What Opportunity@Work is trying to create through its networks, said Auguste, is nothing less than “a new demand signal for human capital.” That would be a signal that says: “Anyone who can do these tasks to this standard in this context gets a try. We don’t care how you learned it. We hire on mastery not pedigree—not everyone gets the specific job, but anyone has a shot.” And if there are skills that you are missing, here are the local schools or learning platforms where you can fill them in on your own time.
Right now, no employer has the incentive to build out that platform, which is why you need groups such as Opportunity@Work or LinkedIn to create the intelligent networks that show everyone how it can work. The current system, in which there is one job winner and a thousand losers, is simply wasting too much human capital, and in the age of accelerations that is politically dangerous. Chopra and Auguste are certain that if they can get a critical mass of employers hiring on the basis of demonstrated skills, not history, and also link prospective employees with schools, coaches, or tutors, to help them respond to the skills most in demand, they can tip the labor market.
If you are a community college administrator, these intelligent networks are a great way to learn what employers are looking for and therefore what skills you should be teaching. You can then mix in innovations in intelligent financing, says Auguste: Imagine a micro-equity investment in a talented low-income student’s tuition and living expenses for a fifteen-week “coding boot camp,” which converts into debt only once she gets her first job as a software developer. We can open up job opportunities, solve our skills mismatch, and unlock immense value in our human capital if we move past the current antiquated frameworks of public and private student lending to more personalized, talent-based, pay-it-forward financing systems—where both educational institutions and employers have more skin in the game to ensure the payoff to students of securing an in-demand job.
“Our institutions spend so much time working on how to optimize returns on financial capital,” said Auguste. “It is about time we started thinking more about how to optimize returns on human capital.”
Come the Revolution
Throughout this book I have stressed that technology moves up in steps—from platform to platform. But not all platforms are created equal. And it is my contention that the last two steps we’ve taken—the one that made connectivity fast, free, easy for you, and ubiquitous, around the year 2000, and the one that made complexity fast, free, easy for you, and invisible around 2007—constituted a fundamental inflection point in the power of men, machines, groups, and flows, an inflection point so profound that it has blown apart the basic workplace that we have known since the Industrial Revolution blew away the guild-based workplace. Thanks to the supernova, the workplace is being globalized, digitized, and roboticized at a speed, scope, and scale we’ve never seen before. It is hard to think of any career not being touched by this process, which is why it is posing such a fundamental challenge to how we think about educating people for work, organizing people at work, and helping people adjust to both new realities.
Most good middle-class jobs today—the ones that cannot be outsourced, automated, roboticized, or digitized—are likely to be what I would call stempathy jobs. These are jobs that require and reward the ability to leverage technical and interpersonal skills—to blend calculus with human (or animal) psychology, to hold a conversation with Watson to make a cancer diagnosis and hold the hand of a patient to deliver it, to have a robot milk your cows but also to properly care for those cows in need of extra care with a gentle touch.
“In the 19th century most Americans spent their time working with animals and plants outdoors in the country,” wrote the historian Walter Russell Mead in a May 10, 2013, essay in The American Interest entitled “The Jobs Crisis: Bigger Than You Think”:
In the 20th century most Americans spent their time pushing paper in offices or bashing widgets in factories. In the 21st century most of us are going to work with people, providing services that enhance each other’s lives …
We are going to have to discover the inherent dignity of work that is people to people rather than people to things. We are going to have to realize that engaging with other people, understanding their hopes and their needs, and using our own skills, knowledge and talent to give them what they want at a price they can afford is honest work.
The latest research backs this up. In an essay in The New York Times on October 18, 2015, entitled “Why What You Learned in Preschool Is Crucial at Work,” Claire Cain Miller pointed out that “for all the jobs that machines can now do—whether performing surgery, driving cars or serving food—they still lack one distinctly human trait. They have no social skills. Yet skills like cooperation, empathy and flexibility have become increasingly vital in modern-day work.”
Those occupations requiring strong social skills, she added,
have grown much more than others since 1980, according to new research. And the only occupations that have shown consistent wage growth since 2000 require both cognitive and social skills …
Yet to prepare students for the change in the way we work, the skills that schools teach may need to change. Social skills are rarely emphasized in traditional education.
“Machines are automating a whole bunch of these things, so having the softer skills, knowing the human touch and how to complement technology, is critical, and our education system is not set up for that,” said Michael Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, where he studies education.
Miller consulted David Deming, an associate professor of education and economics at Harvard University and author of a new study on this subject. As Miller explained, Deming’s research shows that in the tech industry “it’s the jobs that combine technical and interpersonal skills that are booming, like being a computer scientist working on a group project.” Miller quoted David Autor, an economist at MIT specializing in labor issues, as noting “if it’s just technical skill, there’s a reasonable chance it can be automated, and if it’s just being empathetic or flexible, there’s an infinite supply of people, so a job won’t be well paid. It’s the interaction of both that is virtuous.”
To repeat: the new workplace reshaped by the age of accelerations will demand multiple new social contracts. One is between bosses and employees: bosses will have to learn to hire more people on the basis of what they can provably do, not just the pedigree they can ostentatiously produce, and to provide multiple avenues for lifelong learning within the company’s framework. One is between you and yourself: if the bosses create the learning opportunities and help with the tuition, you will have to provide the grit and self-motivation to take advantage of both—to own your learning and your constant relearning. In an age when more jobs become jump balls that more people, machines, and robots can compete for, you’ve got to be willing and able to jump. Still another new contract has to be between educators and students: companies no longer have the patience to wait around for universities to figure out their market, adapt their curricula, hire the right professors, and teach the students the new skills, especially when emerging online education platforms are doing all that now faster and from day one. If traditional postsecondary schools are going to remain relevant in a world where everyone will require lifelong learning, educators need to provide those opportunities at a viable speed, price point, and level of on-demand mobility. Finally, we will need a new social contract between governments and citizens: we need to create every possible regulatory and tax incentive for every company to provide, and every worker to get access to, intelligent assistance, intelligent assistants, intelligent networks, and intelligent financing for lifelong learning.
But before you get all teary-eyed about the end of the worker Holocene that we’re now experiencing, pause for a moment and consider the potential upsides of the new workplace. Marina Gorbis shared a memo she drafted for her institute on how this could actually work out better for many workers, if we put the right foundations in pla
ce:
Imagine that you, as a worker, can decide when and how you want to earn income, using a platform that has information about your skills, capabilities, and previous tasks completed. You are seamlessly matched with the task that optimizes your income opportunity. Imagine that the same or another platform could direct you to learning opportunities that would maximize your earnings potential or support your desire to acquire new skills. Suppose that instead of having to come into the office, you can work at home or in a number of co-working spaces in your neighborhood, providing you with social connections, community, and the necessary infrastructure to support your tasks. And imagine that in this world, the social safety net—all your benefits—are not tied to your employer but are portable. Every time you work for pay, independent of the platform or an organization, your benefits accrue to your personal security account. Pieces of this new ecosystem of work are already beginning to take shape, but the process is happening piecemeal, with many gaps and missteps.
However, she added, the solution is
not to force many of the on-demand workers into formal W-2 employment and thus undermine the core positive elements of new work arrangements, namely flexibility and autonomy. We shouldn’t go back to the old operating system. Instead we should upgrade or re-build the old OS of work, bringing its benefits to not just a growing population of on-demand workers but also to those working in existing organizations. What would it look like if company employees could work when they want, based on their individual and family needs? What if companies internally could use the same coordination algorithms powering Uber and Upwork to assign tasks, create dynamic reputation metrics and feedback mechanisms instead of spending a lot of energy on much-dreaded performance reviews? In addition to providing an unprecedented level of autonomy and flexibility, the new mechanisms, if well designed, might also help us eliminate bias in hiring and promotion … Maybe, just maybe, if we brought new coordination mechanisms into existing organizations, worker engagement and satisfaction would actually increase.
In short, weep not for that nine-to-five work era of old. It’s gone and it is not coming back. But once we get through this transition, and it will be rough, I am convinced there’s a high probability that a better and fairer workplace is waiting on the other side, if we can learn to combine the best of what is new—artificial intelligence—with the best of what never changes and never will change: self-motivation, caring adults and mentors, and practice in your area of interest or aspiration.
Just before the school year started in 2014, Gallup released a massive poll it had conducted of college graduates who had been in the workplace for at least five years. The poll tried to answer this question: What are the things that happen at a college or technical school that, more than anything else, produce “engaged” employees on a fulfilling career track?
“We think it’s a big deal” where we go to college, Brandon Busteed, the executive director of Gallup’s education division, explained to me for a column I wrote about the poll. “But we found no difference in terms of type of institution you went to—public, private, selective or not—in long-term outcomes. How you got your college education mattered most.”
And two experiences stood out from the poll of more than one million American workers, students, educators, and employers: Successful students had one or more teachers who were mentors and took a real interest in their aspirations, and they had an internship related to what they were learning in school. The most engaged employees, said Busteed, consistently attributed their success in the workplace to having had a professor or professors “who cared about them as a person,” or having had “a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams,” or having had “an internship where they applied what they were learning.” Those workers, he found, “were twice as likely to be engaged with their work and thriving in their overall well-being.”
There’s a message in that bottle.
NINE
Control vs. Kaos
The violent chaos in Yemen isn’t orderly enough to merit being called a civil war.
—Simon Henderson, “The Rising Menace from Disintegrating Yemen,” The Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2015
From 1965 to 1970, American television audiences were entertained by a popular sitcom called Get Smart. The show was a spoof on James Bond, and starred Don Adams as agent Maxwell Smart, who went by the code name “Agent 86,” with Barbara Feldon playing his sidekick, “Agent 99.” Written by Buck Henry and Mel Brooks, Get Smart famously introduced the shoe phone to American audiences, but the show also introduced something else: its own version of geopolitics and a bipolar world.
Do you remember the name of the intelligence agency Maxwell Smart worked for? It was called “Control.” And do you remember the name of Control’s global enemy? It was called “Kaos”—“an international organization of evil.”
The creators of Get Smart were way ahead of their time. After all, it increasingly appears that the most important division in the “post–post–Cold War world,” which we’re now in, is between regions of “Control” and regions of “Kaos”—or, as I prefer to describe them, “the World of Order” and “the World of Disorder.”
That was not what a lot of Americans and Europeans were expecting after the Cold War. The Cold War was a struggle between two competing systems of order, dominated by two competing superpowers, who could, relatively speaking, keep their allies ideologically in line, physically intact, and militarily in check. The relevant geographic and ideological dividing lines were East–West, communist–capitalist, totalitarian–democratic.
In the post–Cold War world, from 1989 until the early 2000s, the dominant struggle—and it was not really much of a struggle at all—was between an American hegemon and everybody else. Our economic and political system had “won.” The communist system had lost, and for the most part we thought that the only problem going forward would be the pace at which everyone adopted our democratic-capitalist formula for success—and then all would be right with the world.
And because America and its allies had such a surplus of military and economic power, they chose to use some of it to oppose holdouts against this democratizing trend, like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the military rulers of Haiti, and Slobodan Milošević in Serbia/Bosnia—and to pressure China with a human rights campaign and Russia with NATO and European Union expansion campaigns. It seemed as if it were only a matter of time before the whole world would come our way.
As the Johns Hopkins foreign policy professor Michael Mandelbaum argued in his book Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post–Cold War Era, during this window of overwhelming American dominance, “the main focus of American foreign policy shifted from war to governance, from what other governments did beyond their borders to what they did and how they were organized within them.”
Referring to U.S. operations in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan and to Chinese human rights policy, Russian democratization, NATO expansion, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Mandelbaum wrote: “The United States after the Cold War … became the equivalent of a very wealthy person, the multibillionaire among nations. It left the realm of necessity that it had inhabited during the Cold War and entered the world of choice. It chose to spend some of its vast reserves of power on the geopolitical equivalent of luxury items: the remaking of other countries.”
But that era came a cropper when the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan became mired in failure and the Great Recession of 2008 dampened American growth. This all combined to sap American power and self-confidence—the self-confidence that it knew the right things to do to stabilize the world and how to do them, and that it could do them. All of that was reflected in the foreign policy of President Barack Obama, which was characterized by pinched aspirations, a humility about whether America knew best, a skepticism toward foreigners, particularly from the Middle East, who claimed that they shared our values and beckoned us to come partner with them, and the dispatching of tro
ops abroad with an eyedropper, almost counting them one by one. I say all of this without meaning to criticize; there were good reasons for Obama’s circumspection when it came to the Middle East. Elsewhere, such as in eastern Europe and Asia, Obama actually reinforced America’s military presence to balance Russia and China, and his use of the American military to stem the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa was decisive in preventing a global pandemic. So the notion that America under Obama just withdrew from the world is nonsense. But there was a pulling back in the Middle East, and it had two major consequences: it abetted the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, and it contributed to the massive outflow of refugees from that region into Europe. That outflow in turn helped to create the anti-immigration backlash that fueled the British withdrawal from the European Union and the rise of populist/nationalist politics inside almost every EU member state.
It’s important to remember that America is such an important player on the world stage that even small shifts in how we project power can have decisive impacts. And it’s this combination of shrinking American power in one part of the world plus the reshaping of the world more broadly by the accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law that defines the era we are in today, which I call the post–post–Cold War world. It is a world characterized by some very old and some very new forms of geopolitical competition all swirling together at the same time. That is, the traditional great-power competition, primarily among the United States, Russia, and China, is back again (if it ever really went away) as strong as ever, with the three major powers again jockeying over spheres of influence, along golden-oldie fault lines such as the NATO–Russia frontier or the South China Sea. This competition is propelled by history, geography, and the traditional imperatives of great-power geopolitics, and is reinforced today by the rise of nationalism in Russia and China. Its contours will be determined by the balance of power between these three big nation-states. This story has been well documented, and is not my main focus.
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