The future of…

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The future of women

March 2004

This is widely expected among futurists to be the woman's century. Many of the futurists make that conclusion from a social trends base, but there are certainly a number of technology and economic trends that are also in women's favour.

Today we are very much in the information economy, which simply means that the creation and use of knowledge is the basis of wealth. However, machine intelligence is gradually catching up with people in many intellectual niches, and they threaten the longevity of the information economy. We already have chess computers that can beat any human. Software exists that can write good music and romantic novels that are indistinguishable from those written by people.

It is clear that future machines will be capable of displacing people from many of today's information economy jobs, just as they already have in agriculture and manufacturing. These physical jobs were mostly undertaken by men, who have had to retrain. Meanwhile, jobs in the service sector have increased, and more women are in the workplace than ever before. But in the future, administrative jobs, which are more or less equally distributed between men and women, will be greatly reduced by machine intelligence, as will other knowledge creation and manipulation jobs. These account for much of the services sector, and for most of the jobs that men do.

However, jobs that require a high proportion of interpersonal contact usually need to be done by a human, not a machine. Such jobs account today for about 25% of the workforce, and are growing. For example, machines can be used very successfully in the classroom, but cannot be a realistic substitute for a good teacher. The same could be said of child care, elderly care, nursing, and most personal services - no-one realistically expects robots to cut our hair or wait on us in restaurants, and there are limits on how far we can accept them serving us in shops. Although men do work in these roles, they are dominated by women. Men who work in inherently interpersonal contact jobs tend to be found in medicine or policing. Policing and security are less likely to be affected and this growing sector may provide a useful refuge for men in the workforce. By contrast, doctors and consultants, whether they are men or women, are easier to automate than nurses. A consultant can be thought of as an expert system carried around by a sophisticated robot. A nurse has to be human to be useful in a care role. While men will find many of their traditional jobs substituted by machines, women will have a much easier ride. A lot of women will find their jobs displaced and will have to retrain, but far more men will be affected. Men will often have no choice but to retrain into roles that are more traditionally occupied by women, and they may well find it hard to compete in those roles. Women often simply seem to be better at interpersonal skills than men.

This new economy can well be called the care economy, as it is dominated by interpersonal contact. It will be dominated by women, who will become the wealthier sex. The lucrative jobs that men hold today will mostly be eradicated. It is already starting to increase in importance, but this trend will accelerate greatly as we move into the future. By 2020, most of us will be working in the care economy, and few information based jobs will be left - it will simply be cheaper and better to use machines in those roles.

But there is more to life than work and economics, and some other trends will affect women too.

In 2001, we invented the concept of active skin. The idea is that in the future, it will be possible to print electronics onto the skin. Of course, electronics can already be made very small and some can be very flexible. Philips even have a thin electronic paper display that can be rolled up around a thumb without breaking. I envisage that we will soon have video tattoos, and video displays stuck on our skin for videophone, computing, or body adornment. Later on, it will be possible to print an active skin underlay directly onto a woman's face, which can be used to control nanotechnology-enhanced active make-up. Imagine using a digital bathroom mirror to select what you want to look like, and then smearing makeup all over your face without any concern for where it goes. With a simple touch of a button, your face would instantly look like the image you selected on the mirror. Such make-up is very likely exist in about a decade from now. Furthermore, you can select a range of appearances for the day ahead, which can be controlled according to where you are, who you are with, what time it is, or even linked to your emotional state. Body adornment will become much more fun.

Slightly more frivolously, there is no reason why breast implants couldn't contain electronics too. The volume available is enormous in electronics terms, and electronics can be based on silicone, albeit at slower speeds than silicon. Imagine an MP3 player installed in one breast implant, and a few gigabytes of your favourite tracks installed in the other. We call it mammary memory. And God has provided superbly designed control knobs.

Another are of improvement is in communications. Women often belong to very close groups with other women friends. Today's telecomms provides one to one phone calls, but setting up calls amongst a group is tedious and unintuitive to say the least. Future services such as instant voice messaging will allow immediate communication with any friends, without having to dial a phone call. Tracking technology will also allow you to see on your phone display whether any of your close friends are nearby. A number of services such as these are being designed to enhance communications in social groups. Broadband technology, couple with rapidly falling display prices, will allow people to have large screens at home and see their friends on them as they chat to them. Videoconferencing has never taken off based on very small displays, but when the image is high quality and large as life, and doesn't cost much, we can expect it to finally take off. Teenagers will have virtual sleepovers, with screens on their bedroom linked through to their friends' bedrooms so that can effectively be together for hours.