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The Future of Work in Australia | Throwback Tuesdays
•Ben Kingsley, Opti & The Couch Crew
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Every week there’s another headline about artificial intelligence, how quickly work is changing, and which jobs might disappear next.
But in this Throwback Tuesday snippet, social researcher Mark McCrindle joins Bryce and Ben to unpack a slightly different question: what kind of work can’t AI take away?
And the world is heading, obviously with artificial intelligence, robotics, you know, automation, towards, well, anything that can be outsourced to computers will be. Anything that's procedural, that's sequential, that's structural, that that's gone from a human perspective. And so it should be. We want to inspire people to add a bit of value to their roles, not just sort of be a wet machine, if you like, uh an embodied machine. And I think there's there's greater dignity in giving people a role that can offer some inspiration and and a creative and a transformative approach. So I think that's a good thing. But we've got to make sure that we're prepared for this. I mean, we've been seeing it for some time, manufacturing sector declining, you know, clerical sector declining, you know, because we need to add value in our roles. All of the studies are showing that anything that involves a strong people interaction, you know, so the future jobs are not just people that are programmers on technology, it's nurses, it's teachers, you know. Because that they are roles that aren't easily outsourced. And they're some of the biggest roles by employment uh size currently. But you've got managers, you've got professional people that are interacting with other people. That is hard to outsource to a computer or to offshore. Uh, anyone that's in the creative space, anyone that's a decision maker that's in in some sort of innovation area, anyone that's a communicator, and we've got a lot of high-end salespeople that are in that communication space, again, that's that's not the sort of thing that can be computerized. So if people have social skills, people skills, creativity thinking, and leadership skills, their future is very bright. They're not going to be competing with a computer.
SPEAKER_00
And where's our competitive advantage as a nation in looking at you know the future of work?
SPEAKER_01
It's in this entrepreneurial space, you know, back to that small business background. This is the can-do country. You know, we we find a way, we make it happen. And and we champion small businesses. You know, we we champion the innovator and the the thinker who can come up with a solution. In terms of a a small country, 25 million, we think it's a big number, but uh but globally, we're we're less than one-third of one percent of the world's population. We we really are small, and in our region of Asia, you know, our time. We're dwarfed. But we punch above our weight with innovation, with invention. I mean, look at the the the medical science world, uh, the res meds and the cocktails. Yeah, yeah, phenomenal. We we used to think that we were good on the sporting field, that was our that was our key international uh stature. But now it's in the boardroom, it's it's it's in banking and finance, it's in it's in medical innovations, it's in it's in small business, startups, tech, you know. And I think we've got what the ingredients of what any great nation needs. Um, a fascinating story some years ago, Edward De Bono, you know, that lateral thinker. He was someone said, All right, you know, you're good at thinking. Tell us if you had to design the perfect country, what would it be like? And he said, Well, you you want mid-level population, 20 to 30 million, you don't want to be. You'd want in the in a temperate zone, so probably the Pacific area. You'd want an island continent so that you're not, you know, having to protect your borders. You'd want a good agrarian base so you can be self-sustaining, good mineral base as well. You'd want English speaking because that's the global. He went on like this. He said, But we don't have to invent it, it exists and it's called Australia. You know, isn't that amazing? Yeah, very cool. And if you think about the ingredients we've got and the education base we've got, I mean, we really can be, and indeed are global leaders. So I think we've got the right ingredients, but we you know, we're also called the land of the long weekend. So we don't want to sort of sit back and think it's all going to happen. We've got to work for it. We are globally as a computer.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we're very lucky. Anyone who travelled overseas will quickly work out how fortunate we are, wouldn't they? I mean, if anyone's been anywhere around the world, when you're swinging around and seeing the harbour bridge and and the opera house, and you sort of think, you know, I'm glad to be home because it is such a fortunate country, and coming into Melbourne, same sort of thing, we are very, very blessed. But a lot of people forget a bit of that, you know, if they haven't travelled a lot and they think, you know, what can other people do for me? I think there is there's an element of we've got to keep that can do, and if it is to be, it's up to me and have a go, as opposed to letting you know everyone else take care of us, like the government and those those things. Exactly.
