Jobs of the Future, Part One: Guardians of Reality

This is the first in a series about Jobs of the Future.

I believed for a while that there would be no way AI could create music, poetry, stories, art and ideas, but have now been proved wrong. AI can do all that and more. But can it create relationships and feel like a human? Yes, in theory. Just go watch the film Her again. The thing is that we call this Generative Intelligence whereas I would call it Regurgitative Intelligence. AI is purely absorbing all of the human inputs of music, poetry, stories, art, ideas and relationships, and creating a new version of the original creativity.

Nothing wrong with that, although there’s a lot of controversy around it. For example, major music artists like Nicki Minaj and Pearl Jam (and the estate of Frank Sinatra) recently signed up to the Artist Rights Alliance to try and stop AI  stealing their voices, songs and ideas. The key issue is that copyright-protected works are being illicitly accessed and used without the rights holders’ permission from performances to images to music and the written word.

The thing is that, as with most technological breakthroughs, you cannot stop the progress when the horse has broken out of the gate.

If you say that someone has closed or shut the stable door after the horse has bolted, you mean that they have tried to prevent something happening but they have done so too late to prevent damage being done. Collins dictionary

With this in mind, I wonder what it means for educating future generations and for the jobs of the future?

Based upon various reports, by 2025, most jobs (85 million) will be automated and another almost 100 million new roles will emerge. 65% of kids entering primary school today will work in job types that don't exist. Our kids' future jobs don't exist yet. What will they be?

For some time, I’ve always thought that we need to nurture our humanity. We don’t need math or literature; we need heart and mind. The educational system is focused primarily on creating a future generation who have expertise in things that no longer matter. It’s called STEM: science, engineering, technology and mathematics. Machines can do STEM.

Surely we should focus upon CLIC: Care, Love, Innovation and Creativity. These things will still matter in the future, because how can we continue to create progress if we don’t develop our humanity. We need to do things machines cannot do.

I referred to this yesterday, but continue today with expanding the views of Sophie Deen’s view of the year 2050, mixed with my view.

I regularly present around the world and have a range of underlying things:

• Countries don’t exist, we made them up
• Borders don’t exist, we made them up
• Time doesn’t exist, we made it up
• Money doesn’t exist, we made it up

A lot of our life thinking has been created by the development of humankind over the past millennia’s. What will we create for the next millennia?

Sophie predicts that, in 2050, countries will still exist but traditional borders have evolved, and global issues are tackled collectively. We value both tech and reality more than ever, and we live in mixed reality environments. The key to this is that, in a world where real and fake blur, who keeps our reality in check? 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗚𝘂𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗮𝗻𝘀. The role of the Reality Guardian is:

• to protect historical accuracy
• to maintain integrity in virtual environments
• to verify critical information for governments and public
• to safeguard personal identities in our hyper-connected world
• to seek out and highlight fake news and deep fake media
• to regulate the providers of tech services that provide unregulated media

How do they do this? Well, using human intuition for a start (that will always be a thing!) along with advanced AI for detecting digital manipulation, quantum computing for processing vast data  and blockchain for maintaining unalterable records.

Sophie asks: what counts as reality? which is becoming an increasingly difficult question. When you manipulate a photograph using photoshop, is the photo still reality? What about if you take out something in the background … like an annoying human walking past … is it still reality? What if you change your complexion, remove wrinkles, improve your hair style … is it still reality? What if you take the picture and move it to a completely different location for fun … is it still reality?

There’s a borderline here. I guess the borderline is when you break a line between reality and truth, and truth has always been a tricky concept. Philosophers have debated its nature for centuries; different cultures often have varying perspectives on reality; even eyewitness accounts can be unreliable; and, in our hyper-connected, AI-enhanced world:

• the line between real and fake is blurrier than ever
• misinformation can spread globally in seconds
• virtual experiences are becoming indistinguishable from physical ones

So, do we need a new approach? A global consensus on what we mean by 'real'? An international system for verifying and categorizing reality? A way to navigate this new landscape of truth?

Truth be told we are already there … just look at BBC Verify. BBC Verify is the broadcaster’s news team of 60 investigative journalists who constantly check and verify news reports and data. Their aim is to provide fact-checking of news (including corresponding images and footages) and analysing its factual accuracy based on verified data and facts live on air, while still bringing verified facts and updates especially to breaking news.

Today's digital forensics experts, fact-checkers, and disinformation researchers are the precursors to tomorrow's Reality Guardians and then, bringing it back to my main theme – truth, transparency and transactions – the importance of verifying truth in the future is going to be at the forefront of the jobs of the future.