The Future of Work – A Millennial’s View
I’m blessed to work with some incredibly switched-on young people at Pure SEO. With today’s entrepreneur acutely aware of disruption and impending changes to the future of work, I decided to sit down with this month, and understand a little around his thoughts on this.
Two years out of Otago University, Nathan has been with Pure SEO since graduating. Having studied law and marketing, he started with our graduate programme, and has since moved through into sales and marketing.
The rise of voice
The first thing we spoke about was what’s going to be different if we fast forward five years. Nathan believes voice search and artificial intelligence will play a significant role in shaping the online landscape moving forward. “Right now, we can see the rise of voice search in consumer behaviour. People are increasingly using virtual assistants like Siri and Cortana as an extension of their everyday life.” Look ahead five years’ time, and Nathan expects this shift to have occurred completely, with voice search the norm, and text a thing of the past.
“We’ll no longer be required to do much of the actual work; rather, we’ll be creatively designing the work that AI executes on our behalf.” – Nathan Cargo, Millennial.
Out with the mundane
Nathan goes on to outline that he envisions many of the mundane elements of his job disappearing over the coming years. Things like link building in digital marketing, looking at numbers and finding patterns, designing ad word campaigns – all these have an element of repetition that can easily be taken over by artificial intelligence.
“We’ll see a lot of the mundane stuff go. If it’s repetitive, and doesn’t require any human judgement or creativity, I doubt we’ll be seeing it in five years’ time.”
The human factor
This brings us to the real core of what our younger generation think about the future of work.
Often there’s a lot of doom and gloom about robots taking over, and humans becoming redundant. Nathan has a much brighter outlook on the future—“I think there will absolutely always be a role that humans play in work. There are some things that just can’t be performed by automation or AI, no matter how intelligent their design becomes.”
In Nathan’s mind, humans will gravitate much more towards creativity and innovation. These are the skills of the future, the core competencies that humans hold over robots. Our future workforce is going to need to have a strong understanding of how AI works, how to interact with it, and how to improve on it.
