As regular listeners of this show will know, Artificial Intelligence and its implication for work and jobs is a favourite topic. I feel that it is imperative to keep on exploring it from different viewpoints as it is such a crucial theme for the future of Recruiting and HR.
With that is mind I’m delighted that my guest this week is Byron Reese, futurist, author and publisher at leading technology research and media company Gigaom. Byron has recently written a critically acclaimed book called “The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers and The Future Of Humanity” and has some fascinating views on the future of jobs and work.
In the interview we discuss:
• Three possible future scenarios for the job market post automation
• Why Byron holds an optimistic view on the future of employment
• What skills are important as things change
• Why automating jobs often creates more demand for the skills being automated
• The biggest popular misconception about the capability of AI
Byron also give his advice as to what recruiting, and HR professionals should be doing now to prepare for the future of work
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from ClickIQ. ClickIQ’s groundbreaking automated talent attraction technology enables recruiters to spend less time looking for applicants and more time hiring great people by managing and optimizing their recruitment advertising. ClickIQ’s platform advertises roles across the largest network of PPC, job boards and social media to reach the best active and passive candidates in the most cost effective way. Using the latest AI and programmatic technology, ClickIQ ensures that jobs are always advertised in the right place at the right time and for the right amount of money, saving recruiters both time and budget. To find out how ClickIQ can help automate, manage and optimize your talent attraction Strategy, please visit www.clickiq.co.uk. that’s www.clickiq.co.uk.
Matt Alder [00:01:22]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 137 of the Recruiting Future podcast. As regular listeners will know, AI and its implications for the future of work and jobs is a very popular topic on this show. I feel it’s really important to keep exploring it from various different viewpoints as it’s such a critical theme for the future of HR and recruiting. With all this in mind, I’m delighted that my guest this week is Byron Reese, author, futurist and publisher at leading technology research and media company GigaOM. Byron has a slightly different perspective on the future of work and jobs than some of my previous guests, so this interview is well worth listening to.
Matt Alder [00:02:13]:
Hi Byron, and welcome to the podcast.
Byron Reese [00:02:16]:
So thank you for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:17]:
My absolute pleasure. Could you just introduce yourself and tell.
Matt Alder [00:02:21]:
Everyone what you do?
Byron Reese [00:02:23]:
Well, my name is Byron Reese and by day I run a technology research company called GigaOM, and by night I.
Byron Reese [00:02:31]:
Write books about the future.
Byron Reese [00:02:32]:
And specifically my most recent one is called the Fourth Age and it’s about all of the big questions about artificial.
Byron Reese [00:02:39]:
Intelligence everyone is asking.
Matt Alder [00:02:41]:
Fantastic.
Matt Alder [00:02:41]:
And I know that everyone who listens to this podcast is artificial intelligence. AI is kind of a massive topic for them just to sort of, you know, dig in and sort of find out a bit more about the book.
Matt Alder [00:02:55]:
It’s called the Fourth Age.
Matt Alder [00:02:57]:
Why is, why is, why is this the Fourth Age?
Byron Reese [00:03:00]:
Well, I put forth the idea that there have been three times in history that a new technology has come along and actually it’s usually a group of technologies has come along and changed the.
Byron Reese [00:03:14]:
Trajectory of the human race forever.
Byron Reese [00:03:17]:
And the first of these happened 100,000 years ago, when we got speech, which.
Byron Reese [00:03:23]:
Is our singular ability as a species.
Byron Reese [00:03:25]:
And we got that the same time we got fire. And those two were joined together, and that fire let us cook food and we could eat more calories, and we developed speech. The Second one was 10,000 years ago. That’s when we got agriculture and the.
Byron Reese [00:03:36]:
City and the division of labor and all of that.
Byron Reese [00:03:38]:
And the Third one was 5,000 years ago when we got writing and the.
Byron Reese [00:03:42]:
Wheel, which gave us the necessary ingredients.
Byron Reese [00:03:44]:
For a nation state. And so I put forth the idea that we’re entering a fourth age, a fourth thing like those other three, like getting speech that’s that big and profound and will set the human race off.
Byron Reese [00:03:59]:
In a different direction.
Byron Reese [00:04:00]:
And I try to answer these questions. Well, you know, is AI, what’s it going to do to employment, and is it going to take over the world.
Byron Reese [00:04:12]:
And should we be afraid of it? And even can machines be conscious?
Matt Alder [00:04:15]:
Interesting. And, you know, I suppose it, you know, the next logical question is to, Is to ask you what you found the answers to those questions were. You know, what, you know, what, what makes up this fourth age? What’s happening? What are the, what are the, what are the changes? And what can we expect?
Byron Reese [00:04:32]:
Well, the interesting thing about the book.
Byron Reese [00:04:34]:
I wrote is I never tell you.
Byron Reese [00:04:35]:
What I think, because the questions that I try to answer, which are three, specifically, what is AI going to do to employment and are we going to be able to build a general intelligence, and AI as smart as human, and is that a good thing or not? And then can machines become conscious? I identify all of those as fundamentally philosophical questions, and I try to kind of get at the assumptions underneath each one of them. And because they’re kind of philosophical questions, they’re not technical, I kind of set.
Byron Reese [00:05:11]:
Them up for the reader.
Byron Reese [00:05:12]:
But one question I pose is, are human beings machines? Well, if you think you’re a machine, as many people in Silicon Valley do, then it stands to reason you can build a mechanical human. And if you can build a mechanical human, you can make a better one. If you don’t believe you’re a machine, then almost by definition, there are things that machines can do, can’t do, that people can do. And so I try to set all of that up, but the reader isn’t buying my book. So I will tell them if they.
Byron Reese [00:05:45]:
Are a machine or not.
Byron Reese [00:05:46]:
They have an opinion about that. My job is to tell them or kind of explore what the answers to those questions mean.
Byron Reese [00:05:56]:
So I pose three philosophical questions to.
Byron Reese [00:05:58]:
My reader, and then I Try to work through those. Now, all of that being said, I of course have opinions on it because I have a belief on whether I’m a machine or not, just like anybody else. But the book, I try to be a guide that kind of walks anybody through those questions.
Matt Alder [00:06:15]:
So I think that’s interesting, I suppose.
Matt Alder [00:06:17]:
Particularly the AI and employment question. How, you know, talk me through how you kind of, how you kind of break that down. What’s the, what’s the philosophy, what’s the philosophy behind it? And also what, what are we seeing happening now and what might we see happen in the future?
Byron Reese [00:06:37]:
Well, excellent question. So there are really only three possible things that could happen. There are only three narratives that you hear and if you bucket them like that, it’s kind of easy to wrap.
Byron Reese [00:06:53]:
Your head around them.
Byron Reese [00:06:54]:
So one of them is that automation is going to take a lot of low skilled jobs and there’s going to be a sizable number of people who.
Byron Reese [00:07:03]:
Can’T compete with machines in the future.
Byron Reese [00:07:06]:
And we’re going to have kind of a permanent great depression and there’s going to be the haves and the have nots and all of that. And that’s a viewpoint that robots will.
Byron Reese [00:07:17]:
Take some of the jobs.
Byron Reese [00:07:19]:
Then there’s another viewpoint that says, ho, ho, don’t kid yourself. They’re going to take every job. If they can do work that somebody with an IQ of 100 can do, then they can do work that somebody with an IQ of 120 can do.
Byron Reese [00:07:32]:
And then 140 and then 160, they’ll.
Byron Reese [00:07:35]:
Write better poetry, they’ll do everything better.
Byron Reese [00:07:38]:
And the minute that a machine can learn a new task faster than a.
Byron Reese [00:07:42]:
Human, it’s game over. And every job is going to go to robots. And that’s the robots will take all the jobs. And then there’s a view that says, look, for 250 years this country has had essentially full employment. The United States and the west in general has had essentially full employment. It’s been between 5 and 10% without exception, other than the Depression, which wasn’t caused by technology. But for 250 years we basically everybody’s worked. But we’ve had technologies come along as disruptive as AI, right? We had electricity and we had mechanization of labor.
Byron Reese [00:08:20]:
It used to be, you know, you.
Byron Reese [00:08:21]:
Had to use animals for everything and then you got steam. We had the assembly line, which is how everything’s made now. And these incredibly disruptive technologies came along and unemployment never bumped. And so you say, hmm, why would that be? And that viewpoint that on net the robots aren’t going to take any jobs.
Byron Reese [00:08:41]:
That there’s an infinite number of jobs.
Byron Reese [00:08:43]:
Is the third choice. And so what I try to do is go through each of those choices and understand the assumptions behind them. Like I said, I personally have an opinion. I’m, I believe I’m in the camp of people that find it, the historic precedent that we’ve had rising wages and full employment in a world of incredible, of technological disruption quite compelling. And I hear a narrative oftentimes that I consider to be largely false when it goes like this, and you may have heard a variant of this. It says, look, technology is really good at making high skilled, high paying jobs like a geneticist, but unfortunately it destroys.
Byron Reese [00:09:31]:
Low skilled, low paying jobs like an.
Byron Reese [00:09:34]:
Order taker at a fast food restaurant. And then, and here’s the part that kind of in the great shell game, I think things get mixed up. Here’s what people say. They say, do you really think that unemployed order taker at the fast food restaurants going to become a geneticist? And then people say, yeah, I guess they’re not, are they? But the answer to the question is, well, no, they’re not going to become a geneticist.
Byron Reese [00:10:00]:
A college biology professor is going to.
Byron Reese [00:10:02]:
Get the geneticist job and then a high school biology professor gets hired at the college and then a substitute teacher.
Byron Reese [00:10:10]:
Gets hired at the high school all the way down.
Byron Reese [00:10:12]:
The question is not can that person, quote at the bottom, do that new.
Byron Reese [00:10:16]:
Job at the top? The question is, can everybody do a.
Byron Reese [00:10:19]:
Job a little bit harder than the job they do today? And if the answer to that question is yes, then that explains 250 years.
Byron Reese [00:10:30]:
Of history that technology creates great new.
Byron Reese [00:10:32]:
Jobs, destroys bad jobs, and everybody shifts up a notch, everybody gets a promotion.
Byron Reese [00:10:37]:
And that’s why you’ve had rising wages.
Byron Reese [00:10:39]:
For 250 years with the backdrop of full employment. And that’s why everyone, for the most part remains employable. So I find that very compelling. I don’t think that there’s anything in artificial intelligence, robotics and automation that we see today that’s fundamentally different than say, electricity or mechanization or any of these big changes. And so then I tried to explore, well, specifically what skills are useful in the future and what kinds of jobs are there going to be. And you know, the number one question I get when I’m, when I’m out talking about this is what can I, what should my kids study to be.
Byron Reese [00:11:19]:
Relevant in the future and be employable?
Byron Reese [00:11:21]:
Or, or what should I study to.
Byron Reese [00:11:23]:
Be relevant and employable in the future.
Byron Reese [00:11:25]:
And so I get that a lot.
Matt Alder [00:11:28]:
That’s really interesting stuff. And I. That’s not a. That’s not a view I’ve kind of not. Not a view I’ve heard very often. I think that people tend to, you know, tend to kind of default to the. Default to the kind of extremes when it comes to, you know, it comes to this idea of kind of everyone. Everyone stepping up. I think, you know, that that kind of makes a. Makes a lot of sense. It would be really remiss of me now not to ask as my next question, you know, what. What should my child be studying? You know, what jobs do you envisage in the future? And what, you know, what skills are going to be important as the, you know, as the world is changing?
Byron Reese [00:12:09]:
So I’ll work that question a little.
Byron Reese [00:12:14]:
Bit in reverse if I can.
Byron Reese [00:12:16]:
25 years ago, 1993, the Mosaic browser was released. That was kind of the first widely.
Byron Reese [00:12:23]:
Used consumer web browser.
Byron Reese [00:12:25]:
And let’s say you went back in time 25 years and you told somebody, hey, in just a quarter century, we’re going to have connected 2 billion computers with this technology.
Byron Reese [00:12:38]:
And really, that’s all the Internet is. It’s just a communications protocol.
Byron Reese [00:12:41]:
All it is, is computers can talk to each other. That’s the Internet. That’s the beginning and end of it. So what do you think is going to happen past you if 2 billion people all of a sudden have these machines that talk to each other? If you had been really farsighted, you would have said, well, newspapers are going to have a hard time, and, oh.
Byron Reese [00:13:02]:
The Yellow Pages are probably going to.
Byron Reese [00:13:04]:
Take it on the chin, and, oh.
Byron Reese [00:13:07]:
Stockbrokers and travel agents, you know, they’re.
Byron Reese [00:13:10]:
Probably going to be out of work. And you would have been right about everything.
Byron Reese [00:13:15]:
Right? It’s really easy to seize places where jobs vanish.
Byron Reese [00:13:20]:
But what would you have not seen? You would have never seen Google or Amazon or ebay or Etsy or Facebook.
Byron Reese [00:13:27]:
Or Twitter or Airbnb or Uber or Lyft or Baidu or, or Alibaba or, or, or, or, or you would not.
Byron Reese [00:13:36]:
Have seen $25 trillion worth of wealth.
Byron Reese [00:13:40]:
A million small businesses or more, depending.
Byron Reese [00:13:42]:
On how you want to count them. You never would have imagined any of that happening. You wouldn’t have seen web designers, all of it. All of it. And so what happens normally is it’s really easy to see where the jobs will vanish, and it’s very hard to see where they’re going to be created. So how do you operate in A world. How do you think about a world where you need to say, well, what skills are going to be useful in 25 years from now?
Byron Reese [00:14:08]:
And so the number one skill is really easy. That is the ability to teach yourself new things. And the good news is we’re all.
Byron Reese [00:14:16]:
Really good at that. I mean, what do you do on a day to day basis in your job that you learned how to do in school?
Byron Reese [00:14:24]:
For most of us it’s relatively small.
Byron Reese [00:14:27]:
There’s only one class I could have taken in high school that would be.
Byron Reese [00:14:30]:
Meaningfully useful to me.
Byron Reese [00:14:32]:
Now do you want to. Can you guess what that is? Typing.
Matt Alder [00:14:38]:
Typing, yeah, of course.
Byron Reese [00:14:40]:
And you see? So that’s it. That’s it. That’s what you could have taken in high school where you’d say, yeah, I.
Byron Reese [00:14:44]:
Learned that in high school and it.
Byron Reese [00:14:45]:
Is really useful to me today. And you never would have guessed that, right? So the number one thing is the ability to teach yourself new things.
Byron Reese [00:14:53]:
And we already do it.
Byron Reese [00:14:54]:
You come in and some new word comes across and you’re like, holy cow, what’s that? And you go to Wikipedia and then you follow a link and four hours.
Byron Reese [00:15:03]:
Later you’re an expert on it. And that’s what we all do.
Byron Reese [00:15:05]:
And that’s the great skill. The number two skill is the ability to communicate. You think about a factory model. I think my parents generation probably never wrote anything after they left college. We write constantly, all day, every day, and we speak to each other and we have calls and we work in teams. And so the ability to communicate is probably like the second one. And then there’s all kinds of things that never would have imagined would have mattered in the factory era, which are things like reading, body language and all of these kind of soft social skills. It’s really fascinating because when the ATM came out, people said, well, that’s the end of bank tellers. I mean, after all the things in automatic teller machine doesn’t get a lot more obvious than that. And yet the fact is we have more bank tellers today than when the ATM came out. And why would that be? Well, the ATM lowered the cost of opening a bank branch. And so banks opened more branches and every one of them needed tellers.
Byron Reese [00:16:23]:
And the teller’s job changed from a.
Byron Reese [00:16:25]:
Transactional one to a relationship job. In other words, instead of here’s my.
Byron Reese [00:16:30]:
Check, give me $200, it’s now, hey.
Byron Reese [00:16:32]:
Do you need a student loan? So it became a relationship job. Likewise, nobody saw the open source movement.
Byron Reese [00:16:39]:
There are people who write source code.
Byron Reese [00:16:41]:
And give it away. For free.
Byron Reese [00:16:43]:
What is a worse business model than that? Well, it turns out that’s a great.
Byron Reese [00:16:45]:
One because the product, the transaction, the code is commoditized. But. But the people who wrote the code are in great demand because the code.
Byron Reese [00:16:57]:
Needs to be customized.
Byron Reese [00:16:58]:
Or let me give you a more relatable example. You may have heard that Google Translate is now as good as a human translator. What do you think that’s going to do to the demand for human translators?
Byron Reese [00:17:08]:
Well, according to the Bureau of Labor.
Byron Reese [00:17:09]:
And Statistics, it is going to skyrocket. Now why would that be? Well, when the transactional part of translation drops to zero, when it’s easy to translate a letter or an email, everybody does it. And then everybody says, oh, we can sell our product in this country. Then all of a sudden there’s a contract that needs a translator and then there’s a face to face meeting that needs a translator. And then there’s how do we localize our product which needs a translator? And then there’s a phone call which needs a translator.
Byron Reese [00:17:39]:
What we see with technology all the.
Byron Reese [00:17:41]:
Time is when it drops the price of something to zero, it creates an enormous amount of demand for something similar to that. The Internet dropped the price of communicating.
Byron Reese [00:17:51]:
To your customers to zero through email.
Byron Reese [00:17:53]:
And as such you get this explosion of small businesses who can now communicate with their customers for zero. So I think the net of all of that is in the future more jobs are going to be relationship than transactional. More jobs are going to be about.
Byron Reese [00:18:09]:
What’S the ongoing value that you can.
Byron Reese [00:18:11]:
Offer somebody more than what can you do for them on your way out the door.
Matt Alder [00:18:16]:
I think one of the things that interests me about the technology and technology change that’s happening at the moment because everyone is writing and because we have social media and the Internet, there’s a lot more information out there about what’s changing and what’s being invented and companies that are starting up than there ever were before. And I find that the same old topics kind of come round and round again when people are talking about what’s going to happen in the future. As someone who is a kind of a specialist observer of this chase of this space, what technological change or innovation are you seeing at the moment that people aren’t talking about that you think is critically important?
Byron Reese [00:19:06]:
Hmm. Well, I mean, people are talking about artificial intelligence, but kind of how that debate is going in that discussion I think needs to be more nuanced. When people say artificial intelligence, when you read about it in the media, it means two completely different things. One of them is what we call a general intelligence, and that’s a AI.
Byron Reese [00:19:36]:
That’S as smart as a human being.
Byron Reese [00:19:38]:
That’s like C3PO from Star wars or Commander Data from Star Trek or what have you. And that’s a technology we have no idea how to build. We don’t. People who are in the field think we’re going to get it somewhere between.
Byron Reese [00:19:52]:
Five and 500 years.
Byron Reese [00:19:53]:
But that is the very technology that when you hear Elon Musk or, or the late Stephen Hawking warn about artificial intelligence, that’s what they’re talking about. They’re talking about a technology we don’t know how to build that might kind.
Byron Reese [00:20:09]:
Of spin out of control.
Byron Reese [00:20:11]:
If a human has an IQ of 100, what would it be like if an AI had an IQ of 100,000, like, what would that be? That’s still in science fiction. What we know how to build today is something called narrow AI, but we just call it AI as well. And that’s an AI that does one thing very well. It’s a spam filter in your email, and it’s what routes you through traffic, and it’s what turns your thermostat on when it thinks you’re hot in the house and the rest. Unfortunately, those two very different things are both called AI. The spam filter in your email and the crazy hundred thousand IQ thing that.
Byron Reese [00:20:52]:
Will take over the world and destroy us all.
Byron Reese [00:20:54]:
And so I think that distinction, because we don’t have that, isn’t something that we can kind of. That the debate bifurcates on right now.
Byron Reese [00:21:06]:
It’s just all kind of lumped into this thing.
Byron Reese [00:21:08]:
And so when you hear people say.
Byron Reese [00:21:09]:
Oh, you should be afraid of this.
Byron Reese [00:21:11]:
Technology they’re talking about, one thing that’s very different than your spam filter is not going to take over the world. And what that narrow AI can do gets better and better every day. And there are limits to it, very clear limits. It’s not magic. It’s a technology that says a very simple thing. Let’s study the past. Let’s study data about the past and make guesses about the future. That’s all it is. We’re only better at it because we have more data and faster computers. But that’s all it is. And at its base is the assumption.
Byron Reese [00:21:46]:
That the future is like the past. And for many things, that’s true.
Byron Reese [00:21:49]:
A cat tomorrow probably looks like a cat today.
Byron Reese [00:21:51]:
And so you can train it on.
Byron Reese [00:21:52]:
A cat today and it’ll pick. But there are all kinds of Things that. That doesn’t follow. And so I guess that would be. It is be cognizant when you read and think and talk about AI, about.
Byron Reese [00:22:02]:
Which of those two very different things.
Byron Reese [00:22:04]:
Are people talking about.
Matt Alder [00:22:06]:
So, final question. The people who listen to this podcast are working in recruiting and HR and, you know, the sort of people people part of business. What would your advice be to the audience in terms of what they need to be thinking about, you know, researching and planning for when it comes to, you know, this kind of revolutionary fourth age that we’re. That we’re kind of living in?
Byron Reese [00:22:36]:
Well, the good news is that those are the kinds of jobs. Exactly. That aren’t going away. Anything that has to do with relationships and people now, something machines, well, they just can’t do it. I mean, whether you think they eventually can or not, aside, they cannot today do it. When I was talking earlier about technology creates jobs at the high end and it destroys jobs at the low end, my advice would be apply that to your own job. What is stuff you can use technology to give yourself great new powers like, you know, in your job, and what can you use technology to destroy that you don’t need to be doing and kind of think of your own job that way. Where can you employ technology to buy your time back? You know, it’s the only scarce resource we actually have is time. And the reason we’ve had a rising standard of living. I don’t know about you, but I.
Byron Reese [00:23:36]:
Don’T work harder than my great great grandparents, but I certainly live a much.
Byron Reese [00:23:39]:
More lavish life than they do. Why?
Byron Reese [00:23:41]:
Because an hour of my labor yields.
Byron Reese [00:23:43]:
A lot than an hour of their labor. And so I think that’s the superpower.
Byron Reese [00:23:48]:
Going forward is how can you use.
Byron Reese [00:23:50]:
Technology in your job to not do a bunch of stuff that if a machine can do something to make a human do, that has a word, it’s called, it’s dehumanizing. Because if a machine can do it, it doesn’t take anything that requires a human being. And so find all the stuff in your job that a machine can do, get a machine to do it, and you focus on. On all of the things that machines cannot do, which is what you just alluded to, the relationship stuff, all of the people stuff, all of the kind of soft, organic things that we do very well. And so apply technology to your own job and you’ll always remain relevant.
Matt Alder [00:24:28]:
Wise words indeed.
Matt Alder [00:24:29]:
Byron, thank you very much for talking to me.
Byron Reese [00:24:32]:
Oh, I had a great time.
Matt Alder [00:24:34]:
My thanks to Byron Reese. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about Working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
