D
r Anne-Marie Imafidon MBE, Mathematician and STEM Advocate, speaking as the keynote for the CIPD’s annual conference in Manchester, claimed
that the future of work is happening here and now, and everyone has the opportunity to help shape how we interact with technology and how we progress in an equitable way. This is important because human resources is uniquely placed to help design the ethical use of technology in the workplace. By setting expectations around fairness, transparency, and accountability, HR can turn Artificial Intelligence from a disruptor into a partner for progress, she told delegates. “We do have a voice. We do have a space to operate,”
she said. “Because HR covers recruitment, culture, and wellbeing, it needs to engage with the debate around how technology can be ethically and effectively introduced into organisations. “You have quite a lot of influence to ask these questions, to challenge at the right time,” she said, “so that then 50 years down the line, we can be proud of the decisions that we made.”
CULTIVATING INNOVATION, POWERING DISCOVERY To emphasise her connection with CIPD, she subtitled her talk The future of work: how to lead, adapt and innovate for what’s next, as Cultivating Innovation, Powering Discovery (CIPD) in order to emphasise her vision for what the future of work might look like. As chair at the Institute for the Future of Work, much of the work she does is in collaboration with CIPD, she said, describing how she first became interested in maths and machines as a young child. “Some of my earliest memories were around
machines and different devices that we had at home. I was fascinated by the washing machine, and the VCR player. “We had stacks and stacks of VCR tapes at home,” she said. “I remember being obsessed with them.” This led to experimentation, taking apart the VCR in search of answers, and led to Imafidon’s second point – that curiosity, when disciplined and nurtured in the right way, is the engine of progress. Yet as she warns, “as adults, this is something that kind of gets beaten out of us, gets disincentivised the older we get.”
BUILDING A MOVEMENT TO EMPOWER WOMEN: FROM STEM TO STEAM In 2013, Imafidon founded Stemettes, a social enterprise dedicated to empowering girls, young women, and non- binary people in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. She soon expanded the acronym – adding “Art” to form STEAM. “Art and Design is the true heart of innovation,”
she said, explaining that the programme now serves participants aged five to twenty-five. The youngest participants, however, symbolise a deeper question – how can we shape the imagination of the next generation for a world fifty years away?
LOOKING FIFTY YEARS AHEAD “I’ve ended up becoming a little bit more obsessed with the future than maybe the typical person,” Imafidon admitted. She invited her audience to take a speculative journey beyond quarterly planning and five-year strategies into a world half a century away. Her description of a futuristic cityscape with flying
cars and AI integration was a reminder that many of tomorrow’s realities begin as today’s prototypes, for example we now talk to our cars in a way that would have belonged to the realms of sci-fi forty years ago. Between the 1980s fiction and the present lies decades of incremental innovation, what she called a “slow march” that shows how imagination, persistence, and design converge over time.
IMAGINING FUTURE FRONTIERS OF WORK Imafidon’s vision of the next half-century encompasses radical technological evolution and but also human dilemmas. “AI is not the only piece of the puzzle,” she said.
“What might be happening for the person sat in your seat in 50 years’ time? Many of the desires and the imaginations and the designs that we’re putting forward today end up becoming a reality.” She cited the example of the role AI has to play
in medical diagnosis, how it can review historic legal cases to gain new insights. More controversially, AI can compose music and be creative. AI might also change the role of logistics, in that you would 3D print an item on your local high street, rather than pay for it to be manufactured and shipped from overseas, or you might create renewable clothing which could be composted when no longer needed. Yet she warned that we need to be aware of the
complications of this rapid progress: “We still haven’t quite learned the lesson, especially in the context of technology, around inclusivity, conscience, and foresight.”
“ AI is not the only piece of the puzzle. What might be happening for the person sat in your seat in 50 years’ time? Many of the desires and the imaginations and the designs that we’re putting forward today end up becoming a reality.”
ANNE-MARIE IMAFIDON MBE, MATHEMATICIAN & STEM ADVOCATE
7
GLOBAL LEADERSHIP HOT TOPIC : FUTURE OF WORK
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