'The Human Typewriter' Isaac Asimov was an eminent science fiction author and humanist, and made... [+]
On the 31st of December 1983, Isaac Asimov predicted what the world of 2019 might look like, as part of The Toronto Star’s feature leading into the namesake year of George Orwell's 1984. 35 years later, with the benefit of hindsight and a new year ahead of us, Asimov’s predictions read partly as an amusing nostalgia piece (solar-space farms, anyone?), and partly as a sobering realization that we haven’t achieved quite as much as perhaps we should.
Ranging from ‘space utilization’ to industrial automation, Asimov’s predictions include some misses and some eerily accurate hits. Leaving aside some of his more fanciful or utopian guesses - we aren’t likely to extend the ISS into an industrial, world peace-assuring solar generator any time soon - the perspective of the great author on things like automation, work, and education may give us pause for thought in 2019, and take on new meaning in the context of AI and large-scale digitization.
Automation & computerization
Working from the assumption that the US and the Soviet Union have not begun to ‘flail away at each other’ with nuclear weapons, the first of Asimov’s astute observations relates to the increased prevalence and reliance on computers - ‘the growing complexity of society will make it impossible to do without them.’ While his predictions do not foresee the computational limitations of processing power and data storage (and the resultant move to the cloud), Asimov paints a picture of a world that is divided by technology, stating that 'those parts of the world that fall behind… will clamour for computerization.’ While we may not have reached this point just yet, we are certainly on the way to creating a situation where countries without robust digitization will not be able to keep up with new digital policing methods, the increasing value of data and regulation around it, and an increasingly digitized global economy.
Digitization and its spread into the workplace is something that should be at the forefront of every business leader’s mind, as it clearly was in Asimov’s mind way back in 1983: ‘It is not that computerization is going to mean fewer jobs as a whole, for technological advance has always, in the past, created more jobs than it has destroyed… However, the jobs created are not identical with the jobs that have been destroyed.’ A higher demand for digital services in recent years and the advance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into all industries will bring unprecedented change to the working environment, and if anything Asimov was just a little premature in his estimates of when we would reach this point.
Work
In 2019 and beyond new jobs will emerge based on new digital skills, and existing jobs and industries will see the majority of roles being replaced or heavily supplemented by AI and automation. This is where Asimov is again remarkably accurate in his prediction, stating that ‘the jobs that will disappear will be just those routine clerical and assembly line jobs’ that are simple, repetitive and ‘stultifying’, and have, on the whole, continued to exist in huge numbers with the addition of computing technology. Once ‘computers and robots’, or to update Asimov’s terminology slightly, Artificially Intelligent programs and robots, enter the workplace on a large scale, ‘it is these [jobs] that computers and robots for which they are perfectly designed will take over.’
Automation on such a massive scale will require drastic organizational change and a reinvention of how we think about working, far more than computers did in the 80’s and 90’s. Instead of having decisions made in the C-suite, employees will need to be able to make their own decisions without being hindered by bureaucracy, in order to guide artificially intelligent co-workers as they complete tasks that humans will no longer need to do. Of course, as Asimov also predicts, humans will require ‘an understanding of whole new industries that these “intelligent” machines will make possible’, and we will need to use our most human attributes even more in future to ensure that AI and concurrent technologies are used in the right way and towards the right goals. This understanding of just what technology will enable us to do is still lacking moving into 2019, and we need to educate ourselves and change our attitudes to work to cope with an increasingly digitized and automated world.
Education
The skills gap in computer and data science could create a big issue for employment if we keep creating mountains of data while existing roles are filled by programs that feed on it. Aside from Asimov’s futuristic vision of education - ‘A good schoolteacher can do no better than to inspire curiosity which an interested student can then satisfy at home at the console of his computer outlet’ - his prediction of the current skills gap is quite accurate, stating that ‘entire populations must be made “computer-literate” and must be taught to deal with a “high-tech” world.’
This is also where we can take our biggest lesson from Asimov’s article: ‘The next generation will be one of difficult transition as untrained millions find themselves helpless to do the jobs that most need doing.’ While we are now realizing the ability of AI and automation to help us in all kinds of ways (and discovering its limitations as well), we also need to change our habits in time for AI’s ascent into the workplace. We need to change ‘perhaps faster than [we] can’, but thinking differently about the way we work is the best thing we can do to make sure we are ready for the next industrial revolution - as Asimov states, ‘this has happened before.’
Asimov was optimistic in his view of 2019, assuming that ‘those who can be retrained and re-educated will have been’, and imagining a world united by a reduced need to work and ‘a life rich in leisure’ - perhaps giving us more credit than we were due. Focusing on his assertions about automation, ‘computerization’, work and education (rather than his ‘impossibly optimistic’ dreams of ‘large structures that will be put in orbit about the Earth’ guaranteeing world peace) we can learn a lot from looking at where Asimov was right, and where he was just a little bit too hopeful. I wonder how much of his vision will have come true by 2020.
