Heather McGowan: Who Works

Since I’m constantly scanning the horizon for what may be coming around the curve, I follow Heather McGowan because she is at the forefront on the future of work and learning and/or education. As I have mentioned once before, I learned of Heather through Thomas Friedman, who also has good ideas on what the future may be like. In this post I also mention the PBS series on the future of work and Kai-Fu Lee’s LinkedIn article on the impact of AI and his ideas of what we should do.

Heather publishes on Forbes, has published a book The Adaptation Advantage, and also does a lot of speaking tours. I believe she is very popular on her speaking tours; so much so that she doesn’t have much opportunity to publish on Forbes, BUT, she does have a new article out which sounds like a part of a series of articles. Hopefully, the link provided will direct you to her article – it may be behind a paywall.

In this article, she mentions some intriguing studies that found that more diverse companies perform better profit-wise than less diverse companies. Her book also discusses that companies with more women at the top of the company perform better. It is really important to discuss the economic benefits to businesses because profits are the driver of company behavior. Morals, ethics and integrity really do not persuade businesses, especially when companies follow Milton Friedman’s dictum that companies exist to maximize profits.

So I’m glad to be reading of studies indicating greater profit performance when companies either have more women at the top or are more diverse.

Now, Heather describes herself on LinkedIn as a “belligerent optimist”; unfortunately, I’m a bit more of a skeptic. As long as we have a capitalism that insists that shareholders reap all of the benefits from the profit maximization, we might not see such a benign world, even if more diverse people were to come up through the ranks. I don’t see the wealthy giving up so easily their productive profits to enable more flowing down to the workers helping to produce those profits. It remains to be see if more diverse employees throughout the companies bring about a more equal and just society, not just more profits accruing to the already wealthy.

Along with Heather McGowan’s new article, I also saw some PBS videos on the future of work, parts 1 through 3. I’m not going to lie: those videos are way more depressing so I had to space the viewing of those videos. I think I prefer Heather McGowan’s belligerent optimism. Boy, after watch those videos, I’m going to need all of the optimism I can get.

And lastly, I read Kai-Fu Lee’s LinkedIn article on artificial intelligence and its impact on work. Kai-Fu Lee is an expert on artificial intelligence having actually worked in the field. This expert thinks that AI will destroy jobs faster than we can create new ones, so he is urging us to rethink the role of work and we need to start thinking about creating a new social contract. If you are on LinkedIn, you can probably access the article through Googling “Kai-Fu Lee Can humans and AI work side by side?” in a typical browser. His article is even more distressing as he posits that if we are not careful, the wealth inequality will widen and that we will probably have a new caste system.

But he does share what he thinks are things that humans can still do and AI cannot:

• Creativity: I don’t think he is talking about the creativity in music or art – the kind that I’ve been reading where AI generates a piece of music or art that people actually buy. It sounds like a different kind of creativity: “AI cannot create, conceptualize or plan strategically…it cannot choose its own goals or think creatively”. It has no agency.
• Empathy: Okay, I think some humans don’t have empathy but anyway, robots are going to have a harder time making people feel comfortable. “AI cannot make another person feel understood and cared for. Nor can it motivate.  Even if AI improves in this area, it is unlikely that humans would opt for interacting with an apathetic robot for many human-touch services.” I have read that some studies show that humans may trust robots more with their feelings rather than a real person, so there is some conflict there.
• Physical dexterity: “AI cannot accomplish complex physical work that requires dexterity or precise hand-eye coordination, or deal with unknown and unstructured spaces, especially ones that it hasn’t observed.” I wonder if that is true because I thought I have read or seen something where robots/AI were performing some delicate camera work in surgery or maybe even doing the complete surgery itself.

[All quotes are from Kai-Fu Lee’s article “Can humans and AI work side by side?”]

There is a line in that article in the section for preparing for AI – the last section: “The first step is for us to relearn. This is the process of helping people displaced from unskilled, routine, and quantitative jobs to learn new skills.” I bold-faced the quantitative jobs because I suspect that quantitative jobs will include a lot of the data science and software jobs. Even Heather McGowan notes that the focus on STEM education is the wrong emphasis because a lot of STEM could be impacted by AI. Anything digital, anything mathematics, anything quantitative will probably be easily done by AI. Mark Cuban once said that learning Python will not save you.

I anxiously await a new article from Heather McGowan as she always provides new insights on how we should be handling our future.