Mike Cannon-Brookes met with a senate committee suggesting that we need to adjust our immigration policies to attract the best and brightest technologists from around the world.
These skills will not be filled by people losing their jobs from technology disruption (drivers being a case in point - who he says will be the blacksmiths of the future )
"Displacing of jobs will cause social problems in society, it's going to come and its going to be very painful if we don't plan for it."
Technology is where we should be focussing our energy as a Nation, he says. “It is already the biggest industry in the world, well past finance and pulling away,
We need to make some important decisions - do we want a seat on that rocketship or not. Do we want to be a primary manufacturer of technology or not?
If we do - we need to plan for it and act accordingly.A ack of technology talent is an issue for Australia, and changes to living-away-from-home allowances and recent 457 visa changes are hurting Australia's tech industry.
While Australian technology graduates are highly sought after, Mr Cannon Brookes said "our best ship off overseas."
What does the worldwide head of research at Google tell his kids about how to prepare for the future of work with artificial intelligence?
"I tell them … wherever they will be working in 20 years probably doesn't exist now," Peter Norvig says. "No sense training for it today."
Be flexible, he says, "and have an ability to learn new things".
Future of work experts (yes, it's a thing now) and AI scientists who spoke to Lateline variously described a future in which there were fewer full-time, traditional jobs requiring one skill set; fewer routine administrative tasks; fewer repetitive manual tasks; and more jobs working for and with "thinking" machines.
From chief executives to cleaners, "everyone will do their job differently working with machines over the next 20 years," Andrew Charlton, economist and director of AlphaBeta, says.
But experts are split on whether this technological transformation will create more jobs than it destroys, which has been the case historically.
"Copying [AI computer] code takes almost no time and cost. Anyone who says they know that more jobs will be created than destroyed is fooling themselves and fooling us. Nobody knows that," says University of New South Wales professor of AI Toby Walsh.
"The one thing we do know is the jobs that will be created will require different skills than the jobs that will be destroyed. And it will require us to constantly be educating ourselves to keep ahead of the machines."
Should we all learn to code?
Yes, says Hamilton Calder, acting chief executive of the Committee for Economic Development Australia (CEDA). "Coding will need to be ubiquitous within the workforce and taught at all levels of the education system."
No, says Mr Charlton. "I think the big misconception here is that in order to be successful in the future economy you need to be competing with machines [and] become a coder, a software engineer. That's quite wrong."
Not everyone needs to code because ultimately AI programs will likely be better coders than humans, says Professor Walsh. But "if you're a geek like myself, there is a good future in inventing the future".
A "broad, basic education with a strong STEM focus (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) will provide the core skills and flexibility that people will need," says PWC chief economist Jeremy Thorpe, "given they will likely change jobs or careers much more than previously".
Say goodbye to that 'dream' job
Seventeen jobs and five careers — it is exhausting just thinking about it. But that is the prediction for school-leavers, according to research done for the Foundation for Young Australians (FYA).
"We should stop encouraging young people to think about a 'dream' job," Jan Owen, CEO of FYA, says.
"It's important not to focus on individual jobs … rather they should aim to develop a skill set that is transferrable [including] financial and digital literacy, collaboration, project management and the ability to critically asses and analyse information."
Future work will fall into one of three categories, says Robert Hillard, managing partner, Deloitte Consulting.
"Firstly, people who work for machines such as drivers, online store pickers and some health professionals who are working to a schedule," Mr Hillard says.
"Secondly, people who work with machines such as surgeons using machines to help with diagnosis, and thirdly, people who work on the machines, such as programmers and designers."
Human-machine teams will combine the lightning-fast speed and accuracy of AI algorithms with instinctive human skills such as intuition, judgment and emotional intelligence, according to a report by the US based Institute for the Future.
Mr Hillard says AI's ability "is to answer a unique question by synthesizing the answers to thousands or millions of related but different questions".
"What AI can't do is design new questions and that's the skill that will make people most competitive: helping their customer or employer find the right question to ask."
While he expects the number of jobs to increase, the danger is they may not be better jobs. Those working for machines will experience the most disruption.
Media player: "Space" to play, "M" to mute, "left" and "right" to seek.
VIDEO
Interview: Professor Rob Sparrow and Professor Ron Arkin
LATELINE
Being human is now a skill
There is one skill we already have that can increasingly be leveraged for income: being human.
"We don't make computers that have a lot of emotional intelligence," Professor Walsh says. "[But] we like interacting with people.
"We are social people, so the jobs that require lots of emotional intelligence — being a nurse, marketing jobs, being a psychologist, any job that involves interacting with people — those will be the safe jobs. We want to interact with people, not robots."
Futurist Ross Dawson gives an example of how this could be turned into a new kind of job.
"Perhaps it is a productive role in society to interact, to have conversations [with other people] and then we can remunerate that and make it a part of people's lives," he says.
Mr Charlton says: "Most of the opportunities are to do things that machines can't do, things that humans do well in the caring economy — to be empathetic, to work in a range of occupations which require interpersonal skills."
China's most successful tech venture capitalist and former Google and Microsoft executive Kai-Fu Lee recently wrote in The New York Times that traditionally unpaid volunteering roles could become future "service jobs of love".
"Examples include accompanying an older person to visit a doctor, mentoring at an orphanage, serving as a sponsor at Alcoholics Anonymous — or, potentially soon, Virtual Reality Anonymous."
Jobs growth is already strong in the caring economy with unmet demand in child care, aged care, health care and education — although many of those jobs are poorly paid.
"The challenge is to recognize that those jobs should be paid well. It's a choice for us as a society, community and government to value those types of human jobs well," Mr Charlton says.
Find your inner artist
Computers are not imaginative or very creative.
"We have one of the most creative brains out there," Professor Walsh says.
So, ironically, "one of the oldest jobs on the planet, being a carpenter or an artisan, we will value most because we will like to see an object carved or touched by the human hand, not a machine".
But humans have always created imaginative new economic opportunities as well.
Seventy seven percent (77%) of US workers say they have heard the term automation, but only 30% say they know what it means. The more job seekers know about this growing trend, the more likely they are to seek more secure jobs. This is according to ZipRecruiters's State of the American Job Seeker report.
Sixty percent (60%) of job seekers believe that fears around robots taking away jobs are over-hyped, but nearly 2 in 3 job seekers (64%) believe workers in most industries will be replaced with computers or robots in their lifetime. Also, the more job seekers know about automation, the more it worries them. Of those looking for a job who heard of automation, 70% say they are looking for jobs that are less likely to be automated.
Automation is changing the way we work, and emerging artificial intelligence technologies will in some way affect the careers of workers in almost every industry. Change, however, does not mean that there won't be jobs, however, they are likely to be different jobs. Forecasts of the impact vary widely with some analysts predicting massive decreases in available jobs in some industries and others suggesting that technology has historically changed the job market, not eliminated the need for workers.
What's very clear, according to the ZipRecruiter report, as well as the related studies it cites, is that the skills needed to get a job are changing and will continue to change.
Technological job displacement has already begun, and it is essential that the workforce is prepared to adapt.
In the report, they found that cost was the top reason for not being able to acquire STEM skills or soft skills -- the two sets of skills currently considered safest from automation.
Change has already come and more is coming. Cost is a challenge for job seekers, especially those already saddled with college debt. The second most-cited reason for people not learning STEM or soft skills -- individuals not believing they need them – may be easier to solve.
To stay employed, or get a job in the first place, workers are going to have to adapt as the market's needs change.
For many, that will mean more training, being open to doing different kinds of work, and adapting before change comes in order to not be swept aside by it.
As we head into 2018, we see that the recruitment and human resources industry is buzzing with innovation. The Adecco Group announced today that it acquired Vettery for a rumoured $100 million.
A trend that's currently taking the HR industry by storm is Artificial Intelligence (AI). There's an AI-powered solution for virtually every part of the recruitment funnel today. But I believe that we are still in the first innings of applications for AI in recruitment.
The Perfect Storm
Recruiting is an interesting business where high value is created in very discrete time intervals via a two-sided market. This means that speed and efficiency is of the essence - and companies that can leverage on the multiplier effects of automation will win in the long run.
The confluence of new technology brought to bear on the recruiting industry, and unprecedented influx of millennials entering the workforce, means that the landscape is shifting for recruitment companies.
According to the Deloitte Human Capital Trends report, 38 percent of HR companies currently use AI, and 62 percent expect to do so by end of this year.
The reason is simple - companies that use AI, predictive data analytics and other technology tools are more successful than those who don't.
Research indicates that innovation adopters demonstrate 18 percent higher revenue and 30 percent greater profitability than their non-adopter counterparts..
(Ivan Kaye - have a look at My Recruitment Plus - Anwar Khalil is at the forefront of AI in the recruitment industry - https://www.myrecruitmentplus.com/)
Below are some interesting applications of AI in the recruitment industry
Sourcing, Screening, Scheduling
Mya is a fully automated recruiting assistant that claims to save up to 75% of a recruiter’s time on sourcing, screening and scheduling interviews with candidates.
The idea is to free up recruiters' time, so they can focus on qualified candidates and spend more time on converting hires.
They raised venture funding to the tune of $32.4 million to bring their AI-recruiter vision to reality.
Mya engages with applicants via chat, poses contextual questions based on the company and job requirements, captures these data - and provides personalised updates & suggestions to candidates. And she does all these at scale - one of their global clients screens over 5 million candidates a year.
This solves the pain point of recruiters today, where huge swaths of candidates “spray and pray” - applying to every posting, regardless of fit or match.
Inundated by low quality applicants, recruiters are forced to trudge through a tedious and inefficient process.
Mya solves this problem by disqualifying irrelevant resumes, engaging directly with potential candidates, and capturing information to help recruitments make better hires.
Writing High Performing Job Posts
Textio is an augmented writing startup that works with Fortune 500 companies such as Cisco and P&G to recruit better talent.
Textio helps recruiters improve the content of their job postings. They claim that small tweaks in language used can make a big difference in response rates and quality of candidates that apply.
They raised $29.5 million to bring their augmented writing platform for creating highly effective job listings to market.
Textio uses machine learning to detect patterns, and evidence of bias in job postings. Its natural language processing engine ingests job postings and analyses them to help companies understand the outcome of these postings - in terms of candidates who apply, receive an offer and accept the offer.
It gives language suggestions to help companies attract a more diverse group of applicants. For example, Textio realised using the word, “manage” draws more male job seekers; and it suggests using “handle”, “lead”, or “run” instead.
Other than diversity, they also claim to help recruit candidates that are 24% more qualified, and fill roles 17% faster.
Acquiring Clients And Increasing Market Share
Saleswhale is an AI sales assistant that engages, qualifies and books client meetings for recruitment consultants at scale.
Disclaimer: In case you haven't already noticed, this is us. I'm just going to continue to narrate in the third-party for the sake of consistency 😉
Saleswhale works with some of the largest recruiters in North America and the Asia-Pacific region, including Fortune 500 companies such as Randstad, to close the gap between sales and marketing for client prospects.
They raised $1.2 million and were incubated by prestigious accelerator Y Combinator (incubatees include AirBnB & DropBox), to deploy an AI assistant for every sales organisation.
It engages marketing generated leads and stale leads via personalised and contextual email messaging, parses and interprets a prospect's reply, and responds accordingly.
It can also send relevant collateral, map out referrals to relevant decision makers, and discern the best times to engage a potential client. It is able to do all these at scale, ensuring that no lead slips through the cracks.
The idea is to automate away monotonous and repetitive tasks, and help consultants spend more time on high-value activities. As a result, Saleswhale hopes to solve the high attrition rate in the recruitment industry.
An average recruitment consultant works long hours, often without proper infrastructure and support. Frequently, they have to work with outdated client databases with incomplete contact information.
Saleswhale is able to collect unstructured datafrom email interactions, and enrich prospect information with latest contact numbers / direct dials alongside other crucial pieces of information - for recruitment consultants to engage prospective clients effectively.
A Ripe Apple Waiting To Fall
Essentially, AI is automating the weak components of business - lack of time, lack of discipline, lack of process, even human laziness-- and replacing it with repeatable, reliable process. It gives a lift structurally to the entire organisation, if applied correctly.
These are just 3 interesting applications of AI in recruitment, and I’m sure we will see a lot more in the coming months. It looks like 2018 will be a watershed year for AI in recruitment - and I’m excited to see new upcoming innovative applications.
Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes. Source: Supplied.
The co-founder of one of Australia’s largest and most influential tech companies has fronted a Senate inquiry into the future of work, urging the government to take proactive steps to prepare for automation’s “massive job disruption”.
Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder of software company Atlassian, told a number of Senators at a hearing for theSelect Committee on the Future of Work and Workersin Melbourne this morning there are many industries that automation will disrupt in the future but he picked out the rapidly emerging self-driving car sector as an example.
“There’s no doubt this technology will revolutionise the economy and many many people will lose their jobs. Approximately 30% of Australian jobs involve driving, and by 2030 an estimated 800 million jobs lost worldwide due to automation,” Cannon-Brookes told the Committee.
“A study from 2016 put it at 40% of all Australian jobs by 2025.”
Cannon-Brookes believes drivers of today, such as Uber drivers or long-distance truck drivers, will be the “blacksmiths of the 20th century”, their jobs made largely irrelevant by new developments in technology. Despite reluctance to scare people and be “Chicken Little”, Cannon-Brookes was resolute that “there will be massive job disruption”.
“Look at any big technological change, like the steam engine. That came with massive job loss and massive job gain,” he said.
“But the jobs gained were not filled with those who lost the jobs. It’s a very hard part of how technology works.”
Despite the entrepreneur’s alarm-sounding, he underpinned his warning with the message that technology is not a destructive force, and with many new jobs created as old ones are lost, workers would have the opportunity to switch careers given enough warning and support by government.
He told the committee the future was here and disruption is “not science fiction”. The government to act soon rather than fighting or ignoring the impending changes, he said.
Cannon-Brookes also specified that self-driving cars are far from the only area where this disruption could occur, but mentioned his four young children and predicted, “I don’t believe any of them will every learn to drive a car”.
“Tech change has been a constant throughout civilisation, and hindsight is a beautiful thing,” he said.
“I implore you to use it in our favour.”
Amazon will tear apart Aussie retail
Cannon-Brookes also briefly touched on the incoming disruption from retail giant Amazon, which is now more valuable than all bricks-and-mortar retailers in the United States.
The impact of Amazon will soon be felt in “our own backyard”, warned the Atlassian co-founder, and while the disruption will be a boon for consumers, he said the effect on Australian businesses “scares me a lot”.
“If I’m being honest, Amazon is going to tear apart Australian retail as it did in the US. That’s not an uncertain future, it’s an already written past,” Cannon-Brookes said.
Upskilling and supporting local workers essential for Australian economy
During the hour-long discussion, Cannon-Brookes spoke on issues of skilled migration and the problems with Australia’s 457 visa system, grievances he and the wider tech sector have regularly raised in recent years.
An oft-heard line was repeated: “The lack of access to talent is the single biggest factor draining the growth of the tech industry in Australia”.
He mentioned the government’s 457 visa changes had “directly” hurt Atlassian as a company, and are suffocating Australia’s ability to grow as an innovation nation. With this in mind, he proposed three major challenges for the economy to overcome, while addressing the future of work and the growth of the tech sector.
“The first part is upskilling and retraining workers. We need to shift the opinion on education from something we do when we’re young to something we do for our entire life,” he said.
“It’s about how we enable lifelong learning so people can continue to learn new skills and embrace new learning opportunities.”
Cannon-Brookes also implored the government to provide income support for displaced workers other than through “traditional systems”, along with ensuring there was enough post-disruption job creation.
“It’s time to start planning how to overcome the negative impacts of technology disruption. Embracing change is hard and scary, you have to learn from the past and move forward without any fear or rhetoric around robots taking our jobs,” he said.
Learnings from the AI session at #sxsw - hosted by Loïc Le Meur - at leade.rs
Loic just hosted a session at South by Southwest on Artificial Intelligence with fantastic speakers.
Adam Cheyer — co-founder of Siri now building “the Siri of Samsung” as his new company got recently acquired Daphne Koller — co-founder of Coursera, McArthur Genius award, Stanford computer science professor Nell Watson — entrepreneur, engineer who wrote two books on philosophy and focusing on machine ethics
A few learnings from Loïc from the session
Siri doesn’t understand my “frenglish”
The highlight for me was definitely when I complained to Adam that Siri never understood my accent and he replied “I never understand your accent either what do you expect”. The entire room laughed (photo). So good.
How can we be scared by the creation of a Terminator like AI+robot when we can’t even tell Alexa I have eggplant and parmesan in the fridge give me a recipe? That doesn’t work well yet while Google or YouTube will just return a good recipe of… eggplant parmesan.
I also learned that the top two questions asked to Siri according to Adam are 1. will you marry me? 2. do you love me?
Humans apparently really need love from machines!
The Terminator is a 1,000 years away
Adam Cheyer said we might be hundreds of years away, maybe 1,000 years away of any AI exceeding human intelligence. For him there is absolutely no reason to have any fears of an AI Terminator. He said that Elon Musk’s Open AI to work on a “safe AI” with up to $1 billion funding committed is a worthy exercise but the near threat isn’t real.
What is human intelligence?
How far did we understand our own intelligence, what makes it different to machines?
Daphne Koller told us that this was a totally irrelevant question to understand or create artificial intelligence. Point. You do not have to understand human intelligence to create AI. It goes even further for Adam, it is better to NOT teach human intelligence to a machine to design an AI. Google/Deepmind managed to repeatedly defeat the best Go player in the world by letting the machine teach itself how to play without any knowledge of how a human would play.
What makes human intelligence different is the capacity to learn from a single experience. A kid burning himself touching a flame for example. A machine needs many repeat experiences to learn, we only need one.
The line between reality and AI created fiction blurs
There are now videos of Obama that are generated by machines making him say things he did not in a remarkably “real” way. It is so well done that humans cannot figure what’s true or not and it will only accelerate. We should be concerned that fake news will look more real than reality now. Machines also learn from news and social feeds and deliver ultra targeted ads. It is easy to imagine how the story of Russian Facebook ads during the Trump campaign is only a start. We won't tell the difference between what's real and fiction anymore.
Loading human values into machines
Nell Watson made really interesting points on how we need to teach machines human ethics so that they do not destroy us. I wasn’t convinced how to be honest but then this was a very short panel. I want to understand it better. If a machine learns from the human atrocities it can find on the internet it will be difficult to teach it “human ethics”. We don’t even agree on these ethics ourselves.
What are the 8 million americans making a living from driving a car or a truck going to do when they lose their jobs?
I got the same answer as always. The agriculture and industrial revolutions also destroyed millions of jobs and we figured it out. Nell added that in the near future she believes that millions of people will just be directly employed by machines. Yes, she believes we will more an more work for machines managing businesses on their own without human management.
Are we going to remain the most intelligent specie on the planet in the future?
The AI experts all agreed that they would have never thought any of the major AI achievements in the last decade would have happened. They urged us to focus on the positive and the incredible applications starting to show results in biology, agriculture or energy. Curing major diseases with AI and machine learning seems to be the most promising for the future of humanity.
Here are three phrases that tend to kill innovation in the workplace
1. “BEST PRACTICES”
When it’s time to figure out the next right move or a first action, it’s natural to want to follow best practices, but this can send a signal that challenges should be avoided... “you can’t go wrong with hiring IBM syndrome”
Best practices are usually two, three, or four years old. They probably aren’t even best practices anymore.”
Using best practices don’t enable you to tie innovative, creative thinking to evolving your work.
While following the blueprints of others can inhibit innovation.... Best practices can also encourage innovation - especially when they’re inspired by industries other than your own.
“A hospital in the U.K. had struggled with bringing patients from the surgical unit to ICU,” he says. “Instead of looking at how other hospitals do it, they gained inspiration from a racing pit crew. They dropped their error rate by using another industry as a take-off point. It’s more interesting to take an established idea in a new creative direction.”
2. “RETURN ON INVESTMENT”
Trying to predict a return on investment (ROI) can be smart business, but when it’s tied to innovation, there’s no way of knowing what it will be. “
After 9 months, the founders of Google tried to sell Google to Yahoo for a million dollars. Yahoo ran their numbers and determined the Roo wasn’t there .
Neither the founders nor the leading search engine of the time had a clue of Google’s ROI. You can’t bring up ROI when an idea is developing.
Discussing ROI is a weapon that shuts down innovation, Ratger look at developing an idea like this/-
‘If this fails, what is the cost and are we okay if it doesn’t work out?'”
3. “WHEN I WORKED FOR . . . “
Another way to shut down ideas is trying to tie your past experience when discussing something new. “When I worked for”drives me insane!
However, using experience from another firm may encourage ideas and new ways of thinking!
