WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
In this keynote in Athens, Futurist Matthew Griffin explores the future of work and AI and shows why automating people is laiden with risk and why augmenting workers with AI and technology is the best option for everyone.
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Firstly, thank you to Dimitrios Dimitriou, the First Vice President at the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry, an organisation that represents more than 120,000 Greek companies, and Yannis Mastrogeorgiou from the Greek Government, and the Special Secretary for Strategic Foresight at the Presidency of the Government of the Hellenic Republic, for inviting me to beautiful Athens and present a keynote titled The Future of Work and AI.
While the future of work has always been an important topic over the past few years it’s become more top of mind of governments, organisations, and individuals around the world alike because of the rapid, but not unforeseen, rise of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and more recently Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), whose growing bench of capabilities mean that today we see a way to partially and or fully automate up to 80% of jobs. Really though, if truth be told, in time we can see a way to use AI and GAI, as well as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to automate 100% of jobs, primarily because all jobs have processes, workflows, and steps that can be automated, whether it’s with AI or other technologies such as generalised robotics, and so forth.
The Future of Work and AI, by Futurist Matthew Griffin
While it’s always tempting to lean into the Doomsday narratives about the future of work, as we so often see in the world’s press, I look at the future from multiple perspectives – both sides of the coin, the upsides and the downsides, the positives and negatives – and then, when I do see downsides I work diligently to find solutions to these so called “Grand Challenges.” And, thanks to my work on the Future of Education, Learning, and Work, among other activities, this is what put me in a superlative position to not just show the audience automation and its technological downsides and risks, but also the very real human and societal benefits of using many of these same tools to augment and benefit humans in the workforce to, in essence, help create “Unlimited Humans” with near unlimited levels of potential.
To bring this all to life during my keynote I dived into the future capabilities of AI, Sam Altman’s vision of fully automated companies, the future of job automation and the real risks that companies will face in the future as they continue to embed what ostensibly amounts to an AI automated and autonomous brain into the heart of their organisations operations, and then I showed the audience the important of having a Futures Mindset and revealed what really happens when, through technology, the only things everyone has access to is all the world’s knowledge, all the world’s skills, and the ability to bring whatever they imagine to life at unprecedented speed and scale, whatever that is, to a global audience by the end of the day. And, doomsday scenarios asides who doesn’t like that latter vision?
