Welcome to my second Dean’s blog!

I recently attended meetings of Business School Deans in Europe and the US. A key issue at both of them was the impact that technology is having on the workforce, and, by extension, on education.

Andrew McAfee, an MIT computer scientist, delivered a keynote address at the US conference on huge strides that have been made recently in computers’ abilities to take on tasks that to date have only been possible when performed by people. An example is the rise of driverless cars. Firms such as Google have made enormous progress in developing both the hardware and software necessary for driverless cars to safely navigate on public roads. Given that more than 10% of the US working population have jobs that involve some measure of navigating a vehicle (bus and taxi drivers, delivery truck drivers, etc.) while another significant fraction drive themselves to work (and so could use their commute times more productively), the implications from widespread adoption of the technology are likely to be far reaching, including in areas such as insurance once it becomes clear that driverless cars are substantially safer. One could envisage a future in which those who insist on driving themselves will pay for the privilege. It is rumoured that the 2023 model BMW will be driverless.

Another example is the way in which sophisticated software is increasingly able to process, and make sense of, large amounts of complex material. In the recent Apple vs. Samsung court case over various smartphone patents, there were almost 5 million documents tendered. A detailed analysis of these took a team of lawyers several months. Specialised legal software is being developed in Silicon Valley (by a firm founded by former lawyers) that could undertake this task in hours, at a small fraction of the cost. This has clear implications for the business models of law firms, the career paths of entry level legal graduates, and for the conduct of court cases.

Both these examples suggest that educators have a responsibility to ensure that their students have a set of skills that are “future proof”, in the sense that they are difficult, if not impossible, to be codified in a way that would allow even sophisticated computer systems to duplicate them. These include critical thinking, creativity, a sense of entrepreneurship, and high level communication skills. These are all core capabilities that the UWA Business School seeks to ensure our graduates obtain.