The Age of Augmentation and Work is Coming
“Welcome to the Augmented Age. In this new era, your natural human capabilities are going to be augmented by computational systems that help you think, robotic systems that help you make, and a digital nervous system that connects you to the world far beyond your natural senses.”
This quote is from a 2016 Ted Talk by Maurice Conti, renowned designer and futurist, who also said that there will be more change in the next 20 years than there’s been in the last 2,000 years.
Fast-forward seven years, and Conti is absolutely correct. 2023 has been a transformative year around Artificial Intelligence (AI) – where generative AI has been all the buzz. However, the next step is Conti’s vision of the Age of Augmentation and work.
Of course, many humans are worried about AI and automation taking away jobs. However, the Age of Augmentation will create a new approach around humanizing work. In this scenario, the focus will be on work that humans are uniquely qualified to perform, with many mundane human tasks being fully automated by AI.
The future of jobs will also be around work that requires curiosity, creativity, imagination, as well as social and emotional intelligence. To better understand the age of Augmentation, it’s best to look at the progression of human work.
We initially started as hunter-gatherers and evolved into the Agricultural era, which lasted thousands of years until we hit the Industrial era. The Industrial era lasted for hundreds of years, focused on “hired hands,” and finally gave way to the Information era.
With the Information era only being around for a few decades, it requires workers to acquire technical skills to be knowledge workers in a knowledge economy. The current way of thinking is caught between the Industrial and Information eras, even though we are on the precipice of the Augmented era.
In the Augmented era, we will be living in the human economy, where workers will be “hired hearts,” who are creative and adaptive. Here are the core traits of the future of work under this new paradigm:
Adaptability, Resilience and Change-Readiness
Ecosystem, Empowerment, Self-Organization and Aligned Autonomy
Collaboration, Co-creation and Co-Delivery
Learning, Creativity and Innovation
Meaning, Purpose and Inspiration
Flow, Iterations and Continuous Improvement
In the end, those workers who have strong emotional intelligence traits will be best to adapt to the Age of Augmentation.
We would like to thank Nickolas Sibley, Director of Agile at Makpar, for sharing his vision about the future of work for this blog post.
Want to join the #MakparProud team? Learn more about career opportunities and job openings at Makpar here.