[andrea saveri at the ioct]

nb: live-blogged

Andrea Saveri at the IOCT on The Future of Work: Amplified Individuals, Jobs & Organizations

Institute for the Future - founded in 1968

• How to forecast the future, applied to business, government and non-profits

Think about the future though aware of the present

In terms of business there are 6 key themes that are changing/shaping the future. Accordingly there is a set of new jobs that are going to be important in the future

Collective intelligence officer - oversee the improvisation human resources for the company
Amplification Engineer - improve organization innovation by creating more flexible work styles
Chief Visualization Officer - of Data Whisperer, to devise new ways of visualizing our business
Data Ecologist - design and manage both private and public data clouds
Affinity Agent to build shared values and vision among highly divers collaborates
Junior Catalyst - spark new and experimental collaboration that emphasize diversity as source of innovation
Chief Wellness Officer - implement and oversee a culture of health
Biocitizen Liason - to serves as the primary point of contact between the senior management and individual members of the company's various social health networks
Senior Green Strategist - minimize organizations resource usage while maximising productivity and profit
Ecotect - for a complete and custom sustainability make-over of our work environment
Cognitive Resource Manager - coordinate and augment mental efforts at the workplace
Neurological Training Officer - improve cognitive fitness among employees

But what about the people?

Amplified Individuals - through their access to social media and their practises they are expanding the reach and effect of businesses - amplifying and challenging processes of business

How are they doing it?
Highly social - providing social filters to help process massive amounts of information (flickr - the photo becomes an artifact around which people comment, tag etc...)
classic fm, digg, delicious etc...

Amplified individuals are highly collective, they can tap into knowledge of a group and use it - wikis, twitter, prediction markets etc...

they are into crowd sourcing (see crowdspirit.com, innocentive)

lifehacker - software downloads that help keep you focused (see the anti-procrastination alert!)

cognitive interfaces - think ADHA drug provigil, tested in the military to enhance "alertness" and memory...uni students have been using it around exam time.
Raises the issue - what is "normal" performance
So here you might see the Amplification Engineer and the Chief Performance Officer come together to develop the intelligence of the organisation

Diversity Redefined - instead of diversity as something politically correct now something that is a core initiative, instead of thinking about it as race, income, age, ethinicity...now cognitive diversity, disciplinary styles that appear and add to the workforce. The whole way we describe and characterise people is expanding.

Surowiecki popularised idea of crowd intelligence and it's actually better when the group is diverse, spanning hierarchies etc...HP has used this kind of info when they do their sales forecasts, going across hierarchies in the organization, leverged the diversity of perspective on their question

What IOCT and Transliteracy is - disciplinary, multidisciplinary interdisciplinary to transdisciplinarity - a biologist who can speak math and the language of art. Can create a different perception and different frame of thinking. The is the key to innovation.

Idea - knitting dna and proteins so that scientists get a spatial perception of information

mChek - mobile payments
dispersed innovation networks start to become embedded in urban centres instead of a cloistered innovation park. Idea that innovation and diversity and urbanism combine = future. Here affinity agents and junior catalysts will come into play.

Visible World is changing - sensory perception, bio metric RFID, pedometres - people, places, things and processes are surrounded by this new layer of visible information

Every object and every interaction is really a data point - as we contribute to wikipedia and leave a trace of where we've been, using a thumbprint scanner at disneyworld...we're leaving trails of ourselves all over the place - see Kevin Kelly

What is important is the need for a new kind of literacy - how do we decode/translate all these different kinds and sources of information?!

Check out Intel Mash Maker which suggests kinds of mashups based on your web browsing (see also swivel)

Science at work - fMRI that scans people while tasks are undertaken (that's what I'll be exploring for part of my research fellowship at the IOCT)

biocitizen - people are designing ways to become the originators of good health so wellness programmes on the rise in the workplace, new media ecologies (see Daily Strength), biotechnology, risk society (Who is sick) - we are going to want to navigate a personal health geography

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Discussion:
Andrea asked us which of these future jobs we'd each like to take on.
Talked about discrepancy between language, same words don't necessarily share the same values. A "pattern" for a scientist is very different to an artist.

Question of metrics and evaluating performance is a real challenge, especially for universities and hierarchical organisations.

Visualisation is is key - think of the prius which shows drivers exactly how fuel efficiency is going - also has a ludic quality. But in a general context what kind of data streams would you want to visualise?


My question: who is going to be the person to translate these very North American-sounding job titles into more culturally specific ones?
Also - these futuristic jobs might be important for us (UK, North America) but what about other countries? How will Ethiopia or Afganastan benefit from this...how will they even begin to implement it and is it right for them?