The future is coming. Not to a galaxy near you, to your own - and it is a lot more exciting than you may think

I will start this article with a warning. Contrary to my usual aim, this is not a facts analysis article, designed to use facts to unravel usually held misconceptions. It is rather opinion and vision. I sent it to some mainstream media last year, but it was not published, so I have now decided to publish it here.

Last year brought us some political events which shook our understanding of the World in such a way that it was hard to pay attention to anything else. But many other things, more relevant in the long term, happened, and were missed. For example, news that a driverless truck operated by Otto, a technology start up owned by Uber, had made the first driverless delivery of cargo in human history. The truck drove 100 miles unassisted in the State of Colorado, from an Anheuser Busch brewery to its final destination. It is true that a human was in the cab and drove the last few miles in traffic, and a patrol car followed the truck throughout its journey. However, it is now surely not long before the technology is trusted enough to avoid these then superfluous precautions. The writing is on the wall.

The first reaction to these news is probably: Cool that we can have a truck drive itself. After a bit more thought, this is a lot cooler than it first appears, but it also has complex implications. Firstly, it is easy to see a not distant future in which driverless trucks, powered by electricity, move all goods at times and through routes with lowest impact to traffic, unencumbered by current needs to organise trip times and routes around the inflexible, prone to tiredness, obsolete human drivers. A World without trucks on motorways when humans are driving and without diesel fumes from HGVs? Sign me up!

However, there is a flip side to this coin. It does not need to be negative, but it will be, unless we start planning for it right now. What are all those delivery and long distance drivers going to do for a living? This immediate thought is closely followed by much wider ranging ones: And what about taxi drivers, Uber drivers, airplane pilots, train drivers, air crew, air traffic controllers? Our transportation system will soon and inevitably be replaced by automation. And the same will happen to many manufacturing jobs. A little later, to many other jobs, such as diagnosers (doctors), treaters (doctors) and surgeons. Postmen. Retail employees. Soldiers. Bankers. The more you think about it, the longer the list gets, the question for each one of these professions being when, not whether.

This, believe it or not, is good news for the working people of the future. But only if our education system does not let them down by preparing them to do jobs which will no longer exist. A major rethink of how we educate is urgently needed. And not only of how we educate. Also of how we conceive work and working careers.  Our thinking about all these issues is currently constrained by experience. A backward looking understanding of education and work would lead to the conclusion that unemployment will soar with the advent of automation, bringing about all the social problems we expect from low occupation figures. That conclusion, however, would be a result of framing our vision of the future on our learning from the past, rather than on a detailed understanding of the new opportunities afforded by technology.

A major change in paradigm is needed, which can deliver much happier and well off humans. Automation can only contribute to a better society, and that means a better life for you and me, if we use it in the right way.

So, how can it do this? For example, automation enables a model where a general, significant guaranteed income is possible for all citizens of the World. The need to work as a means to survive could disappear. Sufficient goods could be available to cater for all. The biggest question this leaves is: What is everyone going to do and how are we going to distribute? And this is where the future really gets exciting.

Imagine a World, 20 years from now, where a group of individuals decide to drive an initiative to solve a human problem. For example, energy. These individuals crowd source, not only for funding, but also for skills and labour. A mission statement could read something like: ‘We are going to solve nuclear fusion in the next 20 years and deliver free energy to all, and for that, we need as many physicists, hardware, electronic and software engineers as we can get’. Based on this initiative, humans interested in this project could train themselves, unimpeded by the need to work for a living, to fill those roles and contribute to that effort, drawing huge rewards, both pecuniary and in self-realisation, when it succeeds. Education material would be readily available (MIT and many other educational institutions are already making their teaching available online, allowing millions to potentially qualify in anything that interests them). 10 million ex taxi drivers, delivery drivers, doctors and soldiers, even bankers, could train as physicists and join the effort. Solutions would be arrived at much faster than with current economic and research models, and every human problem solvable by human endeavour could be tackled simultaneously. When a solution is achieved, we all benefit. Cancer, poverty, heart disease, fundamentalism, conservation, biodiversity, climate change and many other problems could cease to be intractable.

Utopia, I hear you say. But it is not. This picture is very close to being possible. Some of the key elements needed to make such a model work are:

• Significant guaranteed income for all. Possible? With better distribution and the new work force of automation, yes. Tick.
• Communication platforms which allow humans anywhere to become aware of collaborative projects and join them. Tick.
• Data repositories and project management tools which support this massive size collaborations. Tick.
• High quality educational resources freely available to all those who want them. Tick.
• The will of humankind to change the way we understand and address the World around us and believe that such a future is possible. This is most likely the biggest obstacle. Change is never easy, and typically those who stand to lose in the short term will oppose it, whilst most of those who stand to gain in the long term do not realise it, or wait and see.

What does this mean for individuals and for education? Individuals will be able to work in different projects, even changing discipline, and to re-educate whenever desired to change fields and join new efforts. Challenging? Yes. But would you rather spend 40 years behind the wheel of a taxi, or behind a desk in your own groundhog day, or solving the World’s real problems and continuously learning in the process. The satisfaction derived from the latter alternative is immeasurably higher. For our education system, this means we need to equip our young people to be able to learn, retool and switch disciplines continuously. Emphasis and effort should move from delivering and teaching content and information, which will in future be available in external media, easily interfaceable with humans (wearable clothing, accessories, tablets and other devices), to teaching how to quickly and effectively use available information to create solutions. Current educational focus on memory, information retention and structured thinking, all of which computers can do better than humans, needs to shift to efficient usage of technology, synthesis capacity, puzzle solving and creativity. A population with these skills will be in a position to benefit hugely from the great opportunity afforded by the impending obsolescence of most of today’s occupations. Work will be something you do anywhere, at any time, in any field, with whatever approach and within whatever structure you choose at any given time. Training choices will not determine the next 40 years of your working life, trapping you in a monotonous profession, but equip you with flexibility and the power to derive satisfaction from any endeavour you choose to undertake. A new security would be found in freedom, flexibility and adaptability.

We need to commit to this vision, and we need to do it now. Automation is coming. Our societies need to develop humanistic ways of life and distribution models which ensure that automation is not used to increase corporate profits, by reducing costs whilst keeping benefits away from the workforce. We need to collectively choose to use technological advancement for the betterment of all our lives.

Current events such as Brexit, the rise of populism, the American election, nationalism and fundamentalism are the result of large swathes of the global working population seeing the writing on the wall and no longer understanding what their place in the World is. They can see their jobs and skills becoming obsolete, and they cannot see how they may replace them. Technology and globalisation are overwhelming for Neolithic Man. The time has come to evolve. To understand what our technological prowess can offer us, and to adapt to it. As part of the process, we will need to address many other social constructs which are no longer relevant, such as office environments, large educational establishments, pension systems, traditional marriage, country borders, etc. But this will be part of the process. The start is the change in the conception, by the majority of the global population, of the opportunities the future offers and the shedding of all limiting assumptions rendered irrelevant by our newly acquired technology. Lose the fear. Embrace hope.