Dr. David Staley:
And I think, frankly, that has all sorts of implications for education. I think that we're going to find that we're going to be having to educate students for that interface with autonomous intelligence.

Announcer:
That was Dr. David Staley, a history professor at the Ohio State University and a futurist. On this episode of The Conversation, Rachel and John learn about rapid technology advancements and the impacts they'll have on our local industries, our economy, and the effects it'll have on our daily lives. Let's dive in.

John Hambrick:
Hello and welcome back to The Conversation, Ohio Voices in Education, Igniting Ideas and Inspiring Change. Today, Rachel, oh my goodness, the conversation we have in store, we've been anticipating this conversation for a little bit. Everybody, Rachel Daniels joining me here on The Conversation, and today we are very fortunate to have Dr. David Staley, associate professor in history and design at the Ohio State University. He fancies himself an eclectic academic. Dr. Staley, welcome to The Conversation.

Dr. David Staley:
John, Rachel, thank you very much for the invitation.

John Hambrick:
Before we dive into the future, let's start right today. Let's start in the present. Can you tell us a bit about yourself please and the work that you do as a futurist?

Dr. David Staley:
Happy to. So the title eclectic academic was something that was bestowed on me and I wear it as a badge of pride, I think. So I'm trained as an historian. But as you note, I teach in the design department. And I probably spend as much time thinking about the future as I do about the past. I describe myself when I'm doing futuring work as a writer of speculative nonfiction, which means I'm interested and I think about what's coming, what could happen next, what's possible.
As a futurist, I think that there's at least three broad things that we're trying to do at any given moment. The first is to assess or to try to place in context decisions that we make in the present. We sometimes in the business call that wind tunneling. We're trying to decide on some policy objective or decision we're going to make, and we try to think through its implications. What would that mean? How will it unfold in the future?
And that also includes trying to see what are usually called unforeseen effects or unforeseen circumstances. We also try to anticipate what the world is going to look like, what could the world be at some stage in the future. I oftentimes say that when I'm asked to give talks on the future of some subject, the future of healthcare, the future of education, what people really want to know is what is some complex system going to look like in the future?
And we do that, or organizations are interested in that because then they want to know how are we going to thrive in that world that's coming. And I suppose the third thing we do is we design the future. We imagine the future that we would like to see and then devise ways to figure out how that world can come about. In as much as I think about the future, I'm anticipating it, but I'm also trying to design it as well.

Rachel Daniels:
Wow, Dr. Staley, that's the perfect segue into my point of curiosity. So as you look ahead, what major trends are emerging that you think will have the biggest impact on our economy and daily lives? Are there any shifts in technology, industry, or geopolitics that people might not be paying enough attention to?

Dr. David Staley:
Gosh, Rachel, I could probably take up the rest of our time talking about all the trends that I've been tracking and all the ones that I'm interested in. As futurists, we sometimes use an organizational scheme called STEEP, S-T-E-E-P, and that means society, technology, environment, economics, politics or geopolitics. And so the trends we look at tend to fall in one of those categories. So I'm not going to list all the ones that interest me here, but how about I give you some that I've been paying particular attention to?

Rachel Daniels:
Yeah, that sounds great.

Dr. David Staley:
Yeah, so the first is artificial intelligence. Although I have a different categorization, I think for these technologies, I prefer to call it autonomous intelligence. And so these are machines or algorithms, devices onto which we've offloaded some decision. And so a traffic light is a kind of autonomous intelligence, although I would argue a pretty dumb kind of intelligence. But that's everything up to large language models that we're seeing today.
We've offloaded some action or task or decision onto a device, onto a machine, onto an algorithm.And there's a whole host of those that I find particularly interesting. I've been tracking advanced manufacturing, or maybe we should call it the return of manufacturing. I think for the last 40 years or so, our economy especially has dismissed or denigrated manufacturing or at the very least pushed it to other parts of the world, and especially as we turned our economy over more to design rather than making.
The example I always like to point to is Nike. Nike actually is not in the shoe business. It is in the design of shoe business and it's other companies that build or make their shoes. We're seeing the return in manufacturing both as central to our economy and as physically located here. Closely tied to that is biotechnology, and there's a whole host of technologies that are attached to that.
It sometimes goes by the name synthetic biology, but it's about engineering and designing life forms. That's probably the easiest way I could describe biotechnology. I've been tracking with some interest the phenomenon I'm calling de-globalization. If globalization as an economic force first erupted late '80s, early 1990s, I think that especially in the last five years or so, we are witnessing the end or the decline of globalization. And that's going to have all kinds of ripple effects, especially on our economy, I think.
And I don't think you can be a serious futurist without thinking about the implications of climate change. And there's a particular facet of climate change that I've been intrigued with here in Ohio in the Midwest. And whatever effects climate change is having, this region has more water than most other regions. And I think that this is going to have all kinds of economic consequences. The fact that the Midwest will still be a store of water say in comparison to the Southwest.

John Hambrick:
So insightful in that, as you mentioned, the growth of manufacturing, the growth of other industries in our region and their continuous draw upon that available water supply. And then even too our growing population. I think that's pretty incredible. I do though, please, doctor, want to go back to an earlier point about AI and the automation and intelligence supporting our industry sectors.
You definitely mentioned manufacturing, but here in Central Ohio, we're abundant in healthcare, supply chain logistics, even our headquarters of global companies here in Central Ohio. How do you see this shift with this type of intelligence helping to reshape or maybe not helping to reshape our industries?

Dr. David Staley:
The biggest concern that I hear expressed from folks that ask me about artificial intelligence, is AI going to take my job? And it's a natural assumption, and I think that there will be a fair number of jobs that will be made obsolete. And we could talk across all kinds of sectors of the economy. We can see this all over the place, but I actually don't think that that's the story of the future. Yes, there'll be jobs and tasks that will be eliminated, but not all of them.
And in fact, what I think is a more likely future is that whatever the job, whatever it is we're engaged in, we are probably going to have to learn how to work with, partner with, interface with some sort of autonomous agent, whatever that job is. I'll share an anecdote with you. So I was giving a talk at the Air Force Research Laboratory outside Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and I was given a tour of the facilities before my talk. My talk was on AI, by the way.
And I was shown a chemistry lab where there was this device that was mixing chemicals, precise amounts, precise times, 24 hours a day. And the chemist there informed me, "Yeah, this is the sort of thing that we would've had an undergraduate intern do, but now we have a machine that does it." I thought, oh, here we go. I am seeing the future right here.
And then they said something really profound. They said, "Yes, in this lab we are teaching the machines to be good team players." And I thought, that's the real future here. At least in the context of this lab, they saw that autonomous technology as being a team member like the postdoc or the research chemist over there. And I think that's probably what the rest of the workplace is going to look like.
And I think, frankly, that has all sorts of implications for education. I think that we're going to find that we're going to be having to educate students for that interface with autonomous intelligence.

John Hambrick:
We talk a lot about durable skills and that ability for our current students and our alpha to be more collaborative, how to be team players. And I love that insight of how do we become team players with our technology? And I see that yet to be a continuous compliment and not a replacement. Wow, this is great stuff.

Rachel Daniels:
Well, thinking about the workplace, Central Ohio has a strong manufacturing legacy, and it's now emerging as a hub for advanced manufacturing. Dr. Staley, what role do you see this region playing in the future of manufacturing? And in particular, what are the skills that we're not yet preparing our students with that we might be considering as we think about the role Central Ohio is going to play?

Dr. David Staley:
It is very interesting to see Central Ohio, the region, becoming a manufacturing hub. You're right, Rachel. We do have a legacy, but not the same legacy I think as other places in the Midwest. Cleveland, just to take one example, Detroit, which were really centered on manufacturing, in a way say that Columbus has not traditionally been centered on manufacturing.
It's always been research and education and government and insurance. But maybe this started with Honda 40 some years ago where we see manufacturing moving back into the region. And boy, I could spend the rest of our time here talking about Intel, the Honda battery plants in Jeffersonville. And now we just read that Honda is going to build EVs, electronic vehicles, electric vehicles here.
Anduril, the advanced weapons system. I was completely caught off guard by this, but they're setting up shop near Rickenbacker. I think that what is going to separate today's manufacturing from say manufacturing as it might've been in the '50s or earlier, is that the definition of a factory is going to be very different. First of all, factories are going to be very high-tech, such that the workers in them are going to have to have advanced skills.
I think it's long been an assumption that factory associated with blue collar, it's associated with someone that has maybe a high school degree and then the next day they could go work in the factory. That was the hope, frankly, of a lot of cities, a lot of small towns throughout our manufacturing history. I don't think that that's what the future looks like. I think that to work in advanced manufacturing is going to require some advanced tertiary education at a minimum and for all sorts of jobs.
I was giving a talk, a presentation on the workforce development implications of advanced manufacturing, and I was looking just at the Honda EV plant at their job listings. And just in the one page that I took offline, every job, it was like 30 jobs listed, every job save one required like a four-year degree at minimum. And I think that's a change that many places aren't ready for, not accustomed to.
The other thing about manufacturing is that it has been I think for the last 40 years, it has been highly automated such that a factory now... At one time we would've thought a factory would employ maybe 10, 20, even 30,000 people. I think today a factory employs maybe on the order of 300. And I think in the future you're going to see a factory employing maybe 30 people, human beings. A lot of it will be conducted through automation. And that's a change that I think we haven't quite caught up to yet in education and in workforce development.

Rachel Daniels:
Yeah, I think that's so interesting because I grew up in the heart of Honda country, we'll say, and you're just accustomed to seeing people walking through the grocery in their uniforms. And most families have somebody connected to one of the plants or the subsidiary. So it's interesting to think. Oftentimes I find myself just focusing on the educational connections, but thinking really outside of that.
And it's intriguing to me to start thinking about how factories in themselves will begin to change, while yet the requirement or qualifications to be as skilled laborer will have a different look and changes the way that I think about supporting districts that I work with around the skills and dispositions that students may yet need. So yeah, that gives us a lot of food for thought.

John Hambrick:
Dr. Staley, as we see manufacturing continue to grow in our region, we see a parallel track in our bioscience. I mean, thank goodness we've organized and we now have the Ohio Life Sciences. They've recently become an industry sector partnership. So they've pulled together the businesses, the training providers, the educational component. And so how do you see that too? You mentioned needing a higher degree, but sometimes these are clean rooms and a technician comes in and is specialized, but not necessarily highly degreed.

Dr. David Staley:
Yes, that's right. I think especially around biotechnology, and this is something I've started tracking, I suspect we're going to start to see more biology majors in universities because biotech is going to prove such a lucrative industry and one that's going to be hiring a lot of people. I think you're going to start to see more students coming to university, maybe not majoring in computer science say, but moving more toward biology. That's a trend that I've started tracking.
I don't know how you're both going to react to what I have to say about the future of biotech. And of course, biotech covers a wide range of areas. That includes things like medical instrumentation, let's say, data science. But I'm particularly interested in biomanufacturing and maybe tying it into advanced manufacturing.
In fact, when I'm giving presentations about the future of manufacturing, I say in the future and maybe even within 10 years or so, when we say manufacturing, we could just as likely refer to something that is organic and alive and squishy being manufactured. And in fact, that term, biomanufacturing, is now becoming more commonplace. In 2022, the White House gave an executive order to grow and develop what they call the biomanufacturing sector. Let's talk about some of the things we're talking about here.
At least in a lab environment now, there have been in growing and in 3D printing human organs. Right now we're talking about things like cartilage for ears and noses and those sorts of things. But the work is underway to 3D print body organs, livers, for example, hearts. There's been some work in developing artificial brain cells, for example. That stuff isn't ready yet to be manufactured, certainly not at any scale.
But I think that it's very likely that what will be manufactured in factories will be organic objects. We've already seen in the last year a pig that has been genetically modified to have its organs transplanted into a human being. That's not science fiction. That's actually happened. In fact, it was put into a patient about a year or so ago, and he lived for about two months and unfortunately died.
But he didn't die because of the transplant. He died because he had other sorts of challenges. The transplant actually worked. And this might sound, I don't know, creepy or disquieting, but I really do think that the manufacture of life forms is going to be an important part of what we mean by manufacturing. And that has, of course, a whole range of ethical consequences to it.

John Hambrick:
Are engineering educators teaching design? Just imagine what you'll design next. And as they actualize that in 3D printing, just imagine what that 3D printer is going to look like next.

Dr. David Staley:
Exactly.

John Hambrick:
Yeah, very exciting. And also, as a point to that pig transplant, was it John Wayne? He had an aortic valve. It was a pig aortic valve. I know this because my dad told me.

Dr. David Staley:
Good source.

Rachel Daniels:
Well, I feel like it's a hard transition because this notion of biomanufacturing is something that clearly you could tell by the look on my face I hadn't really thought too deeply about. So I feel like as I consider the future and think of who a futurist, before in my mind, I would've imagined maybe George Jetson. And I don't imagine that that seems far off to some people.
I mean, that's what I always imagine, and my brain is just really exploding with the possibility of thinking about these things. So I want to step us back to a concept that you brought up earlier that I'm curious to hear just a little bit more about. So you had mentioned deglobalization. You talked about the impact that we may feel here in the US around that concept and this notion of strategic capitalism. So I'd be curious to hear you share a little bit more with us on those two concepts.

Dr. David Staley:
Yes. In some ways, that's actually tied to advanced manufacturing, although that's far from the only sector that's being talked about in relation to strategic capitalism. It goes by other sorts of names. Industrial policy is another name that you're hearing more recently. It means, among other things, bringing supply chains closer to home, back home. Strategic capitalism means that the state has a role or takes a role in fostering and protecting certain industries.
And we've seen this regionally. We've seen this here with Intel. The Intel plant that is going up, I'm pointing this way because it's east of my house, right over this way, is a symbol of industrial policy. The manufacturing of chips, high-end chips, is too important for that supply line or for that supply chain to extend all over the globe. It needs to be closer to home.
We need to be able to protect it in that sense, especially from global competitors. And so that's largely what's meant by strategic capitalism, industrial policy. One effect of that is that we are starting to see the global economy breaking up into a series of blocks. This is being resisted, I think, by a lot of economists especially, but that does seem to be the reality on the ground, a China block, a US block.
We've seen this in other sorts of ways as well, in the way in which the United States has been using economic sanctions in particular as a way to change the behavior of certain actors. When the Russo-Ukrainian War began, the United States imposed and continues to impose sanctions on Russia, the goal of which, I would argue, the goal of which was to remove Russia from the world economy.
And that to me is another instance of deglobalization. Again, economists have all kinds of problems. They see the challenges that it represents, but I really do think that this is the trend. This is the way it's going. I'm not making a statement one way or the other, if I like it or dislike it. I just think that that's the trend. And again, it's going to have an impact on industries in the United States.

John Hambrick:
Doctor, I'm going to go back just a step. We just briefly talked about water and the availability of water in the Midwest, the access to water as our population grows, as our business and industry grows, the need to be able to make water also for my folks that are in water sewage treatment plants. But I'm curious too, from your seat and as you're looking into the future, how important is water security to us and how do we ensure sustainability and protection for our water access?

Dr. David Staley:
Very important and strategically vital, I would argue. We were just talking about Intel a moment ago. It certainly wasn't the top reason, but one of the reasons Intel listed for setting up the chip fabrication plant in Central Ohio was the availability of water, because it requires an enormous amount of water, millions of gallons of water. And this was an advantage that Ohio, the Midwest has over other regions of the country, especially given the effects of climate change.
I'm not going to suggest that it's going to be a paradise in Ohio as we live with the consequences of climate change, but water is a resource that we do have in some abundance. Now, if places like Intel and others come here and put demands on our water, that could be become a challenge, that could become an issue where water scarcity becomes an issue, becomes a challenge.
Other parts of the country who are seeing real problems with water, I'm thinking of the Southwest, California has been under drought conditions for so long now, like decades, like two decades. I think we're reaching the stage where you can't call it drought anymore. It's just that's the way it is. One argument's always made, well, you can always use desalinization technology, and that's the way you can bring water to parched, arid places like the Southwest.
And that's true, you can. Desalinization technology is very well-known. It's been used for a long time. Saudi Arabia uses desalinization. It is prohibitively expensive to desalinate seawater. It is very expensive. Now, that being said, we could be in a situation such that we need water so desperately that we are going to turn to those kinds of technologies. And as a result, water becomes a very pricey part of any family's budget.
I mean, we pay for water, obviously. We pay for water. We get water bills. It will become very, very expensive, maybe even the biggest part of a family's budget. I would like to be wrong about that.

John Hambrick:
It happens for us in the Midwest. Our Great Lakes, we could do a process that would probably not be as strenuous on our economy. But nonetheless, thank goodness we are where we are today.

Rachel Daniels:
Well, we are nearing the end of our time together, so let's wrap up with a call to action. As both a futurist and a history professor at OSU, you've got a unique lens on education. So how do you see education evolving, and what advice would you give teachers preparing students for the future?

Dr. David Staley:
Wow! What an invitation. What an invitation to dream. So I think one of the first areas, one of the first things I'm seeing and championing, if I'm being completely honest, is that I think that we are going to start educating more for polymathy. And I feel like I need to explain this. So I think the way education is set up now, we are funneling students to specialize earlier and earlier, I think.
We're funneling them into being narrow specialists. And I really do think that the future belongs to those who are multi-hyphenates. And that's not my term. That's a term that another writer has used, but it's one I like rather a lot. And I think that we are going to start, and I think that students are going to become more interested in being multi-hyphenates. And by hyphenate, they're going to be a scientist/artist/kayaker, just to take three examples here.
But being multifaceted in their education and being conversant with many different disciplines. I'm already starting to see some students at Ohio State that have this interest. Their interest in the world can't be contained within a single discipline, and so they want to double major and have a major and four minors. And I think that we in education are going to have to become more supple, more forgiving, more permissive in letting students be intellectually curious.
I think if I were to give advice for teachers on how to prepare students for the future, and I hope you don't find me glib in saying this, I think that we need to start teaching about the future. So as far as I know, certainly not in the state standards, there is no class, there is no subject called the future. But I think there should be, frankly. We teach history. That's a subject.
We teach about the past. Why don't we insist that students have some understanding about the future? And so that would be my goal, not just as a unit in a social studies course or something like that, but to give it the same importance that we do to math or reading or science, that we deliberately give students the opportunity to write speculative nonfiction and to design the future that they want.

Rachel Daniels:
Well, first of all, I have to start by saying you've helped me to understand my recent college graduate who was a double major in English and environmental studies with a minor in Italian and geography, who's now in a master's program studying human geography and the impact that colonization has on landscapes. And I've always had a really hard time understanding how she got where she is, but this concept of being a multi-hyphenate completely sums up my child's experience. And so I really am able to put really literal face to this concept. So I appreciate that.

Dr. David Staley:
Can I give you another concept, another name for it? And actually it takes us back then to the beginning of our conversation here. We might call that person an eclectic academic.

Rachel Daniels:
There it is. And there it is. There it is, my friends. We are in the presence of an expert podcaster, but also a academic weaving us back to the beginning again. Dr. Staley, we want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. I have to be honest, and I'm going to call Christine out.
She has been so excited and geeked out about this opportunity to speak with you. And I hope this is just the beginning of our relationship learning and growing alongside you, because clearly we've got a lot to learn. And so we are, again, grateful for your participation. And as always, we're grateful for our audience of listeners. So we'd like to encourage you to speculate a bit, stay curious, and keep The Conversation going.