Work Models Future (Transcript)

So this is after…we’ve got to gone through that, now Clinton happens to be the last president in the United States that, when dealing with an economic disruption, talks about teaching people new jobs. We used to always have these jobs programs. We’re gonna have jobs programs. We’re gonna bring the farmers and do the factory work, and the factory workers do the office work. And by the time we get to the '90s there’s not much talk of that left. And this is part of the reason. Because in the background, what’s really happening is jobs are disappearing and not just changing but simply disappearing.

So a story that Rifkin gives in the book, and I’m just gonna do it because it’s shorthand, is about farming in the United States. Two hundred years ago, 75% of the economy, 75% of the jobs were related directly to farming, 75%. Now, there was a smaller population 200 years ago. But think of the notion of how important farming was as a way of life. By the time we get 50 years later, that’s down to 50%, and yet the population has grown up. So each one of these the population goes up. By 1900, one-third. By 1950, less than 20%. By the year 2000, less than 3% of the jobs are related to farming, yet we end up feeding the nation in the United States. So why is that? All sorts of automations and efficiencies and chemistries, and all sorts of other reasons, not all good but all existing, completely changed the landscape. Those jobs are never going to come back, right? And we’ve gotten used to that idea.

Much of the Dust Bowl coincides with the same final destruction of this job community, and we began to think that our future is in the factory and we start to remake things. But those farming jobs are just not coming back. So is that the only time this will ever happen? Is this the only job sector ever that will disappear and never come back? Of course not. So looking at some of the U.S. Bureau of Labor’s statistics over the last century, we see, this is operative, so these are the assembly workers, truck drivers and miners, things like that. And you can see, most of the numbers peak somewhere around the '50s and '60s and start to go down. This pretty much mirrors what we’re experiencing. If you look more closely, there is this tiny little element that actually tends to be steady, and, in fact, it’s not really reflective, but in the last couple of decades this has actually gone up.

This heavy dotted line, long-haul tract drivers, going up. Long-haul tract driving is one of the few jobs in United States right now where you don’t have to have a college degree and you can earn a living wage and own a home and put kids through school. It’s not an easy job, but it’s at least one of those jobs. And right now we have over 80,000 open slots for long-haul trucking, just in the U.S. Clerical workers. You see this huge rise, '60s, '70s, and '80s office clerical jobs, as well as, this also includes cashiers and other jobs like that, but then starting in the decline in the '90s and then actually goes down quite a bit more noticeably in the last decade. Again, if you look more closely, if we break them up, with this, cashiers, store cashiers, convenience stores, grocery store cashiers. Now, you can guess where I’m going. What are the two things that have been growing?

Job, at least in the U.S., that is not actually…that’s not been around a long time. The notion that I need a job to sustain my family, that wasn’t happening in the 1800s. Most people lived in their own economy. They created their own small community, their own economy, and dollars and money and paychecks and savings and mortgages were not a part of their life. This is something we’ve invented in the last 150 years or so here. We all need work. We all need that opportunity to contribute and have experience and share, but that doesn’t mean we all need a job. We measure a great deal in the United States about what the jobless rate is. We measure what we wanna control, but jobs aren’t necessarily a good thing.

By the late '50s, of course, we took care of it. In the late '50s we’ve gotten rid of the human. Now we’ve completely automated the process. The pins are all collected, they’re all rounded up, put into the right place, they automatically go down when they’re ready. Now, with lights go on, so on and so forth. So that’s a pattern. And we see that pattern in lots of other places, as well. Stage one is when humans do the work. Well, okay, horses maybe in this case. We have this notion where humans do the work, make the decision, do the labor.

Stage two, we get machines that help us increase our accuracy, dependability, speed, so on and so forth. Stage three, machines are actually now more powerful than humans, more accurate, possibly more dependable, maybe even more desirable than employing a human, but we still need humans to tend them, they can’t work on their own. They’re not to be trusted, they don’t make the right decisions, they don’t know how to act, they’re not accurate enough. And then finally, we get to the point where we can say, "We don’t need a human." One, two, three, four, over and over and over and over. I did this quickly but I’m sure I could go back to Mesopotamia, to early days, and find the same things.

So I look at this as an S curve, not just as an arc, not as just this sort of a stuff, but an S curve, an S curve that continues, actually. And really placing these elements on the line, humans, augmented, tending, unattended. We go through these over and over again. So where are we on this curve? I took the list of the top level U.S. business curves, agriculture, foraging, fishing, mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation, wholesale and retail. Think of each one of these, where are we on each of those right now? Where are we on that S curve? How far can we automate?

This is one of the first things we can start to think about, where we are today, where each one of these industries are today. If I was a businessman in the automation business, I would be starting to map this space out to figure out where my next great opportunity is, right? And one of the businessmen, one of the people they used to map this out carefully were union organizers. Where is the opportunity? Where can I help people organize? Where can I find the changing of this organizational element? Where can I help people to perceive what’s about to happen to their lives, to their ability to be in-demand or on-demand? There’s all sorts of opportunity when we start to think about this pattern.

So it’s curves, right? And everyone’s on a different pattern. Everyone’s on a different set. And more importantly, it’s going on all over. I just read this article this week. Amazon is getting rid of the people who decide what to stock, what to put in the retail listing. Algorithms are doing that.

And I love this quote, "In the beginning they could be overridden, but now they prove they’re worth and you need to justify why a human needs to interfere."

So there’s some disruption, there’s some confusion, there’s some upset. Things were going great. "I liked the way the union thing worked, why are they getting rid of unions?" Right? There’s some disruption going on. And that’s the opportunity. That’s opportunity for both positive and negative change. And what I think we’re doing right now is we’re living this disruption. We’re living in this sort of crossing of the curves. By the way, if you’re interested in this idea, there’s a great book, called "Jumping the S Curve" by Nunes and Breene.

It’s a businessy thing but I think it gives you a look into the mindset of people who do a lot of this kind of work. We think about what’s the next level, what’s the next opportunity for change, who are the harbingers. It’s kind of goes along with crossing the chasm and some other things, but I found the book interesting.

What he means is, what we’re doing now is inventing it. And we can have our hands on the wheel or hands off the wheel. As we invent it. So I wanna talk about a recipe for reinventing or inventing the future. A recipe that I actually learned from a gentleman by the name of Beau Lotto, who’s got a great book, I’ll talk about in a minute, and I feel really excited about this idea because it’s intuitively correct for me.

So first, right, we do not see the world. We never see the world. We have a filter that allows us to interpret the signal, right? That’s why this is a duck, that’s why this is a rabbit, so on and so forth. Right? We have filters. That’s what we have, what we have. That’s all we have.

Our assumptions are the sum total of those filters. And we keep the filters that seem to sustain us in some way. We keep the filters that keep us from getting eaten by, say, a tiger, keep us from getting fired at work, keep us from losing our partner in an argument, keep our kids from getting run over by traffic. We have all the filters. And those filters are the things that we use about the way the world works.

"I’m not gonna do this because that’s gonna be bad." That’s a filter. Filters govern choice. "I’ve done this enough times, and I know that’s how this turns out, I’m gonna turn left." Right? The filters we’ve saved are the choices we make. And that’s good news. Because that means the filters we save are our future. It’s as simple as that. The choices we make, make our future.

So you wanna change the future? It’s really easy. That’s how you do it, exactly how you do it. Because the filters we carry are our interpretation of our past. I’m gonna just take a brief moment to, because a couple of other people have shared this, my filters and my past affect my future. And 50 years ago, when I was 9, my mother died unexpectedly, left me with a stepfather incapable of dealing with my internal grief for my external behaviors, would ultimately be going to a boys home. Hours and hours and weeks and weeks and months and months of therapy, over decades. Changing my name in order to start creating a healthy identity, and it’s not my birthday.

And even to this day, continuing all of that. What am I doing? All of my therapy, all these other things, I’m re-engineering the past, the meaning of my mother’s death, the importance in relationship of my father’s inability to deal with me, the reason I need to build an identity. This is not changing the past. This is just simply re-imagining, re-engineering, what Laura calls re-meaning. Politicians know exactly what this means, to get us to re-engineer what the past meant, to save certain filters, to apply certain filters on cue.

The good news is we have that power, all of this is built in, right? And it’s a continuing journey. Several people have shared parts of their journey this week, and I really appreciate it, and that’s why I did this. I don’t do this to be maudlin or self-centered or to think that my particular story is interesting, but because it’s another example that so many of us are living. And we live it all the time. I re-engineered a lot of my past. And recently, within the last two years, three years, I was suddenly reunited with a sister that I had not seen in half a century. I even found out that she’s been living an hour and half away for 20 years and that we’ve been in the same room, at the same concerts, at the same events over these last 15, 20 years. We never knew it. Now I have so much more to re-engineer. Right?

So this ability to do this is really critical. He calls it, "Re-meaning the past." So I love this book. It’s called "Deviate" by Beau Lotto. He’s a neuroscientist. It’s a pop science book. So if you’re a deep scientist this might bug you. But I find it incredibly inspirational and interesting. Basically, I love this quote, "We’re ever growing, ever changing. We are not passive listeners, we are the storyteller." And so much of what so many of us do, storytelling. So this really connects with me.

How do we deal with the disruption? How do we deal with those moments that we’re comfortable with but we know things are starting to change? How can we help people see them earlier? How can we help people recognize where they are in the curve? What kind of things can we do to make that better? And how can we get people to actively think about why their re-meaning, not if they are, but why they are. Why have we decided to be romantic about certain things in this America’s past? Why have we decided to not talk about certain parts of our history, about communities, and here I hear, we’re on native land, and so on and so forth? Why are we doing those things? And what would it mean if we started to re-engineer that? How can we scale that pattern of active personal and incremental? The work we do creates the models to the future. We do that here. And we do it every day. Being active, being aware, being conscious just gives us more power. So hopefully those are some ideas to think about. Thank you very much for letting me do that. Thanks.