Dimitrios Dimitriou, First Vice President of the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which represents more than 120,000 Greek companies, and Yannis Mastrogeorgiou, Special Secretary for Strategic Foresight at the Presidency of the Government of the Hellenic Republic, invited Matthew to Athens to give a keynote titled The Future of Work and AI.
The topic has moved to the top of the agenda for governments, organisations and individuals because of the rapid, but not unforeseen, rise of AI and generative AI. Matthew explained that today's capabilities already point to partially or fully automating up to 80% of jobs, and that in time AI, generative AI and artificial general intelligence, together with technologies such as generalised robotics, could automate 100%, because every job is made of processes, workflows and steps.
"In time we can see a way to use AI, as well as artificial general intelligence, to automate 100% of jobs, primarily because all jobs have processes, workflows and steps that can be automated."Matthew Griffin, Athens, April 2024
Rather than lean into the doomsday narratives common in the press, he looked at both sides of the coin. Drawing on his work on the Future of Education, Learning and Work, he set the downsides and risks of automation against the very real human and societal benefits of using the same tools to augment people, creating what he calls 'Unlimited Humans' with near unlimited potential.
He covered the future capabilities of AI, Sam Altman's vision of fully automated companies, and the risks companies face as they embed an autonomous AI brain at the heart of their operations. He closed on the importance of a Futures Mindset, and on what happens when everyone has access to all the world's knowledge and skills and can bring whatever they imagine to life, at speed and scale, for a global audience by the end of the day.
