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Naively perhaps. But something like Brexit is important,

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but it pales into comparison into the potential impacts of automation on how we work in different future not having enough work.

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Climate change, London finance and. Fresh water, energy transition, large scale social disorder, antibiotic resistant diseases,

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education and deployment of private capital for social good quantum computing.

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Hello and welcome to the Feature Business podcast from say Business School.

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I'm Emily Baron and each week I host a conversation on a topic that will define the future of business and wider society.

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Speaking to experts from Oxford University. Leading businesspeople and entrepreneurs.

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This week we're talking about the future of work. Studies have shown that up to 47% of work is at risk of automation.

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What does this mean for us as individuals, as a society, and how businesses are run in the next 10 to 15 years?

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To help us look behind the numbers today was speaking to Google chief economist Howe Varian and Jonathan Trevor, a professor here at Oxford.

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First is our conversation with Professor Trevor. We discussed the paths of work, how we use employment to distribute wealth across society.

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And he might be the winners and losers in the automation age.

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Today we are talking about the future of work and it's fantastic to have you with us.

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So thank you very much for joining us.

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It would be fantastic if we could start off by painting a picture as it would be for someone who is really a lay person in this subject.

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What does the next 30 to 50 years look like in terms of our working lives?

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Gosh, well, I think it's a great question. It's the it's the million dollar billion dollar trillion dollar question.

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But it's not a question that I don't think anyone can really answer with a huge amount of confidence, because in many respects,

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there's so many unknowns and uncertainties around how work will be structured in future, how we will work,

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how we create economic value, how we create social value and actually maintain social justice.

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And I think in some respects, that's a sign of the times.

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You know, we would have been having a similar conversation at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,

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certainly here in Europe, right about 17th century.

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But but in some sense, it was a simpler environment.

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And the types of technologies we were talking about or indeed others were talking about and introducing things like the double action steam engine,

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which is a transformative piece of technology at that time,

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that that was relatively slow to be introduced and relatively simple, not to say easy at all.

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But today, one of the big differences in not really so much our industrial revolution,

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but rather our information revolution, is that the speed and pace of change has magnified exponentially.

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If you wanted listeners to ask a few questions, maybe one or two questions that they should be asking themselves and asking of the people around them,

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what do you think those key questions that we're missing are?

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What really is the purpose of work? Right. Work, as we understand it, in terms of jobs and careers, is a relatively recent phenomenon.

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We have only really experienced it in the modern era, which is to say the industrial era.

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It is something which is is, you know, no more than really 300 years old.

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Prior to that, there was servitude, serfdom. There was subsistence farming, subsistence living.

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We just sought to survive. Now we have expectations that more than merely survive, we should thrive.

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And work plays a huge, both practical.

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But can I say perhaps also moral role in not just surviving, but thriving as individuals,

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particularly as individuals today as we see society, I think,

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becoming progressively more individualistic and some would say more atomised,

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particularly as a result of things like social media and information technology.

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So for me, the question is really what is the purpose of work?

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And I think that's the ultimate question. But how you answer it needs to be a little bit more nuanced than that.

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And in particular, what I would like to encourage people to do is to think at multiple levels about this question around the purpose of work.

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Certainly it's easiest to answer the question.

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Well, actually not easy, but perhaps simplest to answer the question is individuals, what's the purpose of work in my life?

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So many individuals work gives us direction, it gives us focus, it gives us steam,

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it gives us connection to others beyond our immediate circle, our families, our friends.

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It gives us a sense of whether we're doing well or not.

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There is literally a structure by which we can measure ourselves.

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We often call that performance management, and sometimes it's absolute against some sense of objective or sometimes relative.

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I'm doing better than you, or more likely not.

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But fundamentally, it takes up a lot of our time, and it's something that plays a huge role in our lives,

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not just in terms of generating income to survive, but actually creating a sense of self-worth, a purpose, personal purpose that's really important.

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So that's one level, but then we can take it to a higher level.

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What is the purpose of work from a societal level?

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I think in terms of creating economic value and how that is then distributed and shared in a way that's considered equitable,

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which isn't to say egalitarianism gets same but equitable, but I think also organisationally.

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What is the purpose of work for companies or for employers?

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Again, is it purely around creating economic value, in which case employees are merely a cog in a machine and means finance?

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Or are we embracing the sense of purpose driven organisations which see a contribution more than just simply a healthy bottom line?

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Can you give us a kind of walk through of what the organisation of the future might be?

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And I do want to come to kind of who might be the losers in this situation and what does it look like when I go to work in ten or 15 years time?

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Do I even go to a place? So I don't like the question.

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I think we can do a different question. No, no, I think it's a great question.

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But I don't like the question because it kind of makes an assumption. And I think this is one of the problems that we have when we try and think

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about the future we we have in the past and indeed we are continuing to do so,

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which is dysfunctional. We're not learning from our mistakes. We think about the future as being one future.

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We think about the future organisation being one type of organisation.

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And the reality is it will be different. It will be different on a case by case basis.

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So what is the organisation of the future look like? Well, I've got a clear and simple answer, but you're not going to like it.

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It depends. It's such an Oxford, it's such an honest answer.

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It also happens to be true, I believe. So there will be some changes that we know that will apply.

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I think generally speaking, there will be less security. That's the negative.

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But on the flip side of that, there'll be more flexibility. I think we will increasingly have fewer dedicated occupations.

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What we will have is more and more as a trend portfolio careers, what we will have less and less of,

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simply because I believe it will be replaced by machine intelligence in some form or another,

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is routine work, whether that's manual or even white collar cognitive work.

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But what we will have more capacity for is inventive, creative work and work that requires discretion, discretion,

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the exercising of judgement, all of which are things that humans are really great at respective of backgrounds.

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Everybody can be good at these things. So we know those things.

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I believe them to be true. But what that means for what specific companies or organisations or government agencies look like in future,

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I think it's impossible to say because actually is just very dangerous,

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I think to stop generalising across entire economies or even across entire industries.

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So so for me, the urgent question is not to try and predict the future, to kind of say, well, what should we think about the future?

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It's more how how should we think about the future, how to think about some of the challenges that we're facing,

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how to ask the right questions, and to build in resilience into our own ability as leaders.

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I mean that in the broadest sense, not the heroic individual at the top of the hierarchy,

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but our capacity as human beings to to think differently about the future and to be resilient and to act together to make it more positive.

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Because, as you say, there are winners and losers and change always and always will be.

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But that's the urgent requirement for me, not not to be in some sense a mystic,

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but rather to actually just be better at how we think about the future and the choices we have to make.

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Do you think from your perspective in the kind of conversations you have about this,

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do you think there is enough sense of urgency in our government agencies,

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in lobbying organisations to start to ask these questions and start to have these conversations?

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Absolutely not. Did I know the answer to that question?

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Absolutely not. I mean, I think for very understandable reason, we we focus on the here and now.

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We focus on fighting problems and fires that are ever present and particularly over now.

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But the reality is, for me, naively, perhaps, but something like Brexit is important,

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but it pales into comparison to the potential impacts of automation on how we work and different future.

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And that's not something which is 50 years from now. That's something that's 15 years from now.

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And so thinking about those who might lose out, I mean, two studies I've seen,

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one is sort of this figure that gets bandied around a lot, that 47% of tasks will be automated.

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And then the other,

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that there's a disproportionate impact potentially on women because they disproportionately take up roles which are easy to automate.

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And when we think about both of those things, first of all, do they that still hold up, do you think?

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And secondly, sort of how bad can it get and what is the threat and what how do we then think about redistributing wealth in a sort of equitable

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way to use or leverage when those what mechanisms no longer kind of work in some sense to start to even think about these issues.

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It's important to understand how we've come to where we are and where are we.

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As I saying before, this idea of careers and occupations and jobs,

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working for an employer, engaging in a transaction that is the employment relationship,

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which is literally a contractual relationship legally this perhaps also a psychological relationship as well.

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That's a relatively modern phenomenon. And from a societal perspective,

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how we operate as democratic Catholic societies relies upon in large extent precisely

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that job structure creating industries in which works performed late by labour.

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We've come to rely upon that mechanism as a means of distributing income.

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So the primary means how we share.

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So in the UK, in the US, Western Europe, pretty much across the world is, is how we distribute income is precisely through our employment structures.

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So for me know it becomes more than just media interesting and topical when we are

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talking about threats to precisely that form of structuring the distribution of income.

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It's not just about jobs, it's about societal cohesion, it's about fairness, it's about stability.

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It's about how we come together.

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It's about the even not just simply the the question of responsibility from the state to its people, but actually how we even think about statehood.

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What are we if we are not a system as a nation for fairly sharing economic value?

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And the mechanism of how we do that again is employment. So it becomes a really important issue.

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And I think generally speaking, you have two camps when you start to think about these really complex issues.

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You have optimists and you have pessimists. And the optimists would argue, I think, that particularly with regards to disruption from technology.

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If we look at past experience,

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technology has created so many more opportunities for economic value creation than it has for people than it has actually replaced.

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And in particular, they will talk about the 1922 rather critical piece issued by John Maynard Keynes,

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the Cambridge economist who talks about the threat of technological unemployment.

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Well, in some respects, Keynes was proved comprehensively wrong because, again, from a societal basis,

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the introduction of then industrial technology, such as the move and production line, created far more opportunity for jobs than actually replaced.

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But he has a point. He has a point.

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And that's where pessimists come into it that they pessimists, I think, would argue, well, you know, in the absence of employment structures,

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because we are replacing roles and tasks with particularly routine roles and tasks with technology, what do we do in the future is bleak.

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And I think some way how you start to think constructively about both and evaluate both is again by focusing at multiple levels.

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And I think if we think at a societal level, I'm an optimist, I am, because I think, again,

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the introduction of new technologies needed to make existing industry more efficient or to make it simply more innovative,

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particularly the introduction of things like ever more capable technologies will make companies and organisations

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that rely upon economic value and just the essential products and services that we we use and consume every day as,

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as people. It will simply make our organisations more capable.

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And that's, that can only be a good thing. So in that respect, I'm all for this and I think we should rush to embrace these technologies,

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understand them the meaning and the implications and how they're best managed, but actually supposed to think because it's progress.

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If I think about organisations within that,

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the winners organisation will be those that understand the environment and how it's changing and become adaptive and can embrace,

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for example, these new technologies, but not just technology. There's a whole lot of other things are changing.

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So for example,

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the introduction of millennials into the workforce and differing expectations of people in their relationship with the work they perform.

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So. It is the case that organisations, I think, will. Some will survive.

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Others will thrive in the differences. But quite simply how much they are and how effective they are.

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But where I can become potentially pessimistic is if we come down to the individual level,

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so not the societal level or even the organisational level at the individual level.

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What do we do if people can't or won't adapt to an environment in which the work that they have

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perhaps devoted their entire lives towards is no longer abundant or available or even viable.

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And I think that's why we need to start thinking about some of the implications of this.

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And that's not a hard thing to imagine, because we see that already,

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not not even in our industrial story, in our information revolution, but rather in industrial revolution.

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If we think about, for example, steelworkers in Sheffield, there is a you know,

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there is much post-industrial decline in many of our communities that we built up specifically to set our

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manufacturing base in the industrial revolution that have not transitioned to a post-industrial world.

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So we're going to have that plus many more communities or individuals who haven't in the future managed

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the transition to a post information world or a world in which their work is no longer viable.

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It's technically redundant. So that for me, you know, that's the big question.

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How do we help those who can't or won't?

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Make that transition, who can't share in the opportunities that these changes,

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both technological and otherwise, are creating that I think are inevitable.

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We can't roll back the tide on that, and we shouldn't.

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But it does need to be very carefully thought about, because the implication is is is I think further inequality,

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further division, further unrest, which is and nobody's interested.

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I mean, one thing that kind of really pushes me towards to ask you, before I came to business school, I used to work for Charlie Watts in schools.

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And when I think about the way our schools are organised and the way our system is

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organised and even the way kind of all universities and degrees are organised,

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it doesn't feel like we're ready. It doesn't feel like we're preparing people to work in this different way.

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It requires a different set of skills around leadership, around the way we interact with others, where we build relationships with others.

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And it makes me feel quite nervous about who is going to take responsibility for ensuring that everyone is ready,

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because that doesn't it feels like there's a void of responsibility between the individual, the state and companies.

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And that kind of contract doesn't seem to have been written yet on sort of.

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Okay, I'm going to put up my hand and I will take responsibility for making sure people are ready.

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Certainly, I feel quite pessimistic when I when I think about that.

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I mean, it's certainly true how we organise governments, how we organise the state,

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particularly in terms of public services and support, how we organise our universities, how we even organise our business schools.

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And specifically I'm based is a direct mirror image of the type of, I'm going to say work society that we create.

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It is no accident that the Oxford MBA, like every single MBA on the planet, is organised into verticals like functional subjects,

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strategy marketing, operations, organisational behaviour, finance, because that's how our companies work and actually it's the same in government.

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So we are organised industrially and we've been extremely successful at it and I really

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think that's worth noting is we are victims of our own success and we should celebrate that.

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But the question is, is that fit for purpose for how we will work in future?

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And by work I simply mean find an enduring occupation that invigorates us as individuals,

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but also the means by which we create value economically and otherwise,

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societally, as societies across the world, either as one global society or indeed multiple component constituent nations.

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And so what that looks like in future, I don't know. And do you?

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But I think you're right that we need to start asking these questions and asking them urgently.

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We need to think long term. We can't think about the next quarter or the next simply the next year,

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because that simply isn't going to help us start to prepare or even be in a position to be open minded.

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If and when change does, change does come. You know, in some sense,

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I think there is a tension between finding as much as possible and and allowing

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things to emerge and actually may be part of the challenge of the 21st century.

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The information age and the types of changes we're seeing is that actually we've got to do both.

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And that's really hard. We still I think and I think this especially to myself, that I see it in a lot of other people as well.

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I certainly see it in terms of our companies that we research here at the business school.

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We think in binary terms, we think in black and white.

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And then really we do that because that's efficient and it's simple, but the reality is that it's incredibly complex and therefore grey in future.

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And, and so then you get into very much a kind of political, ideological perspective, and nobody wants to hear me talk about that because who am I?

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But I do think that there is it will be there a fight between those that think that

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the answers will come from heroic individuals or indeed individuals themselves,

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working it out for themselves and in aggregate all of us just hopefully getting along enough for long enough or finding some collective solution,

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which isn't to say something which is towards the socialist end of the political spectrum,

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but finding a collective way through, probably some of these collective systemic challenges that we're facing,

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which aren't just simply economic or social, but they are every aspect of what it means to be a citizen in a in a health exercise.

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After my conversation with Professor Trevor, we caught up with Google's chief economist Hal Varian at the annual Responsible Business Forum,

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where he delivered a keynote address on the topic of AI and its impact on the future of work.

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Unfortunately, I was unavailable, so two of our producers, Brady and Patrick, dragged him into our studio to have a conversation.

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However, it is an optimist. He believes that machines will step in to fill the labour shortage left by a wave of retiring baby boomers.

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He also, in the conversation, shed some light on how tech platforms such as Google and YouTube can help bridge the skills gap.

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My name is Hal Varian. I am the chief economist at Google.

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Welcome to the Oxford Futures podcast. Professor Varian, it's great to have you here.

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You were just giving a talk on automation and demography and how the dynamic works there and sort of implied that

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while there might be a lot of pessimism about automation and job loss out there in discussion at the moment,

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that might actually be a boon. And to sort of replace some of the baby boomers are retiring and they might sort of offset each other.

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Could you just run us through that? Right.

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So everybody focuses on the demand side for labour and then new technology comes along that can displace labour.

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There could be lots of social disruptions associated with that.

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Now, what I looked at was what the supply of labour will look like over the next few decades.

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There's really only one social science it can forecast ten or 20 years into the future, and that's demography.

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And there the patterns are quite clear. If you look at the developing countries, you're seeing ageing society.

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And every time a worker retires, they expect to continue consuming.

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So the workers that are left behind, that are still working, have to have to be more efficient.

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And for that to occur, they have to be more productive. And that effect is really says that we have to invest more in making work more productive.

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You know, we've grown up in a period where maybe I've grown up in a period, I should say,

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when there's been a pretty loose labour market because of all of the baby boomers coming onto the labour market and women entering the labour market,

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it's typically been possible to find workers.

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But we're moving into a period where labour is going to be substantially more scarce and there's going to be more competition for workers overall.

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That should be a good thing. Pushes wages up and makes it easier to find a job.

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What we might what we have to focus on are than these other questions how can we deliver

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training more efficiently and how can we assist people in matching up the workers and the jobs?

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So following on that point about training,

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automation and computing will play a huge role in retraining people to meet demands of the future workforce.

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What is Google doing specifically? So we're doing a number of educational and training courses around the U.S. and the world, for that matter.

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One thing that I've been particularly interested in is looking at the resources are available on YouTube because there's just so

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many diverse sets of education and training videos on YouTube that it's an absolutely remarkable treasure trove of such activities.

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So if you want to know how to weld or you want to know how to fix your toilet,

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or you want to know how to rewire your thermostat or any of these questions, there it is.

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It's available on YouTube. And many, many, many of those educational and training videos are important for learning job related skills.

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So you're going to be able to match the that training to sort of the supply and demand requirements of the future workforce.

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So it's like some sort of sorting or allocation thing so they know what they need to study or is it?

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Well, it's an excellent question, but let me remind you of Google's business.

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Oh, we tried to do exactly that. And pretty much every domain, we're matching people with questions to people with answers.

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People want to buy things for people want to sell things and people want to

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acquire skills and people who can who can provide that training and education.

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So I don't care if it's art, if it's music, if it's carpentry, if it's automotive,

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we have content there that's going to help people learn to do the things they want to do.

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In your talk, you talked about automation, reducing some of the barriers to previously complex tasks.

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So yes, means that it's much easier to become a driver.

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You don't need to know the streets of your car to be a taxi driver.

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Still checking reduces the burden of some of the sort of computer related tasks, for example.

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So how does that work? Do you see that developing any further? Is that going to help people get jobs a lot easier?

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Yes, of course. What's nice is it's a lot easier writing papers.

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And it used to be because you've got all of this assistance in terms of style guides and spelling guides and everything else.

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It's a lot easier navigating around town because you have these fantastic geo positioning systems available for free.

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When I was a kid, believe it or not, we spent a week or so in arithmetic class learning how to take square roots by hand.

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So that's a pretty obsolete task these days. I think there'll be a limit to.

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How low that sort of cognitive threshold will go, how how much technology can augment people in the work they do?

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Well, the examples that are really fun now are to use Google Lens.

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If you take your Google camera and go out and photograph a shrub or a tree or a flower,

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it will come back with a result that tells you the name of the shrub,

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the tree, the power, and what kind of treatment it needs water, some acid soil or local soil.

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So all of those things that you used to have to look up in the gardening manual,

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now just come to you immediately via the via the about via your phone.

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You also have spoken about some of the sort of manual tasks that people assume

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will be the first to be automated or actually made up some very complex,

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numerous tasks that you might need one robot to do each individual thing.

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Mm hmm. And taken together with sort of that Google lens example you just gave.

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Do you think manual roles or sort of cognitive roles will be the most at risk to automation?

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Well, I think that we've seen tremendous advance and machine learning, machine learning artificial intelligence areas in the last five years.

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And we haven't really seen a comparable explosion on the robotics side.

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So let's take something like harvesting crops while we harvest core and we harvest weed using mechanical equipment works just fine.

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But if we're trying to harvest apples, peaches, plums, pears, strawberries, raspberries, grapes,

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on and on and on, these soft fruits can be so easily damaged that really they still require human touch.

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Now, someday we might like that problem, but for now, at least, it's it's still a problem.

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Interesting. So understanding. This is where at a business school.

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This is a business podcast. It'd be great to get your take on first.

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What do you see as the biggest opportunity for the young professionals coming out of business school,

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coming out of undergrads with these two looming technology and shortage of labour in developed countries?

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And then ultimately, what's the biggest threat and where should we be looking?

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Well, in the U.S., I would say health care is going to be employing more and more people,

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maybe inefficiently, but they'll certainly be probably they'll be engaging more and more people.

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And there's a lot of challenges there to making our system more efficient.

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So I think that's probably a good area for people to go into.

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But that technology, just kind of high tech that we see in Silicon Valley is doing tremendous things.

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Think about the driverless vehicles, autonomous vehicles.

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Well, that's $1,000,000,000,000 a year industry worldwide.

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And there is intense competition going on among the auto companies and the tech

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companies to be able to provide services that really work for ordinary users.

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So that's going to be a very exciting business as well. Excellent.

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Thanks. And then what do you think are the biggest challenges? Are threats that we face with with the way trends are going?

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Yeah. Well,

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a lot of there may be cases where some technological change happens so rapidly that people really find it difficult to adjust to the to the change.

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So that could happen in trucking, for example, lots and lots of truck drivers.

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Right now, there's 50,000 vacant truck driver jobs in the U.S. They can't retain people because it's a terrible job.

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Salaries are being pushed up to $80,000 to be a long haul truck driver.

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That's a pretty good salary.

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But it also means that it's even more incentive to try to replace those human truck drivers working in not very good, but high paying positions.

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There's a race to see if we could really improve that job by making it one more user

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friendly that is making the task less tedious and to by making the tasks cheaper.

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I think they're going to be slow enough that the labour markets can adapt.

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But what you ask for the pessimistic view, it could be that something will come on so quickly that it would create a lot of disruption.

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So the key is, is more timing than it is. Well, I think phasing things in and when you look at technology in general, it's it's phased in.

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You look at, for example, mobile phones, first mobile phone for commercial uses was about $2,000 came out of 1980.

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And it was the size and shape of a brick. So things have changed a lot.

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The big phones. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah.

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So it's changed a lot. Things have changed a lot since then.

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But then again, it's been nearly 40 years, right?

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Thank you for listening to the Oxford Feature Business Podcast presented by say Business School.

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Next week I'm in conversation with Nick Howe, vice president of Virgin Hyperloop One,

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where we discuss the future of hyper fast transport and what it means for the planet and our cities.

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Please subscribe on iTunes and if you want to find out more about what we discuss in today's episode, you can follow the link in the description.

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The Feature Business Podcast was created by Brady, Middleton, Patrick, Kyla,

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Michael and Paula, Paris Abro and Emily Byrne, MBA students at City Business School.

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All.