In 2005 I was working for the audiovisual industry. During that time I had long discussions about the P2P technology and the music industry business model with my friends. Some of them worked producing CDs and DVDs and were already glimpsing the inevitability of the change, but kept arguing against it. I vividly remember comparing their situation with the one suffered by the horse breeders when the combustion engine became a consumer good. Breeding horses is still a thing after that, but not really.
As The Propellerheads said through the fantastic voice of Shirley Bassey: “It’s all just a little bit of history repeating”. All throughout our history, technology revolutions have created gaps where skills, jobs or trades have become obsolete. But, at the same, time that same technology created new opportunities where people were able to thrive.
So, if it’s just history repeating… why do we have the feeling that things are getting out of hand? What makes this revolution different from the others?
First, it’s not revolution, it’s revolutions.
Changes keep coming faster than ever and technologies that required centuries or decades to permeate society, take only years or months to spread nowadays. So, before we’re done adapting to and filling up these gaps, new ones will already have appeared.
It’s a fact that most of our conversations with companies are about how to become agile, nimble, capable of reacting to market disruptions, or to create them. Then, instead of asking if the next technological breakthrough will affect your sector, you get to ask yourself how much time you have left to adapt to the last one.
Second, this time we are talking about substituting brains.
Technology revolutions were mostly related with the replacement of human strength with mechanic strength. The plow substituted the human muscle, the tractor substituted the beasts pulling the plow, and now a robotized fleet of tractors are about to substitute humans.
Also, we already talk to machines in our daily life. Imagine what will happen when prediction and automation capabilities increase, and machine learning is the norm. Try picturing what to do with thousands of customer support people that will suddenly become unnecessary.
And third, less and less people are going to be needed.
If not by direct design, most of these new technology breakthroughs have as a consequence an increment on automation. Take driverless cars as an example, a technology as desirable as that can be really job disruptive, just in the US and just in the transportation industry, we are talking about 1.5 million people without a job in a glimpse of and eye. Or think about what was the reaction of Mc Donald’s when they where pushed to a 15$/ hour minimum wage.
A breach is opening.
As these gaps pile up, and we don’t replace all the jobs with new opportunities, a breach emerges. A breach of people who lack the skills to be employable or that, even if they had the adequate skills, are no longer needed.
Today we are working to heal the breach. Identifying new spaces to use the talent of all the people that’s being left out, exploring new opportunities etc. It’s not the first time we have faced presenting solutions to a client that will improve their service both in revenue and efficiency, needing much less human-power than before. And it’s not the first time we have been confronted with the consequences of our own design.
But there will be a time when we will need to accept that the breach cannot be healed. And, as it grows, we will have to find solutions to a scenario were a huge percentage of the population has a lot to time to spend and not a lot of ways to earn for a living. Accepting this breach, creates a new scenario that changes everything.
The breach, a new scenario for design
We, as strategic designers, are both: the main culprits for creating this disruption, and the front line in the battle to heal that breach, or to make it a human-shaped. A place where we can live.
In one hand, we are facing a multifaceted wicked problem, something that is not easy to attack, a regenerating hydra that will sprout two new challenges for each one we solve. But, on the other hand, this is our kind of challenge, the stuff we love to do.
So, which are the 7 different heads of our wicked problem we have identified?
1Business ethics for the future: Mostly during the transition phase, companies will be tempted with automation processes that will greatly reduce the costs and offer huge promises of profit. But that will eliminate the possibility for their customers to generate income to buy their products & services. As Walter Reuther served it to Henry Ford when presented with the a new automated factory full of robots: “How are you going to get them to buy your cars?”
In a worst case scenario, they will survive by targeting just the wealthy and employed. We need to take profit-driven companies and transform them into human-driven companies.
How might we avoid this global gentrification?
How might we generate new value propositions for companies to help us soften the impact of the breach?
How might we help profit driven companies become human driven companies?
2The forgotten get forgotten again: At Designit we use the term “the forgotten” to talk about these huge majorities of people that are left out, and we actively pursue action lines that help us design for them. In this escenario a breach that already exists between the so called 1st and 3rd world can widen even more.
How might we include this “forgotten people” when we think about solutions in this new design space?
Is designing for the forgotten an opportunity to learn about what we will face in the future?
3Education in a future without Jobs: Right now all our education system is directed at producing capable workers. We are brought up learning general skills and specialize in quite specific fields. Right now our education is suffering from this gap between technology and skills. Most of the new jobs created by this constant disruption are not present in any school curriculum, and education often happens outside schools.
How will education be in a world where you are not expected to get a work?
What will be taught at schools and what will be its purpose?
How will schools adapt to an even faster shifting environment?
Will we still have schools?
4Surviving in a future without wages: If most of the population wont be able to get a job, they wont be elegible to self earned wages. Universal basic income is right now something real, it’s being discussed as a possibility, but transitioning into that without a proper design can become catastrophic for our society.
How will we earn our living, will money still be a thing?
Will we evolve towards another economic system like a post-scarcity economy system ?
5Value and reward when money cannot be earned: We live in an era where worth is mostly related with money. It’s “easy” to understand what’s valuable and what’s not. But we are evolving into an era where money might be a complete different thing. What will we consider rewarding, valuable or “expensive” might depend on a complete new set of values.
How will we assign value to services or products if no one can buy them? Or if everybody is entitled to them?
What will be considered rewarding?
How might we design inclusive and sustainable values that people and companies want to embrace?
6Defining our identity: Right now we construct our identity around our studies and our work. When we start a conversation with someone it’s normal to ask about what they do for a living. Also, losing your job is one of the great identity crisis we have in our day, and there’s this trend about constructing one’s future through entrepreneurship.
How will we define ourselves if we are not able anymore to access to a work?
How might we use this opportunity to create a healthier identity definition?
7Balance of power: In this future we are no longer needed to produce goods, and we have not the means (acquisitive power) to use our freedom to select what we consume.
How will we exert our collective power?
What new mechanisms will be created to that end?
How will we help design policies that allow this transition go smoothly?
To wrap it up, and go back right where I began. I’m quite sure that in the very near future I’ll be discussing with a lot of people about this future as I did back then, when the music industry and many others were transformed.
My advice will be far different than before. It’s not longer about avoiding dead-tracks (horse breeding), but to have a collective human-shaped agenda. To start thinking in a bigger scale about how the visions and the paths we are creating for different companies will affect the transition into a human-shaped future.
I’m sure there’s many more issues I’m not addressing, this is a huge subject. But I’d love to use this post as a call to cooperation. What do you think I have missed to identify?
Also, each and one of the topics I have highlighted can be developed and further studied. Which one would you like me to address the next?
P.S. This article comes from Designit Spain&Latam internal mail list “sandeces”, where an intense discussion about a future without jobs is still being hold. So thanks to (in no particular order): Andres Botero, Alberto Romero, Héctor Noval, César Astudillo, Miguel Sabel, Laura Mata García, Diego Cano, Andrej Hillebrand, Gabba, Martin Dubuison, Álvaro Millan, DeividSáenz, Carolina Lopez and Jesús Carreras for participating in it.
