As one of the middle-aged people in Be-IT, I can remember the days when we had never heard of the internet and when a phone was simply for making calls. It is a cliché of course, but the world really is changing faster than ever.

When they reach my current age, today’s children will almost certainly look back at what we think are amazingly cool smartphones and computers, think them antiquated and, more pertinently, wonder why, despite them, everything in 2018 was still so dependent on human beings.

Welcome to the World of Tomorrow!

Despite the advances in technology, it’s true that we are still at a stage when it’s mankind that determines what the machines do. Whether that continues to be the case as, in some people’s eyes, AI threatens to create thinking robots that will take over the planet, is for the future, albeit the not too distant future. But just now, it’s the interaction between technology and humans that powers our world, creating problems certainly but also creating far more opportunities than have ever been possible before.

Our work at Be-IT brings us into contact with lots of amazing techies: people who believe the impossible can be done and set about to demonstrate why they are right. Many of them are young. Their enthusiasm and drive are a wonder to behold. Some of them will become very successful and forge dynamic businesses: others will still succeed but as employees rather than entrepreneurs, yet virtually all of them will make our world a better, more interesting and successful place.

New Sustainable Lives

However, it’s not they whom I think will make the real difference in this 21st century: it’s the children and teenagers whose entire approach to life is far removed from mine and who are growing up in the world that our current clients are creating. For them, AI will, I hope, be a force to engage with, replacing humans in many instances but not (again, I hope) supplanting them entirely as future generations seek to create new and sustainable lives for their children.

This is not just about the difference between today’s conservative adults who use email and Facebook in preference to DM and Snapchat: it’s the entire attitude to life of the up-and-coming generation currently at school. We are already way beyond the stage of our kids struggling to understand the world in which their parents and grandparents grew up: a world where letters were written in ink by hand, then posted and it took at least a day before they arrived; or when we had to wait to see “the next exciting episode” on a thing called a television; or wait months for a landline phone to be installed.

There are millions of millennials who already find that world – the world of my parents and of some of my friends and many of my business acquaintances – utterly bizarre.

The Future of Work

That said, it’s not the world in which we currently exist that really matters. Yes, virtually every area of the economy is increasingly being affected by tech, whether it’s enabling us to target and kill specific weeds in a grain crop rather than saturate the cereal with dangerous chemicals, or seeing if we can make a driverless car safely traverse Hyde Park Corner (other corners are available).

It’s not what we can do now that matters, it’s what our unbelievably tech-savvy kids expect that will drive the economy and society forward between now and 2100.

This, in turn, creates questions for tech companies – and, in the long run, for recruiters. If you’re a tech company creating products and services do you bother with markets for the older generation? Do you focus on the current markets – the driverless cars and AI surgery – or do you, if you really want to make a difference, use that AI to try to discover what my children will want by way of jobs, entertainment, leisure and social activities? And if the jobs are all to be done by robots taught by AI, what then?

Algorithms, Robots & AI

Of course it may be that the economy becomes largely algorithm/robot-powered, and humans become recipients of a form of universal income, paid for by taxes on robots. That latter idea seemed crazy when it was first mooted, but now, who knows? I don’t pretend to know the answers, just some of the questions, but one thing I am sure of is that AI will be at the heart of this and the companies/individuals who learn how to harness it to answer the question of what we will need and want 20 years hence are the ones who are going to be most successful.

Start planning now.