What will the members of the next generation do and does the education system prepare them for this?
Three tsunami waves have passed over humanity in the last two hundred years. These three waves can be summed up in three words: agriculture, industry, services. Until about a century ago, almost half of humanity was still engaged in agriculture. Even in 2011, a survey by the International Labor Union showed that a third of the world's workforce, about one billion people, was still engaged in growing food. But the sharp change in the direction of employment is clear and visible: in the developed countries, farmers are disappearing and even among industrial workers there is a downward trend. Currently, only about 2% of the US workforce is engaged in agriculture and less than 20% of the workforce is employed in industry. More than 70% of Americans are employed in the service sector. Will the next generation be all about services? Will technology continue to replace the workforce in agriculture and industry and result in everyone born today working in professions defined as services?
Some argue that the answer to this goes even further. Sophisticated and intelligent robots will continue to replace humans in agriculture and industry. The technological ability continues to develop and it makes many human workers redundant. But those who believe that the solution to human employment is a sweeping shift to the service sector do not understand the magnitude of the technological and social revolution in which we find ourselves. Robots are replacing not only agricultural and industrial workers but also the workforce in the service sector. Bank clerks, telephone operators, salespeople, drivers, waiters, doctors, pilots and many service providers are now being replaced by smart software and machines. It seems that we humans have no choice but to ride the fourth wave: the wave of creative entrepreneurship.
In the next generation, it seems that those who want to work will have to bring two important values to the desk. The first value is entrepreneurial ability: the ability to create from nothing. The second value is creative ability: the ability to create outside the box. For all other things we will already have robots, apps and suitable software. Some explain the high unemployment crisis among young Europeans as a result of a young generation growing up in a society of abundance and most of them are unable to go through the changes required for the fourth wave.
The change is happening not only in the labor market. Our schools and education systems need to change radically. Human society as a whole is changing. The job market will become something new and completely different from the job market of our parents. The unfortunate fact is that it seems that the education system, which is supposed to prepare the next generation for the new reality, does not internalize the change and many of today's teachers teach yesterday's.
Not everyone will find themselves in the new job market. Not everyone will want or be able to generate innovation and creativity and not everyone will have a job. It even seems that the majority of humanity will be able to benefit from unemployment. There will be no need for billions of productive people, and the real challenge for humanity in future generations will be the existence of a fair and prosperous human society where most people do not have any productive work.
There is of course also another option, less optimistic and bloodier. The possibility that we will not be able to make the transition to the fourth generation. The possibility that we will destroy ourselves and the entire planet. Or the possibility that we will not be able to distribute the resources and the fruits of technology fairly. It seems that the biggest challenge facing the entrepreneurial-creative generation is to prepare humanity for the transition to a generation where people will not have jobs. At least not to most people on Earth.
All I can do is try and imagine the fifth generation - the generation where the robots also bring their own creativity and innovation to the desktop. So what will the people do?
About the author
Yankee Margalit, social entrepreneur, investor and high-tech person. Father of six. Chairman of SpaceIL, an Israeli non-profit organization working to land an Israeli spacecraft on the moon. Mostly curious.
The article was published with the permission of Scientific American Israel
More on the subject on the science website:
18 תגובות
89
I didn't read the article so I may have missed something but I would appreciate it if you could explain what urban farming is? And why will people in the future "return" to work in it?
What about singers?
And why will the robots make the big money? What do they have to do with money, buy spare parts in Taiba?
Today, the singers make a living from performances, not from album sales (Eric Einstein, ran into difficulties because he did not appear). Maybe in the future, people will go back to work in urban agriculture. When the big money will be made by robots.
safkan
I agree with you, except for the last sentence. In Israel this must not be true.
The entrepreneur Yankee Margalit is just fantasizing about a future that will not exist.
Only a limited percentage, say 10 of the population, meet his requirements for high intelligence. The other 90 percent are ordinary people and below. This is the natural biological state, no educational network will change it. Nor will there be any sudden change in the level of intelligence of the population within the next few thousand years.
A leadership that does not provide jobs for the common people will be removed from power.
The standard of living and potential/creativity/education are determined by the family's economic situation. That is, how many resources it can provide to the child, how many siblings he has, and where he is in the birth order. In the Israeli education systems, it is difficult to succeed without the financial involvement of the parents. Because there is no solidarity Socially in Israel, there have always been a lot of poor people here. Sometimes there is really hostility towards weak groups such as ultra-Orthodox Arabs and single mothers. This is not just their difficulty, it is that of the entire country!
It is a bit early to declare a "fourth wave". To also claim that the "first wave" is 200 years old represents well the happenicism of the entire article. "The Third Wave" is the name of Alvin and Heidi Toffler's book, and it does articulate the story of the three waves that have passed over humanity: the agricultural wave that began about ten thousand years ago. The second, industrial wave, which began a few hundred years ago and the third, knowledge-driven wave that began about sixty years ago (from today, not from the day the book was written). In the book "The Transformation of Power" he expands on this wave and how it may change our lives. The power revolution of the third wave is all around us and strikes at the peak of its power, collapsing industries and setting up others under them. It is not even close to being exhausted. We are very far from formulating the final results of the third wave, let alone start talking about a fourth wave - it is simply too early. "Creative entrepreneurship" and all kinds of other slogans of people who want to sell something are perhaps a comma in the third wave revolution, certainly not a fourth wave that stands on its own.
The article is conclusive proof that above all, above innovation, above technology, if we do not comply with the guarantee law, we will return to what the author called: "another option, less optimistic and bloodier"
http://www.arvut.org/he/
The members of the next generation are not of one piece, and trying to predict how the world will function in the future is quite foolish. Meanwhile, the whole sophisticated world, which thinks it's smart, is unable to overcome one murderous gang, which does whatever it wants in one part of the world. There are children in the world who all they want is a little more food and less work in slave conditions and this at a time when in another part of the world they are being exploited as forced laborers. Somehow creativity or entrepreneurship will always come on the back of someone else, weaker, on someone else's land, and also on someone else's air.
Eyal
We know what it is to fly, but we don't know what it is to think. Our knowledge about the brain is minimal on the one hand, and on the other hand it fills a number of very different fields, such as neurosurgery, neuropsychology, psychology, psychiatry, language research, computing, sociology, anesthesiology, pain prevention, and a few more that I have forgotten and that I do not know
We do not know the source of creativity in man.
I know a little bit about brain surgery, look at the link of my name. The doctors I work with are the leaders in the field. One is an expert on a certain tumor in a certain area of the brain. The other is a specialist in aneurysms of a certain type. The third specializes in deep simulation - DBS. All I'm saying is - we are very, very, very far from understanding the brain. So maybe in 1000 years.
But in the coming decades? Come on….
You just constantly convey pessimism, you kind of remind me of the people who claimed 200 years ago that we would never be able to build machines that fly in the air, even though they saw birds flying around them.
Like the birds, our brains are conclusive proof that a thinking and creative machine can be built.
Eyal
What does defeatism have to do with it? What kind of argument is this? 🙂
Sad.
RAM,
It seems to me that if we manage to produce a creative robot, it could be the beginning of our end
Oh Skynet, have mercy on me, your faithful servant, and take me to be your human germ. I promise to say a nice hello and provide clothes for every Terminator you send
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540
http://www.cnet.com/news/bill-gates-is-worried-about-artificial-intelligence-too/
http://mashable.com/2015/01/13/elon-musk-stephen-hawking-artificial-intelligence/
Oh miracles, enough with this defeatist attitude - "we won't succeed"... "it's impossible"... "it's beyond our ability"... enough man, a little optimism.
A
We don't know what the source of creativity is in humans, so how do we build a creative machine?
And who said that the machines and the software and the robots won't know how to bring creativity and innovation to the desktop?
After the black plague in Europe, Europe began to recover. There were few people, and thus the value of work and human rights increased. In light of the mass extinction of a huge population. A similar situation occurred after World War II, in which 50 million people were killed. In the future, the population will decrease, because the birth rate is decreasing and the population is aging. . And the quality of life will soar again.