“I got back in from Canberra last night at 10 o’clock. I fly a lot—it’s a big part of my job. I’ll be on a flight once a week, sometimes twice. I do a lot of speaking, at conferences, and that’s what I was doing in Canberra. The Department of Social Services are doing a series on innovation, so I gave a talk on my book on megatrends, which is a bit of a treatise on what’s to come over the next 5–20 years. My group does research and foresight: what the world’s got in store, and then what to do about it, decision analysis. We form a team within Data61, which has a key role around digital disruption. Last night one of the megatrends I spoke about was ‘digital immersion’ that looks at the ways digital is changing the way we work. It’s not just tools, it’s changing the way we relate to each other, how we work, what opportunities look like. Information technology is going to be fundamental to productivity growth in Australia. We’ve kind of hit a productivity plateau, and to reinvigorate that we’ll have to improve our use of information. If we had the industrial revolution, we’re now moving into the information revolution.”
“I’ve got two kids. My son is ten and my daughter is seven. They’re into mathematics and sport. But not English. ‘Why do we have to learn English at school when we already speak it?’ …I didn’t know where to go with that one. They love robotics and coding, yeah anything about computers. I think kids have got to learn coding. I think to get a job, either mine or yours, or just about any kind of job—you’ve got to have coding capabilities. That ferry down there will be automated, probably in another 10 years’ time, close to it—it might have a driver, but their function will be to address emergencies. Not all jobs will disappear. We did a study on what the future of jobs will look like. We went out to 2035, looking at the megatrends in digital, and economic growth in Asia. It’s definitely a world of much technologically-fuelled replacement and transition of jobs. Some jobs are quite well insulated, say ‘a photographer’. We actually have a graph that shows two jobs in the photography industry: laboratory-based staff that deal with film processing and field photographers. The lab staff basically disappeared in Australia. Field photographers like you guys have gone up. This sort of work is not at risk to automation. Ninety per cent of what you’re doing is social intelligence. You’re sorting out a social situation and making your subject matter work, using creativity, what might be beautiful or different or unique. That’s a skillset.”
