Updating My 2019 Posting on Managing the Future and Living with Continuous Change

Back in 2019, I included in a series of postings entitled “Managing the Future,” a segment called “Living with Continuous Change.” The illustration accompanying the article was of a rollercoaster, my analogy for what living my life has been like, a ride with peaks and valleys, highs and lows, some slower moments, but most often a rush.

Back then, I tried to envision what acquired tools young people would need to deal with the continuous disruptions of this century brought about by environmental and technological change. I already knew what they were doing to people my age who were retired.

I described the need for young people to be “better at virtually everything,” stealing a quote from an article that futurist Thomas Frey had posted. In rereading that posting, I completely missed two significant disruptors: one technical, artificial intelligence (AI) and the other medical, the global COVID-19 pandemic, with both having a profound impact on the global economy and society.

I discussed how young people would need to be smarter, quicker to adapt, and more resilient, as job security would become a thing of the past; how education would no longer be institution-centric, but more a commitment to continuous learning, whether on the job or between them.

I talked about a world of precarious work assignments, the “gig economy,” where people will no longer be employed but rather contracted for project-based assignments, gamification and contests replacing conventional 9-to-5, 40-hour work and leading to a generation I labelled the “precariat.”

I talked about co-generation, getting people of my generation to work side-by-side with young people, in what I describe as a continuous exercise of intergenerational knowledge transfer.

Runaway computer intelligence, or AI as we call it today, was one of the 16 challenges that James Martin, author of “The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for Ensuring Our Future,” described in his 2006 seminal work. I had included AI as number 13 of Martin’s 16 challenges facing humanity this century when I quoted Martin in a posting to this site in March of 2012.

Martin had also included a global pandemic threat in his list. It was number 7. In 2012, I was less concerned about the likelihood of a pandemic disrupting the world, noting that we had the technological means to contain outbreaks and create rapid responses. I must admit, I underestimated the impact of COVID-19 despite having published a posting here in 2019 that contained a World Health Organization list with coronavirus and other high-threat pathogens as number 6 of 10 global biomedical threats.

Getting back to AI, what has happened since ChatGPT first appeared on the scene in November of 2022 has been astonishing. The AI that Martin listed as number 13 of 16 has moved to the top of the list. Why?

AI is a major disruptor for work, careers, education, and more. For entry-level white-collar jobs, it is an employment killer. If you entered university or college in 2022 with aspirations to get a traditional undergraduate degree, when you graduate next year, you will be competing with AI for jobs.

Universities and colleges are taking two approaches to AI. Some have chosen to block its use, which is like putting on blinders. Others are incorporating courses on AI and making them compulsory regardless of the degree being sought. Meanwhile, student use of generative AI has been surging, with a recent UK survey of university students reporting 92% using it to generate text, do edits or source textbook and study materials.

Earlier this week, I talked with a young university student who described how AI has changed the curriculum assignments at his school from essays to oral presentations because faculty were struggling to discern the difference between student and AI-generated prose.

So, what does it mean “living with continuous change” when the change is AI? IBM talks about continual learning as beyond aspirational for humans facing the consequences of AI’s emergence. It is a neuroscience concept focused on the brain’s plasticity, making it capable of constantly adapting to the changes that AI bring. The world AI is bringing us is one of persistent changes. Jobs in the 21st-century workforce where AI is present will need to integrate with the technology and adjust to new roles, workflows, and tools.

The World Economic Forum describes this new reality of organizations continually reinventing themselves. A 2024 Accenture research report, entitled “Change reinvented,” notes that 95% of organizations have gone through two transformations since generative AI emerged, with 61% indicating they have gone through four.

This era of continuous business transformation will be harder to do for the existing workforce. For young people entering the world of work, it will be a work environment where ongoing learning and reskilling will serve as the new normal in a human-AI hybrid workforce.