Future Skills

Perttu Pölönen, Owen F. Witesman

• Publisher: Viva Editions
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781632280749
• eBook ISBN: 9781632281319
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

What will humanity look like in twenty years... in fifty? Which skills should we be cultivating in an age of ceaseless technological progress? Finnish inventor, composer, and futurist Perttu Pölönen argues that the next revolution is a human revolution. To counterbalance the world we digitalized, we need to develop creativity, perseverance, compassion, and curiosity—those same soft skills that give our lives meaning and set us apart from machines. What can we get from you that we can't get from Google? Join Pölönen as he takes a practical, personal look at our ever-changing technological landscape while investigating our ability to respond, adapt, and evolve as a society. In the end, his curriculum for the future will empower you to use your uniquely human skills to master a decidedly uncertain future.

1: TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE

Technology will change each of our lives in the future more than we can imagine. Is that good or bad?

We are living through what may be the most exciting time in the entire history of the world, because technology is advancing at an accelerating pace and changing our environment faster than ever before. In the future, we will need to know the basics of artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, blockchain, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology in the same way today we understand how to use a computer, what the internet is, and everything a phone can do.

The ultimate purpose of technology is to be better than us or to help us to do things better. There isn’t enough strength in our muscles to fly from one continent to another, so we invented airplanes. Our eyes can’t see into other galaxies or investigate anything at a cellular level, so we invented the telescope and the microscope. And because our brains can’t remember everything at once, we developed a way to store data on computers. In this sense, the human body is very limited: travel across the ocean is possible by boat but not swimming; our eyes can’t record the colors of the sun setting over the sea very well, but a camera can; and we can’t send that picture to our friend using telepathy, but with the internet, it happens instantaneously. When our skills are superseded by new inventions or we lose our jobs because of innovation, that isn’t anything unnatural that we should fight—it’s the whole point of technological development. Without this kind of innovation, we still wouldn’t have fire, the wheel, or computers.

Technology is a tool, and a neutral tool at that. It is not fundamentally good or bad. The use it is put to defines its morality. A knife can be used for good or evil, just like fire. If fire were invented today, would it be legal even though so much evil can be accomplished with it? For hunter-gatherers, fire was a necessity, so questions like that never occurred to them. Fire only became a threat later when it was misused. Will the same thing happen with artificial intelligence? Even though some technology may appear radical, seen from the future it may be a very natural step forward, even a necessity. New technology has always aroused fear and concern because it deviates from what we’re accustomed to. As we evaluate benefits and costs, we must consider the spirit and needs of the age. There was life before fire, but taming fire made everyday life better. We got along without artificial intelligence, but soon it will help us every day—if it isn’t already.

The most significant inventions of our day relate to information technology, to things that process information in some way, such as computers, smartphones, and block-chain. Gaining a greater understanding of these innovations can broaden our perspective in new, immensely interesting ways. People need to gain practical experience with how sensors work, how networks are built, and how code is written, to choose only three examples. When we understand the basics, our relationship with technology is more positive and it’s less likely to feel like magic. Likewise, if we want to understand the logic that underlies information technology and how it can be applied, we need to experiment with it. A general awareness of the direction the world is moving in and what megatrends are on the horizon is critical to our success and our ability to form an opinion about developments in society, politics, and technology.

What would happen if we spent a little time every week at school, at work, and with our friends talking about trends and news related to the future and technology? And what if the TV news didn’t just cover current events, weather, and sports, but also future news? It’s important for us to make talking about the future a part of our daily lives so that we can keep up with technological change. Then the change won’t frighten us, it will excite us. Instead of feeling anxious, we won’t be able to wait!

FORTUNE-TELLERS AND FOLK REMEDIES

There are many challenges in predicting the future. We’ve traded fortune-tellers for futurists and omens for trend analysis. Although futurology is a science, predicting technological developments is usually easier than predicting people’s reactions to it. When technology challenges our old mind-sets, our reactions can be inexplicable.

People predicted that the internet would increase our free time and reduce our amount of work, but instead we live in an increasingly hectic society. Urgent work assignments and stress come home with us on our phones and laptops. The goal of social media was to connect people and improve our social lives. It did that, but it also funneled people into peer groups of increasing similarity, and now when we think of social media, the first things that come to mind are confrontation and the undermining of democracy. Globally, unemployment is at its lowest point in decades, but on the other hand, careers are projected to be divided into shorter terms with several employers. In the workplace, we are encouraged to be active on social media, but you can lose your job over a single tweet.

Before, we were more willing to share of ourselves, but nowadays we’re more careful about whom we help. We are building our walls higher instead of our tables larger, even though the world has become more connected. What are the future trends we don’t yet see? Although our intentions may be good, we can’t know what the end result will be. People’s reactions to change are difficult to predict, and few are able to anticipate these types of phenomena in time.

Predictions themselves also affect outcomes. If one week before an election someone issues a prediction that one party’s support will see a huge rise, many voters may react by switching candidates or parties. If no one had ever given the prediction, the voters wouldn’t have changed their minds at the last minute. Predictions are not important in themselves, but they are important in terms of what they cause in us. What the media reports, what’s written in books, and what experts say changes our behavior and alters events. That’s why predicting the future is difficult. For example, if the media is constantly going on about how artificial intelligence is taking jobs, social media is going to hell in a handbasket, cryptocurrency is replacing real money, or entertainment is shifting to virtual reality, those predictions can influence the final outcome, ironically enough sometimes in the opposite direction.

Technology will also have unknown downsides, many of which we would prefer not to predict. For instance, what will be the long-term effects of the internet and smartphones on social welfare and politics? Big trends also bring about countertrends. Who would have believed at the beginning of the millennium, at the height of the rapture over the Nokia 3310 telephone, that within two decades we would start setting up technology-free zones because we need a break from our phones, if only for a moment? Who would have believed that millions of people would end up suffering from addictions to their phones?

The future is unlikely to turn out the way we imagine it now, and that’s why we have to discuss it from different angles.

FRIGHTENING BEFORE, FUNNY AFTER

In the midst of accelerating change, our attitudes, concerns, and laws are the slowest parts of technological progress. Caution is not always a bad thing, but history has taught us that often we can be bolder than we are. Now it feels completely normal for trains to run, airplanes to fly, robots to make goods for us in factories, and pacemakers to be installed in people’s bodies to regulate their heartbeats. But these were once radical ideas, and people feared them. For example, in the nineteenth century, the supporters of a movement of textile workers who called themselves the Luddites went so far as to attack factories and destroy machines. Our prejudices often slow the adoption of innovations.

If I told you now that one day a person would marry a machine, that food would be made out of air, and that an artificial intelligence party would join Parliament, your reaction might be cautious, even though the first two have already happened. A man in China built and married his own robot wife in 2017, and scientists in Helsinki created a protein powder using a microbe and carbon dioxide that they extracted from the air. If you snorted at the mention of people being afraid of trains and airplanes, but the idea of an artificial intelligence party made you pull up short, maybe in a couple of decades you’ll be laughing at yourself and your current fears. Who knows? In any case, it’s clear that the steps we have to take now to adapt to the development of technology may prove to be the most radical ever for the structure of society. And that’s usually what faces the most resistance—change to the status quo, not the technology itself.

We’re terrible at judging what is normal and what is not. We take for granted all the technology that existed before us, but we are concerned by everything that is to come. Your grandparents were suspicious of things that are common for you, and the advancements that you’re suspicious of will be commonplace for your grandchildren. In practice, resistance to change is about defending the radical ideas of the past and not accepting the radical ideas of today.

Imagine a situation where I could push you out of your consciousness by pressing a button. Would you consent to the experiment? This idea may seem unpleasant, because your eyes would go dark, you would lose your sense of control and your sense of time, and you would be absent from your body for a while. However, if I asked you to sleep, that wouldn’t scare you at all, even though these ideas are identical. I think it’s extremely odd that every sixteen hours or so we lose all control of our bodies and slip into an uncontrollable coma. But we don’t give it a second thought! Some people even have hallucinations, which we call dreams. The thought of this would be terrifying if we weren’t used to it. We were born into a world where everyone sleeps, so this kind of loss of consciousness every night is completely normal.

We have been born in a period of history where the representation of the time available to us is based on a calendar that divides the year into months, weeks, and days. It’s normal for us that a five-day workweek is followed by a two-day weekend. How would this concept of the week have been received five thousand years ago? The people of that time might have asked in amusement why anyone was even considering such a thing, since for them every single day was the same, and no one could change that. Now when we suggest that in the future the work of robots may allow us to move to a three-day workweek, people laugh again. We don’t find things strange if we’ve been exposed to them since we were young, whether we’re talking about trains, airplanes, sleeping, the week, an artificial intelligence political party, or backing up our brains online. So maybe it will be totally normal someday to have a computer inside us that we can use to connect our brains to the internet and upload our thoughts to the cloud.

Future generations probably won’t give a second thought to the inventions that concern us now. Our job is to make sure that we don’t pass on our limited thinking.

IN THE FUTURE, IMAGINATION WILL BE THE SIXTH SENSE

The most important tool in developing technology and predicting the future is imagination. Imagination determines what we consider probable and what we don’t. If a future concept is easy for you to imagine, for example, drone taxis, you will predict that thing will become reality. A drone taxi is just a new kind of airplane, after all. But if a concept is difficult for you to imagine, for example, teleportation or a time machine, you will immediately say it’s impossible. But how different is teleportation from a 3-D printer? We can now send an object electronically to the other side of the world and print it. New inventions often seem like magic until someone tells you how they work.

The future has often turned out to be more than we could have imagined. We need imagination, but even it has its limits. We have to understand that the limits of our imaginations are not the limits of the world. Future inventions are difficult to explain because they may be beyond our imaginations, or we may not have the words to describe them. Imagine if you had to explain Google to people in the 1970s. How would you have described how it works? Because we didn’t have the internet yet, words like search engine or algorithm wouldn’t have been any help. Google would probably have to be something like an “answer machine” or an “answer robot,” because it gives answers to any questions you ask. Maybe you could have explained that all the information in the world had been organized in a list and this machine combs through the entire collective understanding of humanity for you in a split second. People would probably have replied that a machine with all the answers was impossible. How would it even work? The very idea would have been considered ridiculous in the 1970s.

Don’t let your imagination limit the world. It’s hard for us to talk about future inventions without the right terms and concepts, just like Google would have been difficult to explain before the internet. An answer machine should have been irrational, just like teleportation, and just like we consider time travel impossible now. We can’t really take time travel seriously now, but maybe even that will be possible one day, in some way or another, thanks to new breakthroughs in physics. As science and technology evolve, we gain a new vocabulary that can help us explain ideas that previously seemed foolish. The future will probably be much more than we can describe or imagine right now. If an idea seems impossible to you, that is only your imagination’s interpretation. Even absurd things can be worthwhile. Encourage crazy ideas, and don’t be the one who didn’t believe in the answer machine.

IS A BEAVER DAM THE SAME THING AS AN AIRPLANE?

It should be obvious to you that a train moves faster than you can run. But you probably don’t think that makes trains unnatural. In the future, computers may be smarter than you. That’s natural, too, isn’t it? In the first example, technology replaced muscle power, and in the latter, brainpower. Isn’t that the same thing, though? When a bird builds a nest, an ant assembles an anthill, or a beaver makes a dam, we are seeing bird, ant, and beaver technology. A beaver dam affects the water level in a lake and changes the environment in which other creatures live. Is a beaver dam unnatural, then? The fact that we build technology that allows us to dive deep into the ocean and fly high in the sky but also edit our own genes and talk to machines that are smarter than us does not make any of these things unnatural. It’s hard to say where the line is, or whether one exists at all.

Before the Wright brothers’ first successful flight, many believed that human flight was impossible. This wasn’t just a popular opinion, it was a fundamental, deep-seated belief that flying was contrary to the laws of nature. As late as the late nineteenth century, experts said that a material heavier than air simply could not stay aloft. A similar impossible idea today might be that humans could live forever. Experts would rush to say that this is against the laws of nature, because human cells simply can’t do it. The turning point for flight was the realization that something can fly through the air without acting like a bird. Once the idea of flight no longer rested on flapping wings, the chains restricting imagination were cast off. And what if a similar change in thinking someday provides the solution to immortality?

Using airplanes, humans learned to fly, and genetic engineering may help us live longer, even though neither is natural to humans. And what if a machine becomes smarter than us because it thinks in a different way than we do? An airplane doesn’t fly like a bird, so why should an artificial intelligence think like a human? Maybe the development of artificial intelligence will make a leap forward when it stops mimicking the human way of thinking or the laws of logic in general.

In the future, you could ask a machine advice about whether you should marry your sweetheart, and it might answer yes. Would you trust the machine’s answer even if you didn’t understand how it had come to that conclusion? This thought might seem frightening if you were in that situation and didn’t understand the machine’s operating logic. But a lot of people don’t understand how engines work or the physics of flight, and that doesn’t stop them from driving cars or flying in planes. So, should you use an algorithm to choose your partner? Even if both you and the computer come to the same conclusion, your thought processes will still have been different. And what if the machine had told you not to get married? Would you have listened? It won’t be until machines begin using better methods than humans and we learn to trust them that the breakthrough will happen.

We make decisions with our emotions, whether we’re talking about spouses or our opinions about technology. Many technological ideas can arouse strong emotions. We get concerned or afraid, or we think that something inviolable is being threatened. These feelings are natural, but if it’s any comfort, I can tell you there’s no conspiracy behind any of this. Scientists and engineers have no interest in making the world a worse place. They create solutions that challenge old ways of doing things, which forces us to update our values. When we are forced to consider the questions raised by technology, this helps us find what’s most important in life. Instead of using our energy trying to resist the inevitable, let it serve us.

WHO HAS THE POWER TO INFLUENCE TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT?

In 1589, Queen Elizabeth I of England heard about a new machine that knitted common wool. When the inventor, William Lee, applied for a royal patent, the queen refused it because the machine would put so many knitters in the kingdom out of work. However, William didn’t give up and improved the machine by adding to the number of needles so it could also produce fine silk. Again, the queen denied the patent and expressed her concerns about the consequences of the knitting machine...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Future Skills
• Publishing Details
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1: Technology and The Future
• 2: Curiosity and Experimentation
• 3: Creativity and Improvisation
• 4: Problem Solving and Adaptability
• 5: Passion and Character
• 6: Communication and Storytelling
• 7: Critical Thinking and Interpretation
• 8: Entrepreneurship and Teamwork
• 9: Perseverance and Patience
• 10: Well-Being and Self-Knowledge
• 11: Compassion and Honesty
• 12: Moral Courage and Ethics
• 13: After-School Detention: Love
• Conclusion: When Nothing is Certain, Everything is Possible
• Sources