The Future of Work: Quantified Employees, Pop-Up Workplaces, And More Telepresence For many people, especially those working at desk jobs, the workplace is very different than it was 20 years ago: there’s a computer at every desk, telecommuting is fairly common, and the traditional cubicle is giving way to more collaborative spaces. We’ve seen predictions about where we’ll go from here before; now PSFK, a popular blog that also happens to be a thriving consultancy, has come up with its own version of the future of work, described in a new 138-page report. It’s not as fantastical as many future-forward reports--it’s planted firmly in ideas that are already gaining a lot of traction. Perhaps that makes it more accurate. We’ll find out. Here are our takeaways. Startup Training and Skills Marketplaces PSFK imagines that learning initiatives for young entrepreneurs, such as Enstitute, will become the norm. Office Feedback Culture You know the employee that keeps screwing up and eventually just gets fired without really understanding why? Quantified Workers
Garbage designer, robot counsellor among the predicted jobs of 2030 About 15 years from now, farmers will have made their way from the countryside to the city, counsellors will help ensure the right robot goes to the right family and garbage designers will lead the upcycling movement. Those are some predictions made by the Canadian Scholarship Trust Plan’s Inspired Minds initiative, which aims to give Canadians a sneak peek of the job market in 2030. Some of the more curious careers include: Nostalgist: A mix between a therapist, an interior designer and a historical researcher, a nostalgist will help the wealthy elderly of 2030 create a living space inspired by their favourite decade. Rewilder: The old name for this job was "farmer." Farming will continue to take place, but in greenhouses located on skyscrapers, which will be known as vertical farms. Tele-surgeon: They're not fixing your telephone -- as telephones could very well be a thing of the past in 2030 -- they're fixing your insides.
Can All Children Become Calculus Whizzes? - The Atlantic In suburban Howard County, Maryland, lots of students take calculus in high school. Or at least, lots of white and Asian students do. In 2011, African American and Hispanic students made up about 30 percent of the public school district's enrollment but only about 11.3 percent of calculus students, according to the U.S. Renee Foose, superintendent of the Howard County Public School System, recently asked Harvard's Center for Education Policy Research to investigate the disparity. "There's a remarkable finding here, which is that actually the achievement gap in Howard County, with regard to math, doesn't seem to grow over time," said Christopher Avery, lead author of the unpublished study. But although the gap doesn't grow, it's persistent. Math experts disagree on whether calculus, usually a college course, should be taught in high school. Even so, most educators agree that more students would benefit from a rigorous math background. "This is going to sound really idealistic.
The 10 Most Important Work Skills in 2020 Share this infographic on your site! <a href=" src=" alt="Important Work Skills for 2020" width="500" border="0" /></a><br />Source: <a href=" The 10 Most Important Work Skills in 2020 Future Work Skills of 2020: Sources: If Schools Don't Change, Robots Will Bring On a 'Permanent Underclass': Report Robots are taking all the jobs. But are we, the average, moderately skilled humans, screwed, or aren't we? Let me just get it out of the way now: We are, unless there are drastic, immediate changes to education and economic systems around the world. The dominant narrative going around today about Pew Research's new report on artificial intelligence and the future of jobs is that experts can't really decide whether automation is going to make working obsolete, that it's really a toss up whether robots will simply create new jobs in other sectors as they destroy ones in other. That's true, in one sense: The 1,896 futurists, CEOs, journalists, and university professors questioned for the report were split in half over robots will "displace significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers," with 52 percent of respondents agreeing that "human ingenuity will create new jobs, industries, and ways to make a living, just as it has been doing since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution."
At what age does our intelligence peak? Older doesn’t just mean wiser. It also means smarter, at least in some ways. Take our ability to do basic math, for example, or our command of a large vocabulary. Contrary to popular opinions about intelligence fading over time, both of those skills (and several others) continue to improve until we reach our 50th birthdays, according to new research published earlier this month. Many abilities, of course, follow the conventionally recognized pattern of peaking around age 18 and getting worse over the rest of our lives. But the study reveals some striking new findings about how our skills change over time: Psychological ScienceSTM = short-term memory; WM = working memory; WAIS = Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. Several other skills ripen later too, as far out as middle age. Our ability to read others’ emotions, for example (shown below as the “Mind-In-Eyes Task”), and recall events that have just happened (“WM: Digit Span, replication”) peak as late age 47 and 35, respectively: Share
Future of Work: What Skills Will Help Us Keep Pace? From Elon Musk’s tweet that artificial intelligence may be more dangerous than nuclear weapons to the growing clamor of voices warning robots will take away our jobs, it is clear we are focusing more on the problems of AI, robotics, and automation than the solutions. While the problems are real and should be taken into account, social innovators around the world are already working to deliver solutions. It’s true that today’s technology is reworking the economy and our role in it. But this needn’t herald economic end times. To smooth the transition, we need to ensure that displaced workers have the resources to learn new work and children are given a good head start. This is nothing new. During the Industrial Revolution, in the US, we demanded every child attend school and learn reading, writing and math. Throughout the 20th century, humanity poured tremendous resources into ensuring every human develop these skills as technologies advanced. Image Credit: Ashoka; Shutterstock.com
LEGAL FUTURES Report: artificial intelligence will cause "structural collapse" of law firms by 2030 1 December 2014 AI: computers that ‘think’ spell doom for many lawyers Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will dominate legal practice within 15 years, perhaps leading to the “structural collapse” of law firms, a report predicting the shape of the legal market has envisaged. Civilisation 2030: The near future for law firms, by Jomati Consultants, foresees a world in which population growth is actually slowing, with “peak humanity” occurring as early as 2055, and ageing populations bringing a growth in demand for legal work on issues affecting older people. This could mean more advice needed by healthcare and specialist construction companies on the building and financing of hospitals, and on pension investment businesses, as well as financial and regulatory work around the demographic changes to come; more age-related litigation, IP battles between pharmaceutical companies, and around so-called “geriatric-tech” related IP. The human part of lawyering would shrink. By Dan Bindman
Low wages not education to blame for STEM skills gap -- ScienceDaily Low wages rather than inadequate training are to blame for the STEM skills gap, according to research from the University of Warwick. A new briefing paper suggests that the lack of workers with skills in science, maths, engineering and technology (STEM) and 'soft' communications skills is not due to problems with the education system, but to employers being unwilling to offer higher wages to suitably skilled workers. The research was conducted by Dr Thijs van Rens associate professor in the Department of Economics. He said: "It is often taken for granted that the skills gap and skills mismatch is a supply problem and appropriate training is not available to workers. "Businesses complain about the lack of workers with STEM skills but are unwilling to raise wages for these workers -- or reduce wages for workers with skills that are less in demand." A discussion of Dr van Rens' policy briefing paper titled The Skills Gap: Is It a Myth?