- Good morning everyone. My name is Andy Serwer. I'm the editor and chief of Yahoo Finance and I wanna welcome all
of you to this panel on the nature and future of work. I think this is a really
incredibly interesting topic and I think it's at the very core of what the World Economic Forum has been discussing and working on, pun intended, for decades and I think
it will be the case for many years to come. This notion of what is work and the future of workers
course is of course also at the very core
of so many socioeconomic and political trends around the world. So it is highly, highly salient and I'm sure we're gonna
be hearing more about that over the next couple of days with some of the political
leaders who have decided to come to Davos this year. We have an awesome, awesome panel and I will introduce you to them now. To my far right is CVK
who is the CEO of HCL. Got it. And that is an IT services firm and we'll get into what he does. To my immediate right is Arlie Hochschild who is a writer and a
professor at Cal Berkeley and an expert in this field. To my left, my immediate
left is Yuval Harari from the University of
Jerusalem, a historian and the author of an awesome book Sapiens, the history of humans, right, which is a book that I think many people have read here at Davos. And to my far left is Mary Flanagan who is an interdisciplinary
scientist, inventor, artist, humanist and also a professor
at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire
and a traveler of the World. So let's get right into it. Yuval, I wanna start with you
because you're a historian and you've sort of studied
mankind throughout the ages, medievalist, you're a middle
ages scholar in particular but you understand what work was about going back into time in history. So can you give us some context? I mean, what is this notion
of work and human beings? What does it mean for
human beings to work? - That's a tough question. - [Andy] It's a biggy. - It changed throughout
history many times. For much of history, people didn't work. They survived. The idea that you have, I have a job. This is my job. I get up, I go in at
8:00 to 5:00, I do this. This is quite a model notion. This is not how hunters gatherers lived for hundreds of thousands of years. Now of course, skepticism or
anxiety about the loss of jobs is also not something new. Certainly throughout the
Industrial Revolution, for the last two or three centuries there is always this fear,
the machines are taking over. We will become irrelevant. But I think that this
time it might be true. With the guy who cried wolf, eventually the wolf really came. - Right, okay. That's a little scary. Wolves, technology wolves. So Arlie, let me ask you. I'm asking broad questions first then we'll sort of drill down. Let me ask you, what is the state of things right now? Do you consider us to be
in a crisis in terms of matching work with humanity? How would you access the state of affairs? - I think we are facing a crisis that we're not talking about. I don't feel that either in
the United States at least, left or right are really
saying hey, automation is here. We need to look at France, let's say. We need continuing education. So, it is a crisis and my fear is that some political leaders
will use the anxiety that crisis creates to blame
people who are not at fault, likes blacks and immigrants. - Okay, CVK, I wanna
ask a little bit about, maybe talk a little bit
about what your company does and then also give us
a global prospective. How equal is this change around the world? - We at HCL Technologies, we are one of the fastest
growing IT services companies, about $8 billion, 120,000 people primarily all technology
services talent is what we have. As I kind of look at this problem and then wanna narrowly focus on technology industry, I think
the wolf is not going to come. That's really the strong
belief that I have. And it's really, if you look
at every technology company, there is a huge shortfall of skills. We are not able to hire the right skills, whether it is data scientists
or cybersecurity specialists. Even to do change management,
even to do program management in the modern context, it's so difficult to get the right talent. And every company, probably
there are more than a billion jobs in the technology sector which is not getting fulfilled with the right level of talent. So, I do believe in the
technology industry, the direction is very different. Instead of looking at job
losses, it's really about how can you re-skill
and how you get people much more capable to deliver
to the new demands of the day. I would say that. - Great. Mary, I think it's safe to
say you're a creative person. And so, I wanna ask you a kind
of big question for you is are we limiting ourselves in the way that we conceive of work and the way that human
beings can think about work? What can we do differently in terms of how we think about behavior and work? - Well this is a really
great question because it builds on history, right? I mean, if we didn't have this notion of nine to five work before
and we have it now, we could see changes that
are unfamiliar forms of work. So for example, thinking about new
technological partnerships with groups of people working independently who might not be in a corporate structure, a cooperative forms of
new initiatives like... I think we're gonna be seeing
a lot of different formats for corporations and companies that we don't actually have
a good understanding for now. I think we've seen this
also in the push towards the handmade, with the
automation and with advances, we also will have a return
to the boutique fetishization of the object as well. So let us not forget
the kinds of new markets that will be emerging. As we have more capacities,
we'll also have more need for the human in some places. - I wanna continue with
you a little bit Mary and I know you do a lot of work with AI. Can you talk a little bit
about how AI impacts work? We all know, okay, technology
is displacing jobs right or changing them at least. But how can AI, how is AI
affecting jobs and work? - AI's the hot, one of the hot
topics at the whole forum so I'll only speak from my
perspective on this which is I think we have this discourse about AI in terms of automation and moving some simple tasks along. This is beyond big data and
other forms of new knowledges that can emerge from AI so we have lots of different levels that which AI is operating. For me, what's interesting
is to figure out how the human matches into that equation. I don't think AI necessarily replaces, it's not like the job
replacer or the job killer so much as this job, in some cases, automation. But in other cases, it'll act as a partner or improve jobs or improve
work, what you can do. My worry, of course, as a
humanist is to go back to how are we preparing
people to think about this? How can we take someone who's
working at a grocery store and help them retool
into another kind of work and then what does society
look like in that equation? Those are really tricky areas I don't think we're
prepared for in terms of how we even conceive education and preparation to live in our society. - Just two notes by the
way, in terms of audience. Number one, the audience here, we will be going to you all
for questions at some point about 30 minutes in so get ready
with questions, number one. And number two, I want to
welcome everyone who's watching this panel on the live
screen which we are streaming all across the world on Yahoo. So Arlie, I wanna talk
to you about your book, Strangers in Their Own Land which is, it sounds like a really fascinating study and work that you did
when you went to Louisiana and talked to people who,
I guess you could say, were feeling disenfranchised to a degree. What did you ask them
and what did you find? - Well I spent five years. First, getting out of my
bubble from Berkeley California and finding an equal
and opposite bubble in Southern Louisiana among
blue collar whites, many evangelicals and really trying to take my own alarm system off and cross what I call an empathy wall so I could really hang out with them and see what meanings,
what feelings they had that underlaid their politics. At the time, I didn't know
that they would become ardent Trump supporters but it turned out that I was,
that's who they were. So what I found... Just back up to say I started
with this red state paradox. How could it be that across the U.S., it's the poorest states,
the states with the worst healthcare, the worst education, the most disruptive
families who take more money from the federal government and aid than they give to it in taxes and yet they revile
the federal government? Big tea party, they wanna
reduce the government. So I thought well, I don't get that. That's the question I brought with me but when I got there, they
dropped that question. That wasn't their question,
that was my question. They said okay, we know, we're
embarrassed to be so poor but, the real thing is something else. And that something else, I
came to feel was a deep story. What is a deep story? Deep story you take facts out of it. You take moral precepts out of it. It's just what feels true
about a salient situation and you can tell it like a dream. By the way, left and right
both have deep stories. It's emotion based. In the right deep story,
they're waiting in line. It's in the pilgrimage and
facing the American dream. Their feet are tired. They feel they don't begrudge anybody. They're just waiting
for the American dream and then, in a moment,
they see line cutters. Well, these are federally
mandated affirmative action blacks who finally have access
to jobs that have been reserved for whites. Even worse, women who
finally have access to jobs that have been reserved for men. Immigrants, refugees, even animals. They think that the environmentalists are putting animals above people. All they see as line
cutters so it feels unfair and then they see Barack
Obama in this case, and waving to the line cutters. Oh, he's their President. I'm left out. I'm pushed behind. So that's the deep
story and they felt that finally someone heard them. They didn't see anything else for them, not the democratic party,
not the republican party. Someone swooped in who
is now our President and said I'm your guy. They are that desperate. It's not that they love him but nobody else seems to
recognize the situation of decline and they feel
they're being bumped from, about to be bumped from the good jobs they have or aspire to into the jobs that women and
blacks do that are lower paid and they think, in a way,
what's happened to blacks ultimately's gonna happen to us. So this in desperation and
anxiety that I think has to be front and center. This third of the country, it's really important we address it. And talk across this boundary. By the way, they want to talk. - You mentioned a word I just picked up on which is anxiety. There is a lot of anxiety out there. Fear, some of it unfounded but when you feel anxious,
when you feel depressed that's a reality and Yuval, you have some thoughts on that. That people are coping
with these kinds of fears of not being able to get the right jobs and work and how it extends
to their lives at large. Can you talk a little bit about that? - I think there are two
issues regarding anxiety we should face. First of all is that, traditionally, people in that situation face exploitation and you have this big socialist call to arms that the
exploited should revolt. Being exploited is very bad
but at least you have power. Now people fear something far,
far worse than exploitation. They fear irrelevance. - [Arlie] Yes, that's right. - When you're exploited,
you're at least important. They can't shoot me, I
mean, who would work? When I'm irrelevant,
that's far more scary. So this is one anxiety that is rising. And the other issue with anxiety is that I think that there will be new jobs. The big questions is whether people will be
able to reinvent themselves to fill these jobs. If you have to reinvent
yourself every 10 years because the Automation Revolution will not be a one time affair. We have a big revolution,
everything is encased and then it falls down
to a new equilibrium. End of story. No, it will be a cascade
of ever bigger revolutions and disruption and then people
have to reinvent themselves again and again and that's
extremely difficult. To reinvent yourself when you're 20, it's difficult but you do it. To do again at 30, at 40, at 50, that's very high levels of anxiety. - Alright, so you got wolves and constant revolutions over here Yuval. This is tricky stuff. But, I think you're very
much onto something. I wanna ask you CVK a
little bit about this. The job elimination and losses are real. McKinsey has a study that says
that one-third of all workers in the U.S. and Germany will
have to find new types of jobs over say a 10 year period. CVK, you talked about new formats for jobs and I'm curious as to
what they means exactly. - I think the formats of jobs are changing in several dimensions. First, somebody alluded that it's not an eight to five kind of jobs. It's very flexible hours. That's one fundamental change. Second is as a society we've been used to 15 or 20 years of education followed by several decades of
professional career and work. I think that's going to change. We're in a world where it's a
state of continuous learning. You learn, you acquire new skills. Just taking on the point that he said. You have to reinvent yourself. You need to be continuously learning. I think that's a very,
very important dimension of keeping yourself relevant in the new paradigm. It's again, you tend to work
with more humans as colleagues. We need to get to use to working with humanoids as colleagues because it's really,
Artificial Intelligence, robotics, all of them. It's very important to recognize that they enable humans to do some
things better and faster. I think as long as that
thought is clearly embedded in the minds and that scenario,
then you're a lot more working constructively to find solutions. Even if you look at any study,
you mentioned about McKinsey, there's a Gardner study which
says the next three years, 1.8 million jobs will be lost but there's a 2.3 million new jobs
which are getting created. So, I think any study talks about changing profile of the work, the repetitive monotonous work, obviously throughout the history,
they've got automated, they've got eliminated but more creative, more unique, more thinking
oriented jobs continually work. I think it's just recognition of this and then we really focus
on doing something about changing or re-skilling
the broader work force. That's where the solution lies. - I wanna talk, get drilled
down into some of those numbers because there's all
kinds of data out there and you can find the data that kind of matches your
viewpoint to an extent. It's always kind of the
case but here in particular. Let me ask you just point
blank about outsourcing because this is what you do and is outsourcing bad
for developed countries and good for developing countries? Net, net, pure and simple. - Absolutely not. I think if you, you need
to look at outsourcing in different colors. If we look at the technology industry, today every business is getting reinvented with technology at the core. The technology intensity
in the industry is growing tremendously and even exponentially. I think outsourcing is truly creating jobs because your ability to address or serve the needs of
the technology intensity, that's really in the
play in every enterprise. It is the core of creating
more white collar jobs and I think if we are a
big enabler, we bring in... We're probably the only industry which is bringing in a lot of young talent and really making them better adept to deal with the technology requirements that the future is looking at. - Okay. Mary, I wanna ask you about gender and jobs in the future of work. - Oh yeah. - Yeah? It's a question. Will women be hurt more or less with the changes coming to employment do you think? - Well, I mean that's the big fear for most people engaged in any kind of... Looking at the biases in our systems, if we're getting rid of
some of the low paying jobs, they tend to be people of color and women, at least in the United States. They might be immigrants,
migrants, or those less educated so we have to really understand
the class implications of technological development and the infrastructural
racism that could result, and sexism and gender, that
could result as a form of this kind of thing. Now how we get over this is
a really interesting question and I wanna go back to
this notion of education. What if we throw out the idea of, I'm at a University so
apologies to Dartmouth, but if we throw out the idea of University as a one time thing and we think about it lifelong learning and we think about the kind
of experiential learning that has to be happening
the rest of our lives in order to keep up with ourselves and our on work environment. It changes how Universities
might become partners with institutions and businesses. We might have a kind of spiral. And I think this would also work in help shifting some
of these class issues because right now, we don't have a huge section of the population
even attending college. It's not relevant. How do you make it relevant? It's necessary to work in the, it's a backbone of the
infrastructure society right? So I think shifting the
role of education may be a dire need, really quickly actually. And I don't think institutions
are thinking this way at all. We're thinking about online learning and expanding skills but
it's really these mindset.. How are you gonna create a creative class? That's something that doesn't
happen in an online class of clicking your buttons, you know. This is something experiential. It's lived. We really need to retool and reinvest in our learning situations whether they be Universities or some other model. - You mentioned lower
skilled jobs being displaced and maybe women being
disproportionately represented in those jobs and one
job that comes to mind that I think is front and
center this week is cashiers at stores and I'm saying that because I don't know if you
guys saw this but Amazon opened up its first cashierless store. At first when I saw that, I said "oh, I'm familiar with that. "I've seen it in the airports. "You just check out yourself." But it's not like that. It's a lot easier because, I don't know again if you saw this but it's with the app and
you have Amazon's app and you scan the app when you
walk into the Amazon store and then you go into the store and you just pick things
off the shelf and walk out. And it scans the things
that you are walking with so it's much easier because I always found
those self-checkout things to be very clunky and slow
and that's a 1st Gen thing. I always go to the cashier
'cause the cashier's faster. - Yeah, than you are. - Which is job security. But this Amazon thing is not job security and let me see here, I've got there's 3.5 million cashiers
in the United States alone. Think about that. And then another one which is at risk, we'll talk about jobs at
risk are truck drivers. The truck drivers, again
in the United States, the biggest job category. The number one job in the
United States is truck drivers and we've all heard about
driverless trucks coming. So Arlie, I just wanna ask you if you've given any thought to what kind of work will we be doing and what kind of work do
the subjects of your book aspire to maybe is a question
I could ask you then. - Yeah. The first thing I'd say is
that work, the fact of work is hugely moral for the people
I came to know in Louisiana. In other words, I talked
with one woman who said "I'm a worker." She didn't tell me how
good she was at the work. She didn't tell me - [Andy] That was how she identified herself.
- How important, consequential, did it make a better world? It wasn't that. It was just "I work". And she attached pride to that and so desperate was that she said actually, I think we outta
go to Europe and France and take all the graveyards of fallen American soldiers
from World War I and II, bring those graveyards back
to Louisiana or somewhere else where American workers can tend the graves and with American lawn
mowers can mow the lawn. - Wow. - This was her feeling and it wasn't... And she looked down on people, this is the other side
that's really important, on people who did not work. People would say to me things like "oh, at 7th and Broad Street, "they're giving out Obama phones "to the people that don't work". These are phones. "Go look" as if this was a shame spot. "This is the people that don't work. "They go there. Or another grocery store. "When they get their welfare checks, "they buy chickens over there. "You should go over there and look." What was I being told to do? But to experience the shame
that they attached to nonwork. So where you're talking
about a change of mental set and you too that we have
to reschool ourselves but the people I'm talking
to, the Trump supporters are, they're not ready at all. And I would add a gender point. I think part of what I saw being tapped is a crisis in manhood. I think that Donald Trump as
tapped into some anxiety again that men are feeling even more than women. I know there's some
research done at Berkeley that indicates that first
generation college students, should I go to college or not, women are more likely to say, okay, do I dare accumulate the debt? Yes, I do and it's the guys who say no,
I don't dare go to college because it would cost too much and they're staying in
the blue collar avenue. Well, that's the most vulnerable avenue. So I think we have to look at men as in crisis and anxious and find a solution. - Oh, I think you're spot on, I mean, especially younger women are
particularly achieving more, that generation, Gen X and Gen Z. By the way, I also
wanna make a point that, I'm sorry if we're talking a little bit about the United States, too much. But I think that all of these trends that we're talking about apply to Europe and other parts of the World
as well, particularly Europe. It's developed counties. I mean, you've seen the
same political reactions and traits and trends in Europe,
in many countries in Europe that you are seeing in the United States. So it's sort of metaphorical
or emblematic that way. Yuval, I wanna ask you
about humans and work again. What work are humans best suited to do and what work makes the
most sense for humans to do now and in the future? I give you the hard ones. You keep coming back with the wolves and the revolutions so I'm
giving you the hard ones. - Well, you know, a lot of what people do is just not recognized as
work, like raising kids. It's not recognized as work. You can just change the label and say oh, there is plenty of work for everybody. It's just whether you
recognize it as such or not. And certainly much of the
work that people do today or in the last century or two, it's definitely not in their nature to just stand like Charlie
Chaplin in a big factory and just screw something all day. As we evolved as hunters
gatherers, we are much more adapted to go to the forest, look for mushrooms, climb trees and things like
that but who does that today? We are beyond the point where you can say there is a natural human work or there is a natural human job. The lines keeping shifting especially, not just as AI is developing. I think there is far too
much focus on AI and robotics when we talk about the
future of the job market and we should pay equal
attention to what is happening on the Biotechnological front and especially to our ability
to decipher human beings, decipher the human brain. A lot of jobs depend on the ability to understand human emotions. Even to just drive a little car, you need to understand these pedestrians, how are they behaving. Certainly if you want to replace bankers or social workers, you need
to understand human emotions. The big revolution which
is happening in parallel with AI machine learning is
deciphering the human brain. We could reach a point in
the not too distant future that AI could have better
emotional intelligence than human beings. They won't have consciousness. They won't have feelings of their own but if you accept what the
life sciences are telling us, that emotions are just
biochemical algorithms, they are not some metaphysical spirit, then we are very close to the point when an AI will have better
emotional intelligence than human beings. - And so what are we left to do then? - That's the big question. - That's the question of our panel. - Exactly. Well, so I'm asking,
- moderator - you have to answer. So we've talked about this. We talk about these jobs and we talked about this
back in the our prep session. What jobs, it's kind of a parlor game, what jobs are vulnerable,
what jobs are not? Go ahead, I'm sorry. - One, again just thinking
in a slightly different way, is we don't have to protect jobs. We have to protect people. You could have scenarios
in which you ditch jobs. Most jobs are not worth keeping. Who wants to be a cashier, all his life? This is the meaning of my life. I'm a cashier and, I don't want this. Sometimes I have to do it
but it's not like something, oh we have to save the cashiers. So we really need to protect
the humans, not the jobs and the crisis here is
a crisis of meaning, not of employment. If you can solve the crisis of meaning, then you can forget about jobs. - But there's also, did you want to say something, I'm sorry? - No, okay. - There's also a political question though that maybe this is linked to
which is universal income. - Right. - Right. - Right. - Let me ask the audience. How many people believe
in universal income? - Five, six. - A lot of people do but
a lot more people don't. So is there anyone who wants to talk about universal income and why it's a good idea? - Women. - We'll get to that, maybe
we'll get back to that. I just think, that's a
really interesting point. CVK, I wanna go over to you
and ask you then though. What jobs do you think are
the most easy to replace and what are the most difficult
to replace with technology? - I think at the very basic level, all the jobs that the left brain does is something which can be automated. And the right brain is where you will find it very, very difficult. It's emotions. While you can describe
it as chemical reactions to understand and decipher and for the technology to evolve, it's really a long way off. So it's the creative, unique, jobs which need a lot of thinking. I think pretty much the
right brain is what is not replaceable, I would say. - Mary, do you have examples
of people who are using creativity to sort of redefine their work. You meet with all
different types of people who are doing really cool things. - Well, since 1973, an artist Harold Cohen
actually developed an AI to paint paintings. So he wanted to paint but he
thought he was a bad painter so he just made an AI to paint. And then the AI was called AARON and AARON started painting
and selling his paintings. And AARONs paintings sell for quite a... They're doing alright so this partnership with using AI or kind of this
partnership in using a tool as a creative process is a
long time coming actually. Artists have been thinking
about this the whole time. So, as soon as there's a
technology, artists are doing... I would encourage everybody to look at what artists are doing
today about social media and about issues of privacy because that's where the critique and the new tools actually
come out in the dialogue. It will surface in culture 20 years later. So it's interesting but that's one example I can give you where we have this kind of fusing. - Right, people talk
about that partnership of human and machine as the
sort of ultimate paradigm going forward. There are also things, we were
talking about this as well, jobs that are not repetitive and deal with unexpected events. What was that one? - Oh - [Andy] The plumber? - Oh no. Definitely yes. I had forgotten about my plumber analogy. Yes, the plumber is a
very safe job I think. Finding a frozen pipe and
trying to figure this out. Plumbing is not standardized. Anything that's not standardized and very difficult to
kind of parse, I think is on the way to human's being
able to be a little bit more apt at that particular
position than a computer. Although, never say never. Technology will always surprise
us as where it comes in and is very useful and where it isn't and that's again, great. I don't think that there's
a burning desire to make AI for replacing artists. It's not like that's the
forefront of the jobs today. I'd be more interested in thinking about could you automate project management? Multitasking and seeing if you're behind and motivating your team members. What does that look like? That's an interesting question. Now everyone would think that's a safe job because it requires so many human skills. Ha. What would that look like? So these thought experiments I think help us try to see where humans are strong at particular positions and also the ethical questions. Anytime there's an ethical
question, humans need to be there to be deciding those ethical questions. - I've seen algorithms
with ethical questions in Silicon Valley and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't which is maybe not a good success rate when it comes to ethical questions. - That's true of humans also. - I suppose so, yes. Well we're not infallible when it comes to ethical
questions, are we? - No - Not infallible period. In fact, we're quite fallible. - Yes. Are machines fallible? - Yes. - Right. - But maybe at, depends on
the rate of fallibility. - And who's programming them. But you also talked about gardening is a job that
may be safe and lawn care. Things like that or being a dentist. But all those things could be. In fact, I was looking at something and one study showed that a very safe job from technology, and I mentioned this to you guys, was clergy, a minister. That is until I found there
was an app called confession with a dropdown menu for sins. - Is there an other? - So to your point Mary,
you think you're safe and then maybe three years
later you're not so safe. - I think we should watch
the safe word though. 'Cause it's not about
whether we're safe or not, it's how we can use this technology. I do wanna be an optimist
and say okay, well we have to design for the human and we have to have certain
ethical standards for that but it's always going
to be a dance I think between the technology and the people. - And where I was
hanging out in Louisiana, religion is hugely important. There's a church at every
block and big mega churches and I don't think they would use this app. The more anxious they become
about the loss of a morale self and meaning, the more they
would turn to church, I think. - Or the other thing they
turn to is opioids and drugs sadly and then that becomes
a whole other place, sadly of job creation which is people who work in addiction
and first responders. In your state of New
Hampshire are very, very busy because they have a
huge heroine, fentanyl, and opioid problem in that state. It's a growth category but
it's kind of a sad one. - Right, right. - I wanna ask you Arlie a little bit about the government because that
was sort of a key issue for the people in your book. Can government be a
source of help for people as they transition to other jobs? There was a program in West Virginia where they were trying to help
coal miners become coders. - Right. - It sounds a little silly maybe but a lot of people signed up. There were 50 openings
and 700 people signed up. - That's my next project actually. I got a call from a
democratic congressman, 17th district in California, Bo his name is, and he made a, Bo Khan, an agreement. His constituency is the Silicon Valley and he said "half of my
constituents here are Asian. "I am Asian myself." And he made a deal with
a republican congressman from Paintsville Kentucky whose constituency are
unemployed coal miners. And what they have done
is set up coding program. It takes three weeks. You get $400 a week and are
promised a $40,000 a year job, if you succeed. The first 30 students have graduated and they call themselves
now Silicon Hollow. So they're staying
right there in Kentucky. They don't wanna move
but they're doing coding for apps for cell phones. So will their jobs be automated out? Well, maybe eventually. Are older people graduating
from these courses? I'm gonna find out. It's a start and I liked it
that it seemed bipartisan and forward looking. Incidentally, in Paintsville Kentucky, there's an opiate addiction, huge problem and presumably, this could help with that. - You mentioned Asia and I
wanna talk to you CVK about that and government policies in the two most populous
countries in the world, India and China. I would maintain that jobs and having a robust job economy is a policy/obsession of
the Chinese government and I'm wondering what
your take on that is and in India as well. Is that an obsession
for Prime Minister Modi? - Absolutely. I think if you just try and differentiate how this problem manifests in Asia was as the rest of the World. I think the fundamental
differences in the demographics. The number of young graduates or people, millennials who are
getting into the work force every year is more than the population of a few countries, right? So, I think the challenges
of a very different dimension which is pushed by the demographics. So I think job creation
trying to kind of train them and make them equipped
for the entry level jobs is the big agenda. I'm sure it's a big agenda in India and so is the case with China as well. I think all of them have a role to play. They academy has a big
role to play because the nature of education
is quite not aligned to what the job requirements are. There is a huge gap between them so there is a lot of effort
going into training them to make them eligible for the jobs. Common roles has a big
role to play because the availability of access to training, awareness of what are the right skills to really build capabilities on, and industry as well. I mean industry needs to
bridge the gap between the education and employability. I think that's a big gap especially on the technology industry, it's a very big thing. - Someone made the point and I don't know if this is urban myth or not but that
in China, for instance, there are so many technology graduates that the government uses
those graduates as part of the security apparatus that
are filling all those jobs of people surveilling
the population of China and the populations of
other parts of the world. Actually, sure it's security but it's also we need to get jobs for these people. So the implications there are
sort of interesting as well. Again, you hear things in
the United States about China that are not necessarily the case so we'll have to be careful about that. I wanna see if we can go to the audience and get some questions from you guys. Ah, we got some people
right away, right away. Do we have microphones? We do. There's two people. You have to choose between those two. It's your... Okay, he did it. Please. - Good afternoon. I'm a global shaper from Kazan. My name is Liaison. I'm also from educational system and I'm an associate
professor in the University and I have a question. How and who should change our traditional educational system? And you could you please
describe ideal future educational system and how it looks like in your opinion maybe? I wanna say very big thank you to you for incredible discussion. Thank you. - We have two academics here. You guys both wanna answer it? One at a time. Go ahead. Or anyone else. Three academics, I'm sorry. - Yeah, we have three academics. So many academics. I'll start because I'm
verbose and I have really, really clear things,
hopefully clear things. So I've been advocating since I came. I've been at Dartmouth nine years and I've been advocating
that we throw out classrooms and just throw out the whole notion of the way we learn and we
teach in project teams and tackle real world problems that also include philosophers,
social scientists, hard scientists, technologists,
and we just go around, and artists and work as project teams doing the whole curriculum
in this kind of way. So that's been my proposal. No one's listening to me but it's great that I propose these things. And I really do believe that there's this, we need to reshape even, not only the way the
disciplines work together and specialties and generalizations
for 21st century skills we call these. Things like creative problem solving. Things like even the wow factor, being excited about things
is like a kind of skill. We don't need information retention, we need cross disciplinary thinkers who can grab onto solutions. There's that sense but
it's also about teamwork and I wanted to get back to this whole, we haven't traditionally at
least in formal United States learning structures emphasized teamwork and I know that's
different around the World. But teamwork is really still
very uncomfortable for students and very untrusted and
difficult to access. Obviously, I also do game design and those are very team
based kinds of things to do. So teamwork is still something,
it should be a natural thing that is a part. Humans are social creatures whether we like to think about it or not. That was a cell phone. I'm just not hiding you know. I could do that too. It's like a social creature. But like, that's one proposal for you. - Yuval, you have anything to add from the University of Jerusalem or go ahead Arlie. I'm sorry.
- I love what you just said Mary. That really sounds very exciting. What I would add to it I think is the idea of Universities getting
out of their moral bubbles. There is a big split between
people who live in rural areas who resent the elite class and then there are Universities
who produce the elite class in a sense of wow, you're so special. You were chosen to study at
Oxford or Harvard or Berkeley. And we've got to get rid of that. We need exchange programs between rural and urban Universities. Berkeley is now trying to
get an exchange program with University of
Mississippi, for example. I think more of that to break
down the sense of isolation and othering. So I would add that and the
idea of continuing education. - Anything you wanna add? - Yeah, any solution will
have to be lifelong education which breaks the sharp
divide between the school and real life and also the really big
problem is scalability. When we can think all kinds
of very creative solutions which can be applied in, I
don't know, Silicon Valley but what do you do about
the millions of people who lose their jobs in
Bangladesh producing shirts. What kind of education will they get or do they get today that
will enable them to cope with immense challenges that are ahead? So, the big thing, working
for the old fashioned industrial era education
is that it's scalable. We need to compete with the scalability not just with coming up
with some bright idea. - Very good, very good. A question, oh, here. Got a microphone, sorry. - Fantastic panel. I'm coming from London
School of Economics in fact and my question is to Professor Harari who is my intellectual hero. Where is leisure? Where is leisure in all this discussion? We have been talking
about jobs and in our era but the counterpart to this is that leisure has increased over time and it's qualitatively
has been revolutionized. The way I spend my
leisure is very different, sort of intellectually much more enriching and much more enriching than ever before thanks to technology and all the excess sort
of very costly access. So where is leisure in all this? - Well, it's the other side of the coin. If you solve the problem
of meaning especially, then that's related to
the problem of leisure. I don't think we've doing
very well with leisure despite all the advances. People today are living, at
least in many parts of the world compared to both their ancestors in the middle ages dreamt about. People today, in many parts of the world are living in paradise. But it doesn't feel like that. - [Andy] Why? - Because we don't know. We are good when it
comes to being efficient and working hard and all that but when, okay, you've done it. Now just take it easy and, we can't do it. - It's because these are always, one of the reasons we
always have these, right? - And that also is a form of work by the way.
- Yes. Very much so, right? There was this line that Cain said we would only be working 15 hour weeks but we're actually now
working 15 hour days. It's kind of a familiar trope with... Anyway. That's a very interesting point. Question over here? These people. This person. - Hi, fantastic discussion. I'm Rasolid. I'm a global shaper from
the Tokohaba Monabish. So, all of you have eluted
to the pace of change and how fast it is changing. But I think one of the
things that doesn't feature in the discussion as much is why. I think there are like forces
that are hidden in plain view that are driving many of these changes like for a company for example. You have clear incentives to
replace labor with capital. So these conversations
like those hidden forces, can we bring them into the discussion and think about how we
can change the incentives to prioritize people and not
just the drive for efficiency at the expense of people? Thanks. So your thoughts on that please. - It's a business question. - Businesses and corporations
are always going to push the envelope of efficiency, right? And I think every time
when they've done that, the outcomes have been better, right? One is you may have eliminated some jobs but the quality of work
that is being done, the speed at which things are being done, that only benefits the larger good. Now, at the same time, the businesses will also
have to take responsibility of how are they trying to deal
with the job losses, right? To some extent, you're
working on an outcome which is driven by your shareholders and what the capitalistic
economy's looking at but if you just stand back a little bit, a lot of companies are
enlisting in training. I think the training
budgets across the world, most enterprises are continuing to enhance the training budgets. So I think you need to do it
in a very responsible manner. I think we should just try and push the envelope on that as well. You focus on efficiency, push
the envelope to the maximum but also look at what is
the part for innovation, how can you enable that
by better investments and learning and development. - Arlie, you had comments. - I like this question very much and I think it's very important. I think it's connected
to the question of the distribution of wealth in the world and the country, speaking
of the United States. Does automation mean that capital is getting concentrated? Do the people who are
in the companies that produce automation and
being taken from people that don't do that. This question really is central, why I like your question. I would add the political
consequences of this. If the people that I
studied, third of the U.S. who really feel that Trump is their savior and they increasingly lose
money in this redistribution, they and Trump is
offering them symbolically a few new jobs. We'll bring carrier jobs
for example back to the U.S. but he really doesn't do anything and he doesn't do anything
about re-skilling, then people are going
to be really fearful, anxious, and he's going to redirect blame for their unhappiness toward immigrants, toward blacks, toward women. I think we need to think
about redistribution and the political manipulation
of the anxiety that produces. - And maybe really underlying of course is the digital revolution, right? I mean, it's sort of I guess, a given. We haven't even said that
but that's really what the cause, the approximate
cause, the accelerant and maybe why Yuval's
wolf is real this time because we've never
seen anything like this in the history of mankind, right? - Andy, I think to build
on this conversation and to really be inspired
by your question, we do have to as societies
think about what's enough. Like what is enough? And can we reach that? And this goes back to the meaning right? What is a meaningful life? What is enough? And we don't ask that enough I... That is not enough. I will say that. Instead, this idea of progress really might need to be questioned. Why have all this speed
and efficiency when I don't meet a human face during my day? We have grocery stores and we get rid of all of the human employees
because it's very efficient. What is my life like as a
person walking down the street not seeing people? We're not built for that. We can try to adapt to that but why would we build a world in which we don't want to live in? We keep doing that. So, I think we might
wanna take a step back and say okay, how to we manage this obsession with progress and growth? Why are we so obsessed with that and could we say, maybe we have enough and we need to share? - Question over here. - Hi, my name is Enid. I am a global shaper as
well from Geneva Switzerland and my question is, you've all mentioned, you've talked about the
responsibility of both the companies and the educational system and how all these need to work together to shift the mindset of people as well from going from the traditional mindset of waiting for the University to teach you or the companies to train you and move towards reinventing yourself and continuous learning. So my question here is what can we do as individuals while we wait for all these
changes to come together, what can we do right now as
we're trying to move towards personal development and
owning our own careers but concretely like, what can we go? - Push for continuing education. I wouldn't wait. I would get into an activist mode and push for precisely
the kind of innovation I think Mary's talking about. I think Macron is talking about giving funds to citizens that can be
used for lifelong learning. We could take that as a model, I think, to other less advanced
countries like my own. - Go ahead. - I think it's really a
question of who you are. People are in extremely
different situations and this means they have
different opportunities. The reason all universal individual that you can give advice to. The best advice I could
give is to invest above all in your own mental resilience because in times of chaos, the only certainty is
there's going to be change, lots of change. So anything particular you invest in, like learning how to code or do this or this particular skill, it's a bet. And you don't really
know whether this skill will actually be necessary. The one thing that you
will need, certainly, is emotional resilience
and mental resilience to just survive with all
this change, all this stress. But this is very, very difficult. I don't know of any course in University which teaches you how to
be emotionally resilient. - There should be. - Some pedagogies do focus
on growth mindset however. - There are actually companies, there's a company for instance
called General Assembly which maybe solves two
problems at the same time where you can go and it's
in cities around the world for instance, and you
can go there and learn. Yes, you can learn to code
but other business skills. Beyond that, you're with other
people, right, to your point. So you're communally learning and growing and challenging and
adapting to the new economy and socializing at the same time. - Whoa, keep good friends
- which seems pretty cool. Right, right. So we're getting close to
the end of this session and just to, one more quick one? Is it a quick one? Good, okay. Let's just do that. Always wanna make sure people are... - What we're talking actually about are two different things. One is putting jobs out of work. If you look at the caring
economy which is unpaid, we can call it jobs
and that was discussed. What actually we are talking about is that if the wolf is
really real this time, what's the insurance policy we have? So we probably have to
look at basic income and if basic income has
two different concerns. One is is it affordable and there are studies going on and it'll be clear. Sometimes studies say it
will be more expensive but it doesn't take into account that if you have basic
income and healthcare, the preventative aspect of healthcare will have far reaching consequences in the budget free affordability. But the other thing is,
and that's very important, is job is not just about income. It actually is about social worth which probably is a more pragmatic and practical illustration of meaning. So what we need to do is start looking at what are different ways in which
people derive social worth. Creative economy is one but
not everyone is creative. We need to look at prosaic ways. People in online communities. They shared something. They become popular. That's what sort of drived them and they have a basic income and they're perfectly
happy to become popular. So as academia and as civil society, we need to understand
where do people derive social worth, just for an insurance policy if the wolf is real this time. - Alright, we're gonna
take that as a comment rather than a question because, not because it wasn't,
because it could be, but also mostly because we're out of time. - It's a very good comment. - So I really enjoyed this conversation. I learned a lot and I
hope you guys did too and it's obviously just the beginning. This is an unprecedented
time in which we're living. The solutions are murky. The change and the wolf are here and we're all going to be living it and experiencing it and I
hope, thriving in it as well. So please join me in
thanking this great panel. CVK, Arlie, Yuval, and Mary. (audience clapping)
