The well-known visionary Stowe Boyd lashed out at the World Economic Forum's report on the future of work: The Future of Jobs. Get to know their proposals.
“Schools are educating children for a world that no longer exists.” Is the holder of a article published in The Wired in 2014. Three years later, it seems that the situation has not changed much. Recently, the well-known visionary Stowe Boyd (engineer, serial entrepreneur, former director of research at the technology multinational Gigaom and writer, among other things) lashed out at the report on the future of work The Future of Jobs of the World Economic Forum. According to Boyd, the list of skills to be acquired between now and 2020 included in this study it is outdated for at least 10 or 15 years.
Instead, Boyd provides an alternative list (published on the specialized site Work Futures) of the 10 skills that he considers essential for the coming era, which the author calls “postnormal”:
1. Boundless curiosity
The most creative people have an insatiable curiosity, which occurs in the absence of extrinsic rewards. You want to know what works and why.
In a world in constant technological, sociological and economic change, the temptation can be to close our eyes and close our ears. However, the appropriate response is to remain flexible, adaptable, and sensitive. However, our education system and company culture strive to suppress our natural tendency to be curious.
2. Freestyling
Inventing our own style of dance with artificial intelligence (AI). We must learn to dance with robots, not to run away. We are going to have to learn to play well with them to enhance our work. Human-machine teams are better than those made up of machines alone.
3. Emerging leadership
Boyd defines it as “the ability to steer things in the right direction without the authority to do so, through social competence.” It is not a matter of having a degree but of being able to redirect a situation when there are problems – at the right time – and to relinquish power if necessary.
4. Constructive uncertainty
It is not about eliminating our biases but about becoming aware of them and realizing that we cannot counteract our prejudices. How? Slowing down decision-making to reduce its impact. That is, postponing decision-making to gather information so that our preferences and social prejudices do not take over them.
5. Complex ethics
Our perspective of the world and our place in it are rooted in our ethical system. It needs to be examined in order to overcome postmodern solipsism and tedium and to overcome today’s prevailing simplistic ethical systems with complex ethical systems.
6. Deep Generalists
From an evolutionary biology point of view, the species that are best adapted to radically changing environments are generalists. However, these are superficial. Therefore, we must adopt the winning strategies of the two classes of living beings: of specialists, deeply connected to the context in which they live, and of generalists, capable of thriving in many contexts. That is, to discover the connections that build complexity in complex systems and capture their interaction; learn a lot about many things and gain a real understanding of how they are connected.
7. Design logic
It is not just a matter of imagining things we want, but also of undesirable things, as warnings that highlight what could happen if we were to carelessly introduce new technologies into society.
It is not just about designing for commercial contexts but about using the logics of user experience, technology and the diffusion of innovations in a more general sense; envision futures based on our present but with new tools, ideas, or cultural totems added, and explore their implications.
8. Postnormal creativity
In the times to come , creativity can become a whole, every day, in all parts of the process. We talk about creativity outside the context of its use today. We live in a time where
9. Posterity, not history or future
While we need to learn from history, we must not let it limit us, especially in a time when much of what is happening is unprecedented.
Posterity is one of the skills that imply the continuity of society and the obligations of those who live now to their future heirs. That is, a
10. Act and do meaningfully
It is the ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed. As intelligent machines take over rotating jobs, routine manufacturing, and services, there will be a growing demand for higher-level thinking skills that cannot be codified. They help us create unique, critical ideas for decision-making.
