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“Stop asking your children, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’” MIT AgeLab Director Joe Coughlin implored ERISA 50th Symposium attendees in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. “The question should be, ‘How many things will you be when you grow up?’”
It was one of many points made by a panel of futurists and thought leaders in a session that explored potential challenges and opportunities for ERISA in adapting to future workforce dynamics.
Karen Andres, Director of Impact Strategy and Partnerships with the Aspen Institute, moderated the panel, which also featured Jennifer Yarrish, Director of Enterprise Strategy with AARP, and Richard Jackson, President and Founder of the Global Aging Institute.
Yarrish began by predicting the impact artificial intelligence (AI) will have on the workforce, arguing that just as we couldn’t imagine a social media influencer in 2004, we can’t begin to imagine the new jobs and titles AI will create.
“Think about a large swath of jobs going away and how AI and automation are delivering against this promise to make us more efficient,” she said. “We really need to think about what it means to have a 9-to-5 job and a 40-hour work week. Are we going to continue to work 40 hours? I don’t think so. It’s going to be 15 hours or 20 hours because we’re going to be so much more efficient. But with that, we need to evaluate and reconsider our social contract and what that means for benefits.”
Noting that he’s “really looking forward to that 15-hour work week,” Jackson added that retirement is a relatively new concept.
“Essentially, it dates to the early postwar decades, which was the point, really, in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, retirement, for the first time, became a universal aspiration and then a universal expectation,” he said. “We’ll move beyond this three-box life cycle of, first, education, then work, then retirement into a world in which we alternate periods of work, study, and leisure across the life cycle. So, more of that leisure front end and maybe a little more work backing it. And benefit systems are going to need to evolve in order to facilitate that.”
Coughlin described a three-part trendline that he’s seeing related to looking longevity.
“It’s TSA, but not the homeland security people; it’s time, speed, and agility,” he explained. “These are the three things that we see moving the workforce. The first, time, means we’re living longer.”
The second is the speed of change, of which AI is a part.
“AI, combined with the knowledge that we have in our professions, are changing at such a rapid rate,” Coughlin said. “This rate of change is going to drive people to change careers. And then, finally, agility. Workers will have to be more agile, not simply to compete with AI, but with each other.”
At one point, Coughlin asked the audience if it had heard of “emerging adulthood?”
“Adulthood used to be 18 years old,” he said. “Where is it today? Thirty-six years old. Over half of people between 18 and 34 have no significant other, no friends with benefits, no partner, no nothing. Your son, particularly, is still in the basement playing video games while young women are buying homes at twice the rate of young men. You need 2.1 kids per female just to keep it even. In the United States, it’s at about 1.6 or thereabouts. So, we’re not starting our lives early. We do not have a significant other. We’re not having children, but we are having pets. If the benefits we’re talking about are to protect workers, they’re about my pets and my parents. The kids? Not so much.”