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LAURA MAE MARTIN: I'm Laura Mae Martin with Google,
and I'm here today with Sinead Bovel, futurist and founder
of WAYE.
Thanks so much for being here.
SINEAD BOVEL: Thanks so much for having me.
LAURA MAE MARTIN: Can you tell me
a little more about your company, WAYE, Weekly
Advice for Young Entrepreneurs?
SINEAD BOVEL: WAYE is a tech education company
that primarily focuses on educating
the next generation for a future that's radically
transformed by technology.
But in a more efficient way to say it,
we are just trying to make tech information more
accessible and more digestible.
The world of technology is moving at such a fast pace.
And more standard kind of institutions,
more standard education institutions,
it's hard to keep up.
So we believe it's really important
to equip young people with the tools
to make decisions about their future,
to participate in these conversations about technology.
LAURA MAE MARTIN: And can you tell me
more about your work as a futurist?
SINEAD BOVEL: The name sounds a lot more fancy and cool
than maybe it is.
It's largely taking a lot of qualitative
and quantitative data points and using
that to build forecasts about where the future may be headed.
And to give you an idea of some of those data points,
it would be something like patents
a company has been filing, tracking those over the years,
then tracking all of the job postings
that they've been sharing to different things
that they're sharing on social media, to the pulse of society,
to build a forecast as to where emerging technologies may
be going and who's leading that charge.
And it would cover everything from a brain-computer interface
to memories that we're able to store to our future
without smartphones to space exploration, the fun
and amazing world of synthetic biology.
So all areas of emerging technologies
are largely covered in our private consulting practice.
We would build a forecast for where that industry is headed.
And for any company, for example, how does something
like humans going to space or commercializing space impact
your line of work?
So whether you are a clothing manufacturer or a furniture
designer, if, in 10 years, the market will also include space,
are you positioning for that?
And if so, how?
LAURA MAE MARTIN: And how can business leaders incorporate
ethical and responsible tech practices
into their organizations?
SINEAD BOVEL: First and foremost, every company
is largely a tech company, even if you're not
selling technology products or services.
If you use AI maybe for recruiting, maybe
for your website, there are ethical responsibilities
that come with that, which means you
do need to be thinking like a tech company in that way.
It starts with recognizing that it shouldn't just
be tech people in the rooms where we're coding the future.
A lot of the issues I think we see in technology today
weren't intended to cause harm.
I think we just didn't think far enough
out with how these technologies could impact society.
And now we're almost in repair mode.
So I think we need historians, ethicists,
social psychologists, all sorts of people in these rooms
where we're building and deploying tech
that can make sure that we get it right in how it impacts
society beyond just the business model, generating
profit from the technologies that we use.
LAURA MAE MARTIN: And what emerging
technologies do you see playing a role in the future of work?
SINEAD BOVEL: I would say augmented reality,
virtual reality, mixed reality, and wearables, I think,
are going to play quite a profound role
in the future of work, especially augmented reality,
because we're embarking on largely the next evolution
of computers, which is one that will eventually take us away--
or from computing, sorry--
so it will be one that will eventually take us away
from our screens, things like our smartphones
and our laptops.
And it would be technologies like augmented reality combined
with something like the internet of things
and artificial intelligence, which means objects around us
will be smart.
We'll be able to overlay the digital world on top
of our physical world, which I think
is going to make work really exciting, really interesting.
We'll unravel all new sorts of data points.
Remote work could be a little bit more like a hologram
and less like a computer avatar floating on a screen.
I really can't say enough about our future with AI.
We are stepping into an era that I
would call AI for everything, where
AI is going to be assisting us in pretty much any task
that you do on a computer, whether that's making music
and writing lyrics to coding to summarizing a research
paper to writing an email.
You can expect to have an AI teammate assisting you
with those tasks.
And there really isn't a profession
I can think of that won't be impacted.
LAURA MAE MARTIN: Well, thank you
so much for being here today.
I really enjoyed speaking with you.
SINEAD BOVEL: Thank you for having me.
It's been a pleasure.
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