Alectra, I’m Looking for a job? And What’s Your Future Skill, Sir, Madam?
Something has to give, and so far its graduates. They’re giving! Giving it their all, but is it enough?
If news of AI’s portent is anything to go by, it’s set to wreak havoc on the job market meaning there are existential questions that require answering.
But let’s go back some first to a time when acquiring high level education prepped you for the job you had in hand. Universities were the lock pickers; and during that time, let’s say 1960s, there were relatively far fewer graduates per jobs than today unlocking jobs.
The 1960s and 70s witnessed a boom in university courses to meet demands in the work place. It was a simple to understand transaction as the years transpired; you got your degree and then you joined the milk round applying for jobs.
In the early 90s I remember my own experience; the milk round cometh, yet it took an age to get a job. I got there, eventually. The service industry was burgeoning. The gig economy yet to arrive. The job you chose, chose you for life.
And then something happened. It had been happening but it surfaced. Digital, tech - a brand new world arrived. Jobs that previously didn’t exist emerged e.g. social media producer, coder and the rest. There was little social discussion about what it deeply meant, and even so, how could you arrest the juggernaut and the message? Facebook and Zuckerberg said earnestly it was about uniting the world. We wanted to be part of that unity — at a hidden cost. The underside of this was culture; the integration of Black and Brown people for their skills, knowledge and diverse way of seeing the world.
In their epochal video “Did you know?” the producers pronounced how jobs that did not exist in 2004 were now blossoming in the digital age. It came as both a shock and opportunity. In 2000 I had added HTML and CSS encoding to my skills and taught that to university MA students.
But a couple of things were amiss. I mean more than a couple. University learning stuck steadfastly to a system they’d exercised for many years. There was a parallel universe, mirrored in Bricks and Mortar businesses.
There was the analogue or post analogue world which tertiary education excelled in. Not quite full digital, playing it safe. Or the full digital monty, which drew on different systems of thinking.
It was akin to Bohr’s theory of complementarity. Niels Bohr, a quantum physicist, in 1926, uncovered that light could be a wave and a particle, thus forcing new models of thinking on science. Newtonian physics was giving way to quantum mechanics thinking.
Cut back to these times, some institutions made changes to accommodate new learning and new jobs in digital. But it was so few so little that online courses saw an opportunity, and grew a new market.
Uni formats largely stayed the same. You learned one thing well disseminated via multi-pronged transferable skills, got educated, and then enter the market to find a job. That’s good capitalism. “let the marketplace decide” one colleague said to me.
Some students found jobs, others like me struggled. No worries said universities, some alumni schemes at best might do, otherwise stay wide awake. In any case, you may likely not pursue the job your career was designed for. Er!
Students adapted; some would take digital-enhancing skills, leadership training etc. to compete as the market decided their fate. In 2015, alongside a bunch of academics I stopped teaching HTML/ CSS and instead focused on design aesthetics and the psychology of design.
Wix and a slew of applications could help anyone build a platform with no code training at all. Simple wireframes inserted within the canvas automatically generated code.
If ‘Did you know?’ were updated today, code writers, those who just wanted to get by multi-skilling would be design curators. Social Media producers might want to advertise their skills as cognitive and behavioural online producers.
So now to the present. “Did you know” that in less that ten years time you may not need any technical or theory of knowledge to accomplish a task — what’s referenced as epistemology. Or as Cameo said in their hit track, you’re “ Talkin’ Out The Side Of Your Neck”.
That’s because AI and the vast metaverse which is forming will be able to undertake any number of jobs. In Oscar winner “American Factory” slick tech did the job of factory workers. Blue collar workers, AI experts told those listening that their jobs would have to be reformed. And then AI came for the white collars, and the execs.
Of course that’s an egregious way of looking at it. AI is merely a product of innovation and creativity to make the human condition more efficient, more sustainable, work which is arduous will be handled elsewhere.
But AI appears to be different or is the reaction indicative of what happens when new tech surfaces? That scene in “When Old Technologies Were New” in which electricity is set to replace people harvesting Whale blubber to manufacture candles. Good riddance Whale hunters, might be the cry. Can you say the same for AI?
With no regulations or universal critical policy over its social impact, some of the world’s leading innovators see trouble on the horizon.
According to Shift, the tech magazine they include Daniel Gross former head of AI at Tesla, Nat Friedman GitHub’s former CEO, and former Machine language expert Andrej Karpathy, formerly of Deepmind and Open AI. Asimov had his concerns way back
Decision making in the hands of AI. Artists voice like Jay-Z can be replicated without any agreement. Photos can be generated with no copyright infringement.
All along this revolution that will impact workforces and hence learning centres like universities seem dulled, a lack of urgency. That several platforms like Bloomberg already use AI to write Financial news isn’t a cue into being alarmist, more skewed thinking that the role of universities that set up young minds require new modelling.
What if you entered an institution, put on your VR visor and saw companies pitching to you? They’d show you their deck, and that if you permitted you could work for them whilst studying. They would help shape your curriculum. It wasn’t a binding transaction, but one in which you gauge the skillset you required in the horizon, whilst participating in solving real world problems.
A real life scene of reporting from a dangerous zone, like this in South Africa circa 1994 could be used to test attributes needed for complex problem solving. Students would build the repository of a future work trust brain. Alectra, bring up student work in the last ten years that dealt with poverty. How do you solve poverty in a systems thinking way?
Alectra make available the UK Chancellor’s budget and the spend over the last six months. Alectra model what happens if the Chancellor does x? Alectra match that to his statement on poverty in the UK? What’s the match for the data versus what the chancellor’s saying.
Bill Gates provides a critical view of AI which leans more to its benefits. I’m equally an optimist. But AI isn’t a homogenous mass; it should resist a breathlessness of praise. For far from solving problems, it also bakes them in. There should be greater insight and oversight. AI isn’t sentient. It can’t think. It matches mathematical modelling of known scenarios ( output) to its input. What goes in comes out. AI, or the vogue for generative AI has parents.
It’s rewiring the future and rather than trying to hold back its reins, centres of learning will have to up their game. AI succeeds as a society+ when there’s a matching philosophy and enquiry from the institutions shaping future minds. When do we get there? Because at the moment its appears we’re all in a comatose state.
( Below two pieces of work generated based on an AI image I provided above working in South Africa)
