The Future - where in the world are we going?

The Week after Davos 21 this episode explores one of the biggest issues of our time - what will the future look like? At a time of unprecedented change in the world I explore why we are having to change so fast and what is the scale of the change we can expect going forward. What do we need to prepare for and how can we be successful in the world going forward.

How to be a good Hu(man)

One hundred pages for the future

Transcript

Hi and welcome to todays podcast on the future - where in the world are we going.

Okay, this is a subject that I'm very passionate about. I'm passionate about it for a number of reasons. I think that I'm just one of those people that likes to live in the future. I like to imagine what it could be like. Some people like to look backwards and they’re the sorts of people that always try to learn from history and try to apply the lessons from history in the present moment.  Some people just live in the present, and don't really look backwards or forwards particularly and enjoy living life in the present moment, and then there are people like me who spend most of their life living 10 to 20 years in the future. 

People like me tend to talk about the present in the past tense, which can be confusing sometimes. It's because my image and vision of the future is so real to me and so constant, I just think that things have already happened.

Anyway less about me and onto what’s happening in the world at the moment and what you need to know. 

If you’re anything like most people You're probably looking around, and all of a sudden the world just seems to have been turned upside down. You were probably aware that in 2007 and 2012 we had what amounted to a global earthquake in the financial markets which resulted in immense problems for whole economies and countries and millions of people. 

Greece Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland had near catastrophic economic collapses , and those are just the European countries that suffered but you know we suffered globally as well as a result of that, whole towns in the USA almost disappeared completely when it happened as house repossessions took hold. 

Millions of people lost their jobs and lost everything and now, in the last year, we've had a virus which is basically brought the entire planet to a grinding halt. 

So, you could be forgiven for wondering what on earth is next. And, you know, the honest answer is, no one can really tell you. The reality is we don't always know what's going to happen next , but generally speaking, the high level Shape of Things is possible to predict. 

Now you might be thinking well that just sounds like a conflicting message here, you know, on the one hand you're saying you can't predict and on the other hand you can.

Well, some things that you cannot predict, and these events are called exogenous shocks or black swan events. They're, things that no one could really predict, they come out of the blue, and they fundamentally change things. 

Now we can't do a great deal about these sorts of events other than just respond to them as best we can when they occur. But the purpose of this conversation is not to talk about these events.

Instead what I do want to talk about are the long term planetary trends, because, really, when you look at the planet and humanity there are some things that are happening, and have been happening for a long time that we can't avoid.  

Now, once upon a time, back in 1968 a book was published called the the population bomb - 

at the time the population on earth was about 3.5 billion, roughly half what it is now and we already recognised back then that by 2000. We would have approximately 6 billion people on the planet. 6 billion people on the planet. We'd done the maths, and we'd worked out that this was probably approaching the limits of sustainability for the planet. 

We already knew back in the 70’s that if we were going to hit these sorts of numbers we were going to have water resource problems on earth. We knew we were going to have food problems, we were going to have general raw material and  resources issues relating to a population of that size and scale. 

In 2020 the worlds population stood at 7.7 billion! 

Over the years we've tried various experiments to try and control the population growth.

We had the state sponsored one child programme in China, where the Government tried to legislate the number of children you could have, they also tried sterilising over 100 million women after their first child, and to this day the jury is out as to whether any of it really had any benefit at all. 

Perhaps one of the earliest originators of the idea of population control came from a man called Thomas Malthus, an English Cleric in 1798 (223 years ago).

Population growth has always been an issue on the planet because population growth puts pressure on resources and is know to affect the poor disproportionally. If as a species you prize stability and predictability on the governance of things, then uncontrolled population growth presents a big challenge of you, specially if you are trying to run a country. 

So you can see that population growth has been an issue on the table for quite a long time, it’s not a modern issue and certainly it hasn’t been as critical upto now because we have, more or less, always found a way to provide the resources to support the growing world population. Rather Unfortunately none of these writers over the years chose to moderate their language when discussing this topic, so for a modern audience their choice of words could be deemed highly offensive. Which is one of the reasons why global population control is one of those taboo topics in todays world.

We have had various sorts of programmes in India and across the globe generally under the banner of “family planning”. None of these has worked particularly well. 

In fact we have tried all sorts of incentive schemes and legislative tools across the globe in order to tackle what was seen as a problem, and in retrospect some of those ideas and activities fall far short of what we would term as reasonable theses days.

Over the years it has become apparent when looking at the data that there is only really one thing that reduces the rate of global population growth and that is a an increase in the standard of living for people.

What we now know is that if people's standard of living increases and they have food security, secure housing, education and equal rights. 

We know that if we do these things people will have fewer children and the reason for that is quite logical  - 

If you depend in your old age on your family to support you - growing food and looking after you, it pays to have a large family, so naturally you will have a large family. On the other hand if you don’t have to worry about food security or being looked after in your old age, you don’t need to have as many children. You can instead  have children because you WANT children rather than having children because you NEED children. This is at the heart of population growth and is at the heart of differentiating the poorer nations from the richer nations on the planet.

So, in about 1971 the President of The Club of Rome wrote a book called 100 pages for the future and this was a book about what would happen by the year 2000, with the expected doubling of the worlds population. 

It is a Fascinating book and well worth a read if you can get hold of a copy - just about everything that was predicted in 1971 has so far come true. 

Now jump forward 10 years to the 1980s, we had a committee senate hearing in the USA

where the problem of population control was investigated as a result of the publication of a report called THE GLOBAL 2000 REPORT.

I can tell you from reading the transcript from the meeting, that people were extremely worried about the situation back then.  Words like Armageddon were used by the committee, so you can imagine can’t you, what it must have been like and how concerned people were.

So, the population of the world is just one aspect of the pressure that we put on the natural environment. Now, before we get too worried about it. The good news is that since 1968 the whole world has been working on this issue. 

We have in fact managed to increase the standard of living across the globe at levels never ever previously achieved in the history of humankind. (if you are interested in this sort of thing google the Human development index) and The good news is that global population growth is levelling off. 

In fact, we have another problem now. And we'll come back to this later, which is that we now face the opposite problem in developed societies, and that is population collapse. 

This means that in the rich countries we are now approaching a point where there will be an ageing population with more retirees than working people and this creates unique challenges to the very fabric of society and the economies affected. 

We now actually have a living example of what happens when a population collapses. Japan is now facing this problem at the moment, where they are actually running out of airline pilots and taxi drivers and other key workers for example.

The collapse in population is so important, that the Japanese government is now drafting new public policy, to cope with the decline in the population and the economy going forward.

As for the rest of us around the world, we’re watching with interest as this unfolds to see how the Japanese manage to cope with the decline as we in turn will face a similar scenario in the years to come. 

So, population is one of those things that is fundamentally driving some of the activities that you're seeing in the world today and will have a big impact on the way we do things in the next 100 years.

The other thing that population growth has created, is increased pressure on the land we use to grow food for for all of us. 

One of the reasons there are so many of us on the planet right now is that we have as a species been incredibly successful in producing vast amounts of food  - and its one of the reasons why we have managed to increase the standard of living across the globe. 

But we've done this by using artificial fertilisers and nitrates and extensive farming methods. So we've put an enormous amount of pressure, on the soil. So the soil is now all but dead in a many places, it is what is termed ‘severely depleted’. 

The only reason we can continue to grow anything in some of these areas is because of the sheer amount of fertilisers that we put into the soil. So that means a couple of things. 

One is we have declining yields. We can’t get as much from our harvests as we used to -  At a time when we need increasing yields.

This also means that the nutritional value of that food is dropping because the soil is effectively being de-mineralized. As a result we're not getting the nutrient dense foods that we need. 

So what's happening is that our demand for food as a planet is still going up - but our ability to produce more of it is declining and this is one of the reasons why everyone's gone vegan mad. 

You would have had to have lived in a cave for the last 10 years not to realise that veganism and plant based protein and alternative meats are the new big thing and that will only continue. 

It will continue for the simple reason that we use over half of the cultivatable land on the planet for crops like cereals, rice, corn maize, and so on - to feed to animals because we like to eat meat. 

With the continuing increase in the world population at least for the next few decades we  can't afford to do that anymore for two reasons. 

One is that cattle farming and animal farming produces enormous amounts of methane which much more far more toxic for the atmosphere than co2 so it's an absolutely enormous multiplier in global warming terms. And also because the only way for us to feed ourselves going forward and to create food security worldwide, is to reduce the amount of animals that we eat, and to use the feed or at least the land that’s used to grow the feed for animals - for humans instead. 

So, plant based protein, and plant-derived-food-products are going to transform, what we nowadays regard as food. These new alternative meat products use a fraction of the water to grow and make than what we currently use to produce animal protein.- so if we can create alternative burgers and things that taste and look like a burger and persuade people to not eat animals we are in effect conserving an enormous amount of water and we are removing an enormous amount of methane from the atmosphere.

This way we also ensure that we have planetary food security going forward. In fact estimates show that we can, in theory, feed upto 10 billion people with the current land mass available for food production on earth.

But let’s hope we don’t ever reach those limits as it’s starting to feel crowded already.

Now, I talked about food security and you're probably thinking what are you talking about?, you know, there's loads of food  - we produce surpluses every year and if you go online you can see it in the data, but that’s not quite as true as you might think.

At the moment China is facing the second biggest famine in its history, there was the great famine in 1959  where it is estimated that upwards of 55 million people died. 

China currently have a situation as big as that on their hands right at this moment in time and that is due to a couple of things. 

Firstly they have had widespread crop failures due to the erratic nature of the climate which is due to the warming-cycle we are currently in, 

and secondly they have had a catastrophic outbreak of swine flu which has led to the almost total eradication of their pig herds to control the spread of the virus. 

In fact we're seeing unseasonable weather events all around the world. And that's as a result of the volatility created in the global atmosphere, due to global warming and El Nino. 

It’s not just currently when we have had problems in recent history - back in 2008, we had a global rice crisis. We ran out of rice in many parts of the world. Now, there's two schools of thought explaining why this happened -  one is that, you know, we we didn't handle the crisis very well and that, when you took the total amount of rice available on the planet and divided it by what we needed we had enough. The problem was the effective distribution of it. And then there's the other side of the argument which says, look, if you have a global weather event and we have less than a year's worth of reserves globally worldwide, we put ourselves at risk.

If we use up those reserves, then it only takes a freak weather event the next year and you actually have a global shortage.

So what I’m saying here is that, as it stands, we are only ever 18 months away from a global food shortage at the moment. 

It’s not something that we can say, “oh the rice crop failed in India this year, let’s plant potatoes instead!”, this is something finite, -  if we run out,  - we run out  - and millions of people starve to death.

So let’s be clear we are only a bad year climatically away from actually being physically unable to feed millions if not billions of people. That is what i mean when I talk about food security. This is a very real problem that the planet faces at the moment.

So then you move on to a third pillar, which is the absolute devastation, which we've created just by being successful as the human race. We have completely over-fished all the oceans. We're busy polluting all the oceans. We're polluting the atmosphere and we're building on everything and farming on everything. 

With the warming climate, as well as our contributions through co2 and general pollution and building everywhere - we are actively contributing to a global extinction event. We are systematically destroying the natural world around us. 

If you listen to Sir David Attenborough recently in some of his documentaries you begin realise that we have about 100 years left on this planet, before we more or less become extinct ourselves.  In fact if we don’t stop doing what we are doing now by 2050, we will  be extinct by the end of the century.

So, then we move on to a fourth pillar, which is oil. We built this entire planet on oil. 

Ever since the moment we found oil. That has been the moment that this planet has grown and everything around you that you see - is built on oil. Oil isn't just about driving cars and petrol and flying. Just about every plastic. Every paint, Every cosmetic, Everything that's useful in this world comes from oil. It's the building block of our modern society. 

In in the 1970s, there was a book called Hubberts peak which is about a concept called Peak oil.

This book introduced the theory that eventually our consumption of oil would outstrip our ability to extract it, and at that stage we would have effectively a declining amount of oil left in the world. 

This idea has been poo pooed for years by the oil industry who for the last 10 to 20 years have said no, there's plenty of oil we've got loads of it. Just last year, someone basically challenged the industry and made the oil industry go away and do a full audit of every oil well and reserve on the planet. And lo and behold, the answer came back quite shockingly that they've just been making the numbers up for the last 20 to 30 years. The reality is, some of the largest oil reserves we have left on the planet are almost empty. Which means we have effectively reached peak oil. We now face a future where oil is going to increase in scarcity.

The reason this is important is that if we want to transition into a new sustainable way of life we need all of that remaining oil. 

So to just give you a really simple example. You may be  thinking at the moment you have all these wind farms or solar farms you've got alternative energy or got hydropower. 

Yep, we've got all of those alternative energy technologies and the one thing that all of those energy things need more than anything else is oil. You have to have oil to produce the infrastructure for those alternative energy technologies - things like solar panels requires a vast amount of energy in order to be produced. 

So what's happening now is that we're starting to realise that oil cannot actually be replaced if you take the total cost of energy of the alternative energy sector. 

We're not there yet, we haven't produced solar panels that live long enough, that have enough efficiency to overcome the cost of actual production, yet, 

Wind farms are an incredible source of alternative energy but they too are energy dense things to create and currently are non recyclable.

These are some of the reasons why we're falling back on nuclear power  and hydrogen as fallback energy producing technologies  - and believe me, nuclear power and hydrogen production has come a long way. 

Just the other week the Chinese managed to keep a fusion reactor up and running for 102 seconds, the longest anyone has managed far to date.

The internal temperature of this reactor was was the same as the sun. 

This is a very different technology to the old fashioned reactors we are used to  - its a bit like harnessing the sun on the planet Earth. 

Really, in the next 20 years or so, we will create a permanent safe and clean energy source for the world - So that's a fantastic thing for all of us, -  but the point I'm making here is, that currently we have a very real problem with oil reserves  - so we cannot continue to consume oil at the rate we are doing - if we do, we'll run out. And if we run out. Then everything we know and cherish in the world today will disappear to, along with billions of us, as well.

So we've got four extinction drivers on our plate. 

This then creates another potential problem globally - if you can't produce enough food, your crops are failing because of climate change, and you haven't got enough energy to develop your economy you create the perfect situation for mass migration. 

We are already seeing this with mass migration in Europe, coming up from Africa and in other areas of the world - this is a very real scenario which we are currently living through.

So we have examples of this and we have examples of Pacific Islands and nation states that have disappeared, or are in the process of disappearing and being evacuated at the moment due to global sea level rises. We also know that in the next 100 years cities like London, New York, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Alexandria in Egypt, Shanghai in China, and other low lying coastal areas will disappear underwater. Hundreds of millions of people and huge economic centres will have to migrate to higher ground. That’s already inevitable. 

So, I want you to take a moment now, because I don't want you to get too depressed about all of this because I don't think the extinction events are going to happen. 

You know, generally speaking, we are very good, as human beings - as a species, at fixing things, at cooperating and making things happen. 

We've been trying very hard to fix all of these things I have talked about today since the 1970s. But we just haven't quite managed to do enough of it. 

Therefore I would like you to imagine you're up there with the all the world leaders and you all come together for a meeting, and you're presented with the global situation we are currently in -  where basically you've run out of time, and you've run out of options, you know what's going to happen in the next 50 years If you don't sort it out and you need to fundamentally change the entire globe, -  the global economy, and the way we do things, totally as quickly as possible. Otherwise, we're all going to die. 

Well - That’s the situation they're in. That’s the situation we are all in.

So ask yourself, How far would you be prepared to go. Now that you know all of that. That's what happened. And it's not as if this is a hypothetical or theoretical situation. We are actually living with all of those elements. Right now, it's happening as we speak.

 We are actually trying to manage these situations as countries  - as a global population, right at this moment in time so it's not a theoretical exercise. We've hit those numbers we've crossed that Rubicon. We are now in a situation where we have no option but to do something radical in order to save the planet and the human race. 

So, what would you do?

Well, the situation is critical. And I think we are now entering into the next age where we are going to have to transition to a digital society, a robotic society, an autonomous and AI led society. Why do we need to move into that you might ask? -  Well, firstly we can't carry on driving trillions of miles around the countryside in our cars every day going to work  - that’s clearly a ludicrous proposition because it uses up most of the oil on the planet and causes massive pollution problems -  So that has to stop. 

We can't replace that with public transport because there isn't enough public transport to cope so we have to get people working remotely. And hey, guess what, COVID 19 is providing a perfect excuse to transition into that digital way of working. 

The next thing is, the transition to electric autonomous cars. We are going to see car ownership collapse in the future.

In the future, cars will be like self driving taxis - if we need a car for a while we will just book one on our phones and it will turn up and drive us to where we need to go. They will be self driving, electric and used all the time. This way we will only need about 10% of the current number of cars on the planet.

So that's why Google and Tesla and everyone are focused so much on driverless cars, because we need them. And the same with aeroplanes and trains. You know, if there’s one thing Japan has shown us already with population collapse - you don't actually have enough people to fulfil some of these jobs. What's more, actually, to be honest. In a lot of cases. AI is a lot better at doing those jobs than humans. Most of the accidents that we have in public transport are human error. You know it's someone falling asleep, not paying attention deciding to break the rules. Most of the accidents we have on the roads are down to human error. It's been shown quite clearly with the millions of miles that have been driven autonomously in cars that autonomously driven cars are much safer than human driven cars, so why wouldn't we do it, when we have to do it. 

So, that's something, a big thing that's coming. 

Another thing, for example, doctors, doctors spend seven years of their life training. Basically they have to absorb an enormous amount of information in order to become a doctor so that they can diagnose and help us when we are ill, now imagine, Google has all of that information, it has the sum total of all human medical knowledge in a database. So we don't actually need to train anyone, -  training is such a waste of time. That's a waste of seven years of someone's life trying to learn something that a computer knows already and if you ask Google to replicate virtual doctors it could produce a million of them tomorrow. So learning in that traditional sense is redundant and what they've shown with AI diagnostics through Google and big blue and other AI programmes is that AI is much more accurate than a doctor at diagnosing certain illnesses and this trend is just going to continue. 

So not only do we not need to learn all of this knowledge and produce doctors in a traditional way, but the AI is going to replace a large portion of what we commonly think of as a doctors role. Doctors of the future will be very different to the doctors of today and the same is happening with lawyers, we're already starting to see in the legal profession that that parts of it are just getting taken apart, bit by bit, as technology takes over.

When blockchain finally arrives estate agents, and the legal advisory services that go with the selling of properties will also go as well, much like the old fashioned insurance brokers that we used to have on every street corner 20 years ago. 

So, we are in the process of just an enormous digital revolution. Back in 1970 had someone told you that today you would have a little device in your hand, which allows you to communicate with the world, access the sum total of human knowledge at the movement of a finger or a voice command and you could do all your banking  through it and it was a computer with more processing power in the palm of your hand than NASA had at that time. You would just think they were crazy. It would have been so far fetched for someone in 1970, that it would have been truly unbelievable. 

Well, we are now just entering the digital age proper, and I can truly-tell-you, none of us, are capable of conceiving what our lives will be like in 20 years time. It's impossible. We have some idea. But really, we cannot even conceive of it. It is the sheer pace and scale of change that’s happening that is just too great for our relatively Simple, post-industrial Minds to grasp. 

There are only a couple of things that we are capable really of doing successfully at this moment in time. The first thing is to just accept that we have no choice but to change. There is no plan B, there is no middle way. We have to accept, fundamentally, that we are facing a cliff and humankind is racing towards that cliff at a vast rate of knots -  so we are going to change faster than we've ever changed in the entire history of humankind. 

More radically than we've ever thought possible. Globally, simultaneously. Over the next 20 years. That is what going to happen. 

So, the first thing we need to do is accept this. 

We need to accept that change is coming, that it is already with us. 

The second thing we have to accept is that we have absolutely no idea how big how far or what those changes are going to be -  the only thing that we can do is accept that we're going to have to do it and get on with it. 

Now, you might think, well that's obvious, but no it's not. As I explained in my previous podcast on change -  We are really bad, as humans, at changing -  really really bad. And we get really upset about it. And, you know, we tend to throw our toys out of the pram and we go out and we demonstrate  - we set fire to things and we have riots. We have civil wars. 

You know, we're just hopeless and that's one of the big things we have to stop, we can’t  afford to do that, we don't have the time to do that. We have to get behind our governments, our leaders, our influencers and we have to support it and we have to support it in the best way possible. 

It’s  our responsibility to find ways of fixing this, we can’t just complain and talk nonsense on the internet and write rubbish and proliferate conspiracy theories - that doesn't actually help us. Because if you think about it, it doesn't really matter if there's a conspiracy or not,  - think about it - why would anyone do anything other than try and save themselves and the human race. 

Conspiracy theories are all based on powerful people out there, somewhere, who are self-serving, and only interested in themselves, well hang-on, just take a step back for a minute. All those people are going to die the same way that we're gonna die. And if we're not here and there's no society, then they're not big and powerful. And they've got nothing. They can't fly anywhere they can't go on vacation, because there's nothing there. Because we're all dead. So, You know, you have to stop this conspiracy nonsense. The reality is, everyone is totally focused on survival. And we have been, for 60 or 70 years now. So, go back and educate yourself on all the United Nations programmes. All the World Trade programmes. All the books, all the things that have been happening for the last 60 to 70 years. We have, as a species been focused on preventing this Cataclysm for a long time now, and it's got to the point where it's gone critical, and we have to solve it. 

So, yeah, I'm sure it looks like a conspiracy but a conspiracy is something that happens in secret, without anyone knowing about it. And this isn't a secret. Everyone knows about it. The only thing I can tell you about most conspiracy theorists is that they haven't read enough. They don't know their history, and they've just found out something that they didn't know before and they think someone's hidden it from them. If they were to go away and do their research properly they’d find, that it's all out there. 

And as to this whole thing about, agenda 21 and agenda 30 and all these terrible people that have created all these programmes for mankind, that just wait a minute, you know, I grew up with most of these people, they are scientists, they're my father. They're my friends, fathers and mothers. These are highly educated, scientists who have dedicated their life to solving some of the world's most complex problems. They're not evil doers.  You know, they drew down civil servants salaries, most of their lives they are not businessmen, they, they're not wielding power. They are just normal good people that have gone out into the world and researched problems, developed enormous amounts of knowledge and understanding about these problems and put forward potential solutions. 

So, you know, I don't have much time for some of these conspiracy theories. 

Now I'm not saying that there aren't people out there that are conspiring and acting in self serving ways but isn’t that just what some humans do? and it’s down to the Selfish nature of some of these people  - which will always be there. 

Throughout history, power has been sought by self serving selfish Money grubbing behaviours -  it has always been a part of humanity, it’s not something new “Power corrupts”, but it's also part of the reason that we have so many checks and balances in the world. 

So, you're going to see digital currencies in the next 10 years. Money will cease to exist. You're gonna see yourselves being paid a living wage by most governments. It probably won't be enough for you to live-on, but it will pay your rent and your bills. And you will have to find work, permanent or temporary, to supplement that basic income going forward. Because there won't be enough jobs for you until we hit population collapse and then there won’t be enough people to do the remaining jobs.

So you will adopt a portfolio life and you will have many little jobs and you will have multiple sources of earnings. 

Tax will be paid in real-time on a transactional basis so global businesses will no longer be able to game the system as they currently do.  So we won't have this annual tax return business that we have now -  we will have real-time taxation going on through blockchain. You know, as much as 2 trillion dollars a year are lost to tax evasion and the black economy around the world, getting hold of that is what is going to help pay the living wage I was talking about.

We won't really have shops anymore everything's going to be online. A lot of people are going to move from the countryside into towns. Because as an ageing population you don't want to be living in the country side, you want to be close to the shops, close to doctors (if there are any)  So you're going to see migration. 

I mean, just in the last 20 to 30 years. A landmass the size of Italy has been rewilded and reforested in Europe, as a result of migration into the cities. That's just a natural phenomena that happens with the ageing demographic. 

You're going to see more delivery services. You're going to see less global travel, because the cost of that's going to go up. And you're going to see a huge explosion in the creative arts. Because if you think about it, we're all consuming vastly more media than we ever did in the past. 

You can see with the large broadcasting services that they've just run out of content. That's where reality TV came from. You don't have to create content for reality TV you just have to have people watching people, that tells you everything you need to know. 

But if you look at the numbers it's very simple you know, you can take a year to write a book. And it takes an hour to consume the film of that book. So the reality is that consuming visual media is hundreds of times quicker than the rate we can produce it at the moment. Some are going to need hundreds and hundreds of times more written work or creative work to create the films and the media to service the demand that we have globally for entertainment going forward. AND that is something that AI is just not very good at -  so that is something that will grow and expand as we go forward. 

Anyway, that's about it for the time being. 

So in summary, I don't think there's ever been a time on this planet. When we face the scale of challenges that we face now and the necessity to change or the ability to transform in such a radical and extensive way. It's unprecedented. And it's just the most amazingly exciting time to be alive. That's the way I see it,  - the potential to do things and to get involved in exciting things is just unlimited. You will probably have four or five careers in your life - all totally different. You will be involved in things and you will see things that you just could not imagine possible. That will happen. And we will solve those problems that we face as mankind, because we have to. So, that is the attitude. I'm suggesting that you take going forward. Don't bury your head in the sand, don't look backwards don't think oh well you know my dad had this sort of job maybe I can have this sort of job. Don't be fooled into thinking that the professions are where you need to go If you want to be a lawyer or a doctor, you know you need to check with some of these things the assumptions you are making and whether some of these professions are even going to exist in the future. So you're going to embark on a lifetime, worth of learning and re-skilling. That is something you're going to have to do all the time because software changes all the time. ways of working business models, everything is going to change, you're going to be in this constant learning loop so you have to ask yourself, do you need to go to university I honestly think universities are going to die in their current format, and will adapt, go online and just produce completely different ways of working I mean we're already seeing it. Universities are breaking down their courses into modules into things that people need to know. 

So, you know, you might not need to go to university for three to four years in the future to learn how to do or become something, you will just do a course on something that you need for that moment in your career. 

You can do that and that takes you a month or two months of training. You know, these are all examples of just re-skilling. and companies will have to train you as well, because they're going to be doing new things that have never been done before. And if you're doing something that's never been done before you can't go to school or to university to learn about it because they don't know about it  - most University lectures and knowledge is 10 - 20 years old, it's not up to date. They're teaching you old stuff. 

So in the new world. You're gonna have to learn on the job. And those skills are going to be commoditized and transferable, but they're going to be commoditized transferable for short a period of time until they're overtaken by something else. 

So one of the things you're going to have to do going forward is learn continuously learn and upgrade. And that's the only way you're going to stay relevant in the future. 

Now that doesn't mean that there aren't going to be jobs which just require people, and hands, there are some things that machines haven't mastered and probably never will master and those will remain the same, those will be human jobs. But there'll be human jobs that robots can’t do so they may be quite lucrative, or they may not, who knows?. 

So if you're looking for interesting work. You have to be flexible, adaptable, trainable and forward looking. 

This is such an exciting time. I've never been as excited as I am at the moment about all the changes that are happening. And it's just wonderful to have this backstop to know that we don't have any choice. If mankind is to survive. We are all going to have to transform ourselves in the next 20 to 30 years. Wow, what a burning platform, absolutely fantastic. 

Now I know what I'm saying will terrorise some of you, but I'm saying Don't be terrorised listen to the podcast on change, understand why you feel the way you do, start to train yourself to become more adaptable, flexible and forward looking. Invest in yourself, invest in the future. It's never been a better time to be alive. It's such a wonderful world we live in. It's so full of promise. We have such a wonderful community of mankind. And it's only going to get better. 

So I'll leave you with that message. Good luck. And if you think that you would like to know more about specific aspects of what I talked about today. Email me at I am iamshokunin@gmail.com, or leave me a message WhatsApp me go to the Facebook page

So, be interested. Be open. Look forward, get excited, because it's coming, It's with us. And we're living through it right now.