Tell us a bit about your journey from being a Rotman MBA student to becoming a futurist.

It has certainly been a winding road, but I think for most millennials, career paths are becoming more and more unconventional. During the MBA program at Rotman, I focused on strategic management and learned how to help businesses make the right decisions for the medium and long term. I also really enjoyed statistics — how to assign probabilities to decisions, and game theory. And of course, economics: How do the macro decisions of businesses, sectors and entire countries impact the decisions we make?

Perhaps most importantly, I took a course called "strategic foresight," and that really planted the seed. By the time I graduated, I had learned all of the varied components of what it means to practise ‘futurism,’ and how to apply that to ambiguous settings that require both qualitative and quantitative data analysis.

I realized that people can make a living around building scenarios about where the future is likely headed, based on emerging technologies and unknown variables. However, I didn’t think about it as a career for myself. I was set on the becoming a management consultant, and I was fortunate enough to land an internship with A .T. Kearney. They actually played a vital role in my ability to take the leap of faith.

While I loved consulting — and I still don’t think there’s a job where you can learn as much in such a short period of time — there was a bit of a disconnect for me in terms of the problems I wanted to be addressing and solving. That disconnect started to grow, and during that period of uncertainty around what my next step would be, I was working on an app with some Rotman colleagues, centered on emerging technology. Then, out of the blue, I was scouted by a modelling agency. So, all of these really diverse opportunities started to present themselves.

I discussed this with a partner at A.T. Kearney and indicated that I was eager to try some new things. They were wonderful: they gave me a year off to go and essentially explore. When I stepped into the world of modelling, I realized that so many people, at all levels, are interested in the future of work, AI, blockchain. They just didn’t know how to access the knowledge.

That’s when a light bulb went off: I could take everything I’d learned about understanding the future and building scenarios and try to reach a lot of people with it. From there, I launched a tech education company called WAYE, which stand for Weekly Advice for the Young Entrepreneur. The more I started to host talks and share my forecasts and future scenarios, the more companies, governments, and NGOs approached me. So many doors opened up because everyone wants to strategically prepare for the future.

On that note, you believe our beloved smartphones may soon disappear. Why is that?

To be clear, this will absolutely happen. If you look at the history of phones, they have always become smarter and smaller over time. The trendline is that they’ve come closer to us, physically, and that won’t stop. Fifteen or 20 years ago, we didn’t have smartphones, and most of us had land lines at home. That trend has completely reversed. The home phone has all but vanished, and now we all have smartphones. In truth they’re not really even phones. They are a portal to the world that can do so many things for us in addition to making the odd phone call.

Looking ahead, if something is destined to get smaller and smarter, screens will become smaller, which means we will probably do less looking at the screen and more talking to it. If you look at current smartphone providers, what are they investing in? It’s not building more smartphones. In fact, those sales are starting to decline. It’s all about building wearables, creating AI systems that can provide more assistance to people, and building mixed-reality devices.

So what will specifically replace the smartphone? That doesn’t fully exist yet, but we can bet it will be a mixture of the next generation of AI and wearables. If we look around carefully, we can already see a bit of what’s coming next, because the future, in many ways, is just an accumulation of decisions that we make in the present.

Also in the near future, you believe AI won’t just be amplifying content: it will be generating it. Talk a bit about the implications of this.

If we look at the impact of AI amplifying content thus far, it hasn’t been great. In a world where AI is deciding what content we see based on what it knows about us, we have seen a fracturing of societal cohesion and deep lines of polarization. Already, we are all in some ways stuck in our own information ecosystems, and that is a result of the business models of some of the big social media platforms.

The question becomes, what happens when it’s not just AI deciding what you see (in terms of incentives that are aligned to different companies,) but when it can also create what you see? It could become a perfect storm of individual, tailored content based on an AI optimization function, not necessarily based on the things that you need to see and understand to be an informed citizen and participate in society in the best way possible.

Basically, we’re passing AI the keys to human language and attention. We’ve never had a non-human entity be able to communicate in a way that sounds entirely human, but isn’t. Most people recognize by now that AI comes with its own biases, which means it can nudge us in different ways that we’re not aware of. And the expansion of its powers also amplifies the challenges of misinformation and disinformation.

We have to think more critically about the digital infrastructure that our information ecosystems sit in. The internet wasn’t designed for a world in which AI can amplify and create content. So, maybe we need to think about making structural changes to how we share information to ensure AI isn’t causing harm or enabling malicious actors. It should be a tool to help people produce and share content that is aligned with humanity’s incentives — not just those of corporations.

By 2030, you believe the most common form of work will be independent contracting. Talk a bit about how this is unfolding and the impact it will have.

I believe we will see the continued rise of the independent workforce across all sorts of service jobs. This will happen across areas of specialization, from marketing and legal work to finance, and there are two reasons why. On the one hand, AI continues to learn new tricks over time. And as it does, it is going to change the nature of every role in every organization.

This will make it much more challenging for companies to hire for full-time roles, because in 18 months, jobs will look entirely different as a result of growing AI capabilities. We will start to see companies preferring shorter-term independent contracts to give them that flexibility. Instead of working for one company full-time, where the role continues to change, we will become our own ‘independent contractors’ offering the skills that AI doesn’t have — although AI can and will help to amplify our work. This will change the fabric of the workforce to one that’s more flexible, more gig based and more independent.

We will also likely see the rise of entrepreneurship in a really exciting way. I believe we’ll see faster-scaling startups, more powerful, smaller teams and companies, and a flexible workforce that looks very different. We will also need to be learning constantly, because technology continues to challenge what we humans bring to the table.

All of this will lead to a rise in new jobs and new sectors that haven’t been invented (or imagined) yet. Just think, Instagram and TikTok didn’t exist 15 years ago. Just imagine what types of opportunities will be created in a world where AI is a brand-new layer that we can build things on top of.

AI also has a dark side, of course. Can you touch on how it can be used to exploit certain people?

All of this does mean that we need to think about how to protect people as we make the transition. As it becomes easier to generate human-like identities with AI, there is an added layer of ethical complexity because people can now generate identities in communities that they may not actually belong to. For instance, if a company starts to create AI avatars to do some of its external-facing roles, whether it be customer service, sales or HR training, the avatars they use might look like they’re from diverse communities, but the actual people on the payroll — those who are economically benefiting from those AI identities — won’t necessarily be diverse themselves.

AI, when used this way, could create two windows for exploitation. One is profit, whereby people are profiting off of the experience and identities of communities that they don’t necessarily belong to and the second is misrepresentation. Maybe you work for a company that isn’t well represented by a certain marginalized group, and instead of righting those wrongs, you just create AI avatars that represent those groups. That actually harms those communities. We’re already starting to see examples of this fashion: photographer Cameron-James Wilson identifies as a white male, but he has created a black female avatar fashion model. This is a black woman created through his eyes that most people believe is a real human. I think this should cause us all to stop and ask, what are the new cultural rules of the road when it comes to creating human-like identities with AI?

You have spoken to the United Nations about the dangers of social media for our youth. What are a couple of key things to keep an eye on?

There is one that I am particularly concerned about. I don’t believe that pre-pubescent and teenage minds should be exposed to an ecosystem where they are incentivized to present themselves and perform in a ‘coliseum of the public eye’ and to be rated and evaluated in real-time in the manner of likes, follows and comments. That is not a healthy environment for kids to grow up in.

Many adults already feel the pressures and anxiety of social media. Imagine the impact on a pre-pubecent mind. And it’s not just that young people are showing up in this ecosystem. Social media platforms have been designed intentionally to target them. They employ all kinds of psychology tricks to make them stay on the platform for as long as possible, so they can show them more ads. For example, every time a young person receives a like or a comment, they get a big hit of dopamine in their brain. The entire system has been optimized to get kids back on the platform and stay engaged. Some of it even entails exploiting people’s vulnerabilities and insecurities, which can be very harmful. Something needs to change. These platforms weren’t designed for youth and they probably shouldn’t be on them unless we make substantial changes to how the platforms interact with people — if they should be involved with them at all.

We’ve talked about some of the negative impacts of AI. Who stands to gain the most from all of this?

The fact is, if we can get our future with AI right, it will be absolutely transformational. For example, we are on the precipice of some changes to healthcare that could be even bigger than the discovery of antibiotics. We could soon see truly personalized medicine and preventative health care — moving away from a model where you only treat a person once they’re ill to preventing them from getting sick in the first place. This could be right around the corner.

We’re also looking at the ability to design education for each individual’s learning style. Our current education model was based on the needs of the industrial revolution for standardized jobs. But we need to prepare kids for the future. AI is going to be a tool that allows us to meet kids where they are and ensure that everyone is given an equal opportunity to learn and excel.

I also think we’re going to see creativity explode. Just think about how the invention of electricity led to the film and television industries. Imagine what will happen when we all have access to creative tools and ability to create in new ways. There’s a quote that I will always remember from Rotman professor Avi Goldfarb: “A lot of people are creative, but not everyone can draw.” Not everyone can write well, either. AI removes these barriers. Just think of all the societal and global problems that we’re facing, like climate change. AI can be a valuable tool in finding creative solutions.

Finally, think about the inventions and industries that we can’t even imagine yet. What will happen in a world where we can stream AI the way we now stream the internet? The problems we’ll be able to solve in our personal and professional lives — it’s going to be transformative.

So, as indicated, we can all stand to benefit, but we really have to guide this technology. The thing that keeps me optimistic is that the problems are within our control and it’s about the human decisions we make around how this technology evolves in a way that brings the best outcomes for the most people possible.

We have a lot of hindsight and data from other transformative technologies like the printing press to help us make the right decisions. It’s just a matter of doing that. AI is a global project that will force us to make global decisions — which is never easy. But if we can get it right, I have no doubt that the future will be fascinating.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of the Rotman Management magazine. Subscribe now for the latest thinking on leadership and innovation.