â??70/80s, and derivatives in the â??90s. Retail made the change through eBay and Amazon, airline tickets through Expedia, and real estate through Zillow/Trulia in the early/mid 2000s. Now Uber is doing that in transportation and AirBnb is in home rentals.”                                  

Ken Harris,  Consilience “The automobile sales industry is being disrupted by Tesla.  Traditionally auto dealers have been the middle men between car buyers and manufacturers.  Tesla is upsetting that model by direct factory sales to car buyers, even successfully challenging state laws that actually mandate sales by dealers. But there are backlashes against these companies.  Uber drivers and Handybook cleaners don’t get employee benefits and have no control over their schedules; they are beginning to organize.  In addition, there are disasters waiting to happen that could become front page news.  What if an Airbnb renter turns someone’s home into a brothel or rents an apartment in a large building for the purpose of making it a terrorist target or using it as a terrorist base?”

Verne Wheelright, Personal Futures Network “Uber may be simply a forerunner to selfdriving cars.  As the technology becomes available and enabling legislation is in place, Uber may simply replace their drivers with self- driving machines. Reliable, automated door-todoor transportation will allow more people to get along with only one vehicle per family, and eventually, no owned vehicles.”                                       

Marcel Bullinga, Futurist & Trendwatcher  “Uber will not die as soon as self-driving cars arrive but become a platform for connecting people to machines (cabs). The cab driver can probably make more money than he does now â?? not by doing the driving but â?? by renting the self-driving car he owns.”

Robert Finkelstein,  Robotic Technology Inc  “The drivers for Uber and the Uber business model are temporary.  With the advent of driverless cars around 2020, a car owner could send the car out to make a living as a taxi or delivery vehicle. Uber might still provide a management service for the vehicle owners, or they might become independent, facilitated by software and communications providers.”                                                  

Olivier Adam,  5Deka Inc.  “Uber is more advanced than car sharing using ZipCars. Car sharing is a somewhat marginal phenomenon. It is not cheap and only slightly more flexible than ownership (most of them force you to bring the car back at a specific location, before a specific time). Imagine if you can press a button on your smartphone, a car shows up, brings you to your location and goes on to pick up another passenger. This is what Uber does, and a driverless car is a simpler version, reducing the costs and increasing even more the flexibility. Everyone would want their own private car, and they would want to avoid public transport. The Uber model of peak hour fares would then be key as there would be incentive for public transport use. When driverless cars become the norm, I predict the number of cars sold worldwide will be halved by 2025 (it has steadily been increasing up to now). Car fleet management then becomes a big source of employment, with individuals inspecting the cars and cleaning them up as needed. Car insurance companies disappear as the private ownership of vehicles is only done by the well-off as a sign of luxury.”

 
Economic Disruption is Everywhere

In addition to the many examples of disruption just noted above, there has been the passing of encyclopedias, travel agents, newspapers, and now possibly movie theaters

(Netflix). Which industry or profession is next? Medicine? Teaching? Law? And where is this economic transformation heading over the long-term?

Our TechCast experts see this happening everywhere:

Anamaria Beria, University of Maryland  “I think healthcare is next. We see everywhere an emphasis on virtual medicine, both from the policy and the insurance points of view. We also see more and more often a “pairing” between lifestyle and preventative medicine. I think the lifestyle-healthcare- finance axis is deeply connected and this is where IT can possibly disrupt the most. There are health tracking apps and studies based on “Big Data” regarding epidemics and the access to more information about healthcare, patients, doctors and research. I have also seen companies that are providing diagnostics and prescription online. But there are many situations where the doctor has to meet the patient face to face. This means that the evolution of virtual reality, robotics and IT, together, have the greatest power to disrupt the medicine industry. But we still have not understood the impact of these technologies on society and the social changes that come out of all this. So I believe the

21st century will belong to the social sciences.”                                            

Clem Bezold,  Institute for Alternative Futures  “I concur that health care will see significant disintermediation. One of my primary care scenarios for 2025 is “I Am My Own Medical Home.” This scenario considers how health care would interact with IBM’s “doc Watson,” digital health coaches, and increased personalization using genomics, epigenetics, zipcodeomics, and other Big Data. Education and legal services are other sectors where IT will make humans more productive or take over their jobs altogether â?? leading to higher unemployment.”

Dan Abelow,  Expandiverse  “A new book Medicine 2025 includes these examples of what is coming in healthcare automation:

  1. Patient zero: preventing a new pandemic
  2. Ground zero for medical emergencies: immediate diagnosis anywhere, anytime
  3. Digital medical coordination between organizations, including emergencies     
  4. Containing a lethal contagious disease, or bioterror attack, in an unexpected hot zone
  5. Delivering digital medical service to anyone, including under developed countries     
  6. Treating and curing infectious diseases at the source
  7. Bringing digital transformation inside the first world’s medical system
  8. Turning medical drugs into a “strategic stockpile” for treating diseases worldwide                         

Chadwick Seagraves,  North Carolina State University  “As both a librarian and IT professional, I see traditional libraries being forced to evolve and compete with technologies of all types.  The profession has had to focus on value added services and roles the library plays in addition to providing information.  Placing emphasis on being able to find “authoritative information” has been a focus in our profession for over a decade. Redefining library services to compete with the plethora of tools that replace a flesh and blood mediated experience has driven a massive development of applications and platforms for libraries to serve up deep web content that the average Googler has no idea exited.”                

Carlos Scheel, TEC de Monterrey  “I would say that Earth Sciences are next to be transformed. The planet has lost its resilience and is unable to recover its land, water, and air from the consequence of an irrational industrialization. Distinguished technologists must shift their efforts to finding solutions for drinkable water, soil recovery, clean air, equal food distribution, infectious decease.”                                                  

Govindaraj Subramani, PA Consulting Group  “A recent article in the Wall Street Journal quoted workers of on-demand services like Uber and Handy saying â??We are not robots.’ There are signs of rumbling discontent in the shared economy.”

Will TV Networks Be Next? Much the way major newspapers fell into decline when the web took over, signs point to something similar for the big TV NetworksSigns of the imminent decline is newspaper readership were visible years before the fortunes of the NY Times and other prosperous papers fell off a cliff about 2005. As people switched to the web for their news, selling stuff, and other forms of e­commerce, printing and distributing papers that consume forests of trees no longer made much sense. And the general nature of mass media could no longer serve the complex tastes of modern societies. Print newspapers will always fill an important niche, but big changes in consumer behavior always sweep away outmoded industries. Something similar seems likely to happen for TV Networks. With Smart TVentering the picture, people are increasingly choosing shows they want when they want them, avoiding paid commercials, finding movies and TV shows they prefer, and watching all this on PCs, tablets, smart phones, and other devices. And with good speech recognition, a la Siri, we will soon just talk to all these platforms. The U.S. cable TV industry lost more than 400,000 subscribers in the second quarter of 2012, according to a Sanford C. Bernstein estimate reported in the Wall Street Journal. The figures are fueling speculation that American homes are “cutting the cord” on cable TV in favor of free or cheap alternatives such as services from Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube. Our forecasts suggest it may take a few years for this profound shift in consumer behavior to reach mainstream. But it appears that TV is likely to suffer the same fate that befell newspapers when their business model collapsed.

 
The Value of Collective Intelligence

This simple article nicely illustrates the power of collective intelligence.

Starting with the few paragraphs outlined by the TechCast Team, our Global Brain Trust of experts quickly fleshed out this analysis with insightful points. The many examples of IT driven economic transformation in the quest for market efficiency. The temporary advantage of Uber being replaced by self-driving cars leased out by private owners. The likely transformation of healthcare, professions, libraries, and even the environment as next steps in this inevitable unfolding of a high-tech society based on invention.

 

TeleWork

TechCast expert Steve Lowe provides a report on TeleWork from the trenches. Steve is a consultant working out of London.

 

TechCast’s forecast makes it clear that the argument for teleworking seems a “no-brainer,” offering lower costs and greater agility than traditional on-site employment. Yet, there are important barriers to its adoption. I have seen many of them as a consultant to telecoms and tech companies and in corporate finance supporting tech start-ups. Here are some insights drawn from these years of experience:

By 2025, some 30 percent of employees in the industrialized nations are likely to be teleworking two to three days a week. If that estimate seems low, it is because fewer than half of today’s jobs are suitable for telework. Today at least, drivers must work on location. Ditto teachers, doctors, farmers, care givers, shop workers, uniformed personnel, and many others.

There are several more issues to consider as well:

Although it costs little to link a home-worker to the office in this digitized age, associated expenses can build up quickly. This is especially true if the job involves dealing with private commercial or third-party data.

Many employees in the industrialized world have broadband, but their homes may lack space or other facilities they need to telework effectively.

Most people enjoy being part of the team. Periods apart can erode this sense of belonging, and therefore worker satisfaction.

Traditional offices provide dedicated spaces for impromptu meetings, telemarketing, admin, training, and ideation. High-performing businesses use them to help optimize their performance. The ability to move among such spaces enriches the employee experience. Full-time teleworkers miss out.

Belonging and variety form the positive side of corporate life. Office politics and management structure can be the negative. People have a strong defensive wish to be where they can preempt any maneuvering that might harm their careers. Because of this, adopting telework often requires changes in corporate structure and culture. The net impact is that teleworking has tended to penetrate entire organizations, top-down or bottom-up.

Top-down situations are relatively uncommon. They tend to occur after senior management calls in consultants or systems houses to help implement Business Process Reengineering or “Lean” (continuous improvement) programs. Such implementations tend to have all the bells and whistles, including tailored virtual conferencing environments, structured training, and written protocols.

Bottom-up deployments often are ad-hoc mixes of free or cheap services. Unlike top-down programs, major long-term commitments are rare, and groups learn by doing.

Either approach can work well, depending on the company culture and employee buy-in.

The huge growth opportunity for teleworking is in servicing middle management: beneath the C-suite and above team managers. Improvements in cloud-based technologies and growing interest in collaborative tools and citizenship make this a good time to reap its rewards.

Yet, the best use of telework requires one more key innovation: a way to give middle managers the kind of agile, tailored support that basic ad-hoc services cannot. These services need provide security, tailored virtual environments, and user support, but without the high costs of today’s top-down implementations.

Imagine, for example, a team of 20 regional salespeople coming together for an hour-long virtual meeting. At $0.20 per minute each, the gross cost of their service will be just $240. It would take a huge number of meetings to cover the supplier’s development costs and overhead, but that massive scaling is now feasible. After a few years of frenzied activity, these services probably will come from just two or three dominant global suppliers.

The next big change will be in the teleworker’s location. Working from home can be great, particularly if you have an air-conditioned office and the discipline to maintain both good work and your health. However, many people find it physically and emotionally draining.

Since the dawn of digitization, people have talked of teleworking centers, where people could “touch down,” but these facilities have never become common. Today, shops are becoming vacant in communities from tiny hamlets to big cities. This offers a chance to revisit the idea of community-based teleworking. Many teleworkers could find this alternative very inviting.

Until recently, the capital cost of equipping such centers would have been enormous. Fiber broadband, today’s Wi-Fi, and users able to “tunnel” through this with their own secure networks, using their own devices, have made them practical. Are today’s coffee houses and flexible workspaces already serving this opportunity? Not quite.

New business models are required to deliver the drop-in flexibility of a Starbucks with the mix of task-focused facilities available in a small innovation center. Users must able to protect sensitive data, even when talking on a video or audio connection. They will want more screen space than they can be expected to carry. They will need the safe and ergonomic workspace any employer should provide.

One can imagine local authorities and businesses backing such workspaces, as they will help keep local high streets vibrant, reduce employee commuter miles, and help big employers operate more sustainably. Telework also will benefit the environment, the vitality of dormitory towns surrounding urban centers, and those employees who get to keep their jobs because they can work remotely. This appeal could make public workspaces important community centers.

One big market for them will be among self-employed “portfolio workers.” Large companies already use on-demand workers in growing numbers alongside their regular employees. By enhancing their “virtual proximity,” community workspaces could make portfolio workers still more attractive.

Better teleworking technologies also should benefit the rapidly growing number of nonemployees. Given reasonable procurement policies, the self-employed will be able to use them in agile, virtual teams, to compete better against big companies. Retirees also might find an opportunity to build a second career. If local authorities and agencies support telework, the unemployed and vulnerable should be able to feel part of a more inclusive society.

Telework is of course just one of many innovations now bringing change. Organizations, public and private, have a duty to embrace these developments and make tomorrow better than it might otherwise be. Innovations in telework are likely to be more enabling than most.

Gene Editing to Cure Cancer

After the discovery of CRISPR in bacteria, a cut and paste DNA system used to defend against foreign genetic sequences especially those inserted by viruses, researchers transformed the discovery into a tool called CRISPR/Cas9 that can make precise cuts in the genomes of other organisms as well.

To put this tool to good use, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a clinical trial where this gene editing technology would remove and alter human T cells that target foreign cells in cancer patients.

Since clinical trials of gene-editing therapies have already taken place and the ethical considerations have already been discussed, the researchers have cleared the first hurdle by winning unanimous approval from the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

The proposed two-year trial will treat 18 people with myeloma, sarcoma, or melanoma who have stopped responding to existing treatments at U Penn; the University of California, San Francisco; and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. For the next step, the researchers will need to obtain approval from the ethics review boards at their institutions and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

So far, the testing of the CRISPR/Cas9 system in lab animals has yielded mixed results and worked only on some cancers. However, the researchers have made improvements to the technology and will monitor immune responses and for any off-target cuts in genomes.

As Hank Greely, a Stanford law professor points out, whoever owns the therapies stand to make a lot of money. Currently there are potential financial conflicts of interest and issues with intellectual property. The Parker Institute, a foundation established by Facebook billionaire Sean Parker, is funding the trials. The trials will utilize methods based upon earlier work by Carl June of U Penn, which genetically modified cancer patients’ immune cells and would create a financial interest in the outcome.   

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, filed a patent application in 2012. Then, researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard filed a patent application under an expedited review program and were awarded the patent in April 2014. Until recently, the US awarded patents to those who could show that they were the first to invent, rather than the first to file. Then US switched to a first-to-file system, complicating things, and now proper licensing agreements have to be established.

Inequality

Throughout the industrialized world, the rich are getting richer and  the poor and middle class relatively poorer. This trend has accelerated in recent years and there is a broad consensus that severe income inequality undermines the stability of societies. Although tolerance for inequality varies from one country to another, depending on other factors that promote social cohesion, research shows that a crisis or social breakdown is near when the top income decile pockets 65 times as much of the country’s total household income as the bottom tenth. Many countries are at or approaching these dangerous levels of inequality. Worldwide, the wealth differential between the top and bottom tenths of society has long exceeded the level at which a social crisis would be inevitable. 

 
Growing Risk of Instability  

In advanced the economies over the past several decades, the incomes of the wealthiest 1 percent have grown three times faster than the rest of the population, and the wealth of the top 1 percent is now greater than the combined wealth of the remaining 99 percent. This trend has accelerated rapidly—by 1 percentage point per year—between 2010 and 2015. The bottom 50 percent of the world’s population has less than 1 percent of the total wealth. [1]

The World Economic Forum (WEF), concurring with many other organizations, has described severe income inequality as the biggest risk facing the world. WEF founder Klaus Schwab has observed, “We have too large a disparity in the world; we need more inclusiveness… If we continue to have un-inclusive growth and we continue with the unemployment situation, particularly youth unemployment, our global society is not sustainable.”

The rise of giant tech platforms appears to concentrate wealth even more. Early evidence is Oxfam’s research finding that 8 wealthy individuals own 51% of the world’s wealth (as much as 3.6 billion people). Three of those 8 men are the founders of 3 of the giant tech platforms: Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. If these platforms evolve into the economy’s “digital infrastructure” for the coming Digital Economy, they are likely to funnel the world’s wealth to themselves for decades. 

Taxation and other policies could reduce inequality. Yet, measures such as tax cuts for the rich, shrinking welfare programs in countries such as the US, and business-friendly Supreme Court decisions are making it worse.  

 

Most Likely Forecast

According to the World Economic Forum’s indices, median income has declined by 2.4 percent between 2008 and 2013 across the 26 advanced economies where data is available. [2]

An analysis shows that the richest five people in the world own as much wealth as the poorer half of the world’s population.  According to Oxfam, the richest 1 percent of the global population has more wealth than the remaining 99 percent. [3]

The percentage of global wealth accumulated by the top 1 percent of the population has increased rapidly in recent years, from 44 percent in 2010 to over 50 percent in 2016. 

The TechCast Expert panel estimates that income inequality is likely to produce a global social crisis by about 2024 +/- 1 year. They are also 60 percent confident in this forecast.  

 

Strategic Implications

The stability of a democracy is based on the shared trust in institutions and belief that decisions made at all levels of government will create an environment of fairness and equality of opportunity. When the wealth distribution gets too far out of line, it undermines that belief. Excessively high levels of inequality have historically destabilized societies and resulted in widespread violence. Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist and entrepreneur Muhammad Yunus has called the growing inequality a “ticking time-bomb.” 

Policies for reducing inequality are relatively well understood and widely supported. For example, the International Monetary Fund has repeatedly encouraged governments to implement a wide variety of inequality-reducing policies.  Despite some evidence that inequality may not have grown as severe as it seems, there is widespread support for policies that would mitigate the problem. [4]

[1] World Economic Forum, Jan 16, 2017

[2] New York Times, Jan 16, 2017

[3] Common Dreams, Jun 12, 2017

[4] International Monetary Fund, April 2017

Young-jin Choi, Germany

PROFILE SUMMARY

Since 2015, Young-jin has been instrumental in building the impact investing practice of PHINEO gAG, a leading non-profit think tank and advisory service provider for impact-oriented (venture) philanthropy in the German speaking area. As a seasoned impact investing expert, he has led the development of various social impact bonds as well as an impact investing vehicle for startups that use technology as a force for good (“tech4impact”). Prior to joining PHINEO, Young-jin executed and managed numerous venture deals as an investment manager at 3M’s corporate venture capital unit and worked in a variety of industries and regions as a strategy consultant at Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte). Young-jin holds three separate master’s degrees: in Mechanical Engineering (RWTH Aachen), in International Business Studies (University of Maastricht) as well as in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (LMU Munich).
yj.choi79@gmail.com

The Robots Are Coming — To make You Creative

The AI Revolution has created a palpable fear that ”The robots are coming to take your jobs!”  Studies conclude that roughly half of present jobs could be lost to automation, even professional work, possibly leading to mass unemployment and social upheavals 

TechCast asked our thought leader-experts to forecast the future distribution of jobs across the occupational spectrum for the year 2030. The results below tell a different story that opens the way to a creative society.

 

Results and Conclusions: Muddling Through

Results are tabulated below and show that the majority of experts believe that a reasonable path can be found through this difficult transition. We call this the “Muddling Through Scenario.” This is a “middle” scenario in which an organic combination of market forces produce new creative jobs and government support offers GMI benefits, containing unemployment to tolerable levels.

TechCast experts collectively judge that humanity will find its way safely through the coming AI/robotics crisis as the world reaches a more fully automated stage of development about 2030. Automation is likely to eliminate about 22% of routine jobs but the loss is likely to be compensated by roughly 8% of workers gaining a guaranteed minimum income (GMI) and roughly 15% finding new jobs in “creative work.”  

 

Expert Survey Results for OECD Nations in 2030 (N = 53)

 

The Possibility of a Creative Society

This is a modest study, and many complex issues are involved, yet we think this forecast provides useful insights into how the AI issue can be resolved. 

We conclude that government support and innovative enterprise could absorb this AI threat and turn it into a new domain of creativity.The adoption of GMI and the growth of new creative jobs are likely to keep unemployment contained at 11 percent or so, which would be bad but not a major crisis. Furthermore, the widespread use of AI should increase the level of knowledge and intelligence to unprecedented levels, fostering a society of creative change and understanding.

The key is to recognize that AI can automate routine knowledge work, but there exists a huge unexplored economic domain beyond knowledge—creativity, entrepreneurship, vision, collaboration, diplomacy, marketing, supervision, and other higher-order functions that are uniquely human. See the figure, “Structure of Consciousness.” Advanced AI may be able to solve tough problems, but it cannot provide vision, purpose, imagination, values, wisdom, and other capabilities that are essential for sound leadership and tough choices.

 

Intelligent machines are likely to take over routine service and knowledge tasks, but the technology will remain limited and people will always want a real person to provide human contact and handle tough issues. Staff is growing rapidly in universities, hospitals, research institutes, and other advanced settings for these reasons. The service and knowledge work sector could grow to 50−60 percent by 2030.

In the end, rather than diminishing people, the net effect of AI may be to enhance the value of these higher-order talents that are a unique gift to humanity.This conclusion may seem contrary to many who are convinced a disaster looms ahead. We respectfully suggest that, yes, the robots are coming to take your jobs, but more creative work and better support can also foster a more innovative, prosperous and thoughtful civilization.

This article is a short version of the AI and Future Jobs published in Foresight: The journal of future studies, strategic thinking and policy.

Andrew Micone, USA

PROFILE SUMMARY

Technical Architect & Strategic Foresight consultant focusing on Health Informatics and Information Security.
andy@micone.org