reprinted from a story by Casey Neill in the Dandenong Journal

THE future is all about flexibility, businesses at the SEBN Christmas Industry Breakfast have been told.

“I want you to think of yourselves as a recyclable bottle,” global business futurist Morris Miselowski said at Sandown Racecourse in Springvale on Thursday 3 December.

The morning’s 190 guests donated cash to buy Christmas gifts for those less fortunate, to be distributed through agencies including Dandenong Community Aid and Advice Bureau.

The generosity continued when Simone Hackett from State Schools Relief Fund (SSRF) spoke about how money from the Take a Swing for Charity golf day had supported struggling students.

Golfers raised more than $44,000 at the SEBN event in February, which helped SSRF to dress 679 students at 17 schools within Greater Dandenong in $95,977 worth of clothing this year.

SSRF will also be the recipient of next year’s golf day proceeds, which are scheduled for Monday 22 February at Sandhurst Golf Club.

Mr Miselowski told breakfast guests that some of today’s most successful companies had no assets – driver service Uber owns no cars, accommodation service Airbnb owns no hotels.

He expects this trend towards “using rather than owning” to continue.

Tomorrow’s jobs will include tasks not yet imagined.

Mr Miselowski said everyone would be employing a transhumanist designer within 10 years – a human resources role assigning tasks to humans and robots.

Other roles of the future will include vertical farming and genome specialists, 3D prosthetic engineers and machine linguists.

Accountants and auditors, retail sales assistants and library technicians are among those on the way out, Mr Miselowski said.

He said employing many people in one space from 9am to 5pm weekdays would become anachronistic, and businesses would instead have a small team they could add to when necessary.

Wearable devices will continue to increase in popularity, he said, to the point where in 10 years everybody would be wearing nine devices at any given time.

“The world is increasingly based on data,” he said.

Mr Miselowski said more inanimate objects would be hooked up to interact with and understand humans.

Homes will recognise that their owners are about to arrive and open the garage door, turn on lights and more.

“And next year will be a huge growth year for drones across the planet,” Mr Miselowski said.

But don’t worry: “This is not robots taking over the world.”

“There will still be humans at every touch point.

“At the core we are still humans. We still have need for all the products and services in this room.”

He said today’s tsunami of new technology would calm down in 10 to 20 years.

“We’re seeing so much that is so different,” he said.

Autonomous cars could be a matter of years from dominating roads, dramatically reducing – if not eliminating – road deaths.

Mr Miselowski said they’d also remove the need for driver’s licences and so improve transport accessibility for the disabled, elderly and young.

The more efficient mechanised driving would also be better for environment, he said, and less stressful for commuters.