Jobs of the future, Part Ten: the Intermediator

It is easy to believe in these futuristic scenarios that we won’t need human advisors. In the words of Vivian Ward, the escort in Pretty Woman:

Vivian: You work on commission, right?

Saleswoman: Ah, yes.

Vivian: Big mistake. Big.

If you believe that the future will no longer involve financial advisors, you are making a big mistake. Machines may make our world massively automated and the majority of advice is delivered by intelligent infomediaries, but you will still need humans to manage such structures behind the scenes.

Forget The Terminator. You need The Intermediator.

OK, I hear you laughing but here’s the thing. Thirty years ago, I predicted that intermediaries would be irrelevant by 2020 and people laughed at me. Thirty years later, I’ve been proved wrong. We still need intermediaries. By 2050, will we still need them? My answer is yes, but there will be many less of them.

A little like the Traffic Commander, the Intermediator is there to ensure the machines are making the right decisions for us.

A good example is financial services. Our finances may be decentralised, automated and integrated with AI, but there will still be humans sitting behind the machines monitoring their work.

This goes back to the fundamentals of how technology is developing and starts from the base point: the tech is only as good as the human behind it.

We programme the technologies and they cannot be left unrestrained, unmaintained and untrained. We have to train, maintain and sustain the machines. Therefore, throughout this series of blogs about the future of work, the one thing that is fundamental is that there will always be humans monitoring the work of machines … or will there be?

I find it interesting asking this question and often revert to the example of the airline pilot. The aeroplane can go from A to B with zero human intervention. But what happens if it goes wrong?

I guess this will be the question for all aspects of the future world. We will live a future world where everything from taxis to hospital operations to financial networks will be managed by machines … but when things go wrong, you will need drivers, doctors and financial experts to intervene and set things right again. These are The Intermediators.

The Intermediator has deep knowledge and expertise of their space, and they train and maintain the machines to do what they know well. Machines are delegated to operate on our behalf, but they are not autonomous. They are managed and monitored by us to make sure that they do the right things.

For more on jobs of the future, checkout this gallery for what work will look like in 2100.