Frank Greenall: Engagement name of game

Feel good: Should handstand classes be compulsory?

A recent NZ Herald story featured a gentleman who makes an unlikely living travelling the world teaching others to do handstands.

You might wonder there'd be much demand for an activity normally associated with the primary school playground, but it seems so. Miguel Sant'ana — Brazilian born but now New Zealand permanent resident — has taught thousands of students internationally. Passing on the intricacies of the art is how he now earns his crust.

It calls to mind the very nature itself of what we normally call 'work", or "earning a living". That someone is able to pay the bills peddling such a singular activity seems somewhat at odds with economies that until recently appeared resolutely centred on the necessities of life — food, clothing and shelter, and so forth.

To a certain extent they did, until Industrial Revolution technology produced the farm machinery that freed countless thousand soil-toilers from the bondage of manually producing food and fibre. But that was only a general perception.

In reality, societies since Cro-Magnon days have made accommodations for those with specialist skills, freeing them from the more prosaic occupations to concentrate on communally beneficial activities.

Five thousand years ago, no doubt the Egyptian surgeon with the expertise to draw the brains of recently deceased pharaohs out through the latter's nostrils to facilitate mummification would have had entitlement to a reserved chariot park out back of the mortuary and a much coveted key to the surgeons' private washroom.

So it's really no surprise now that one can earn a specialist living as a pooch manicurist, or harmonising the various sonic signals emitted by dashboards of top-end cars … or teaching handstands.

The interesting thing, though, is how modern societies will find new accommodations for workers as momentum builds for what is now termed the fourth industrial revolution, where massive computing and internet power further drives robotic technologies to the extent that artificial intelligence (AI) devices are replacing US workers at a rate of five to one.

As Mr Sant'ana points out, while superficially his area of expertise might seem quite frivolous, the true value to his students is that it teaches them "how to feel good, how to be more confident". In other words, the key thing is that people are moving forward through engagement and empowerment — qualities translatable into other aspects of their lives.

New technologies create new jobs, but if AI continues to knock out current occupations at a rate of five to one, it's hard to see how the creation of new types of hands-on jobs can keep pace with that rate of change.

Frank Greenall

In the wake of the AI revolution, the World Economic Forum predicts by 2020 "creativity" will rate only behind critical thinking and complex problem-solving as pre-eminent worker skills. But if this creativity is geared towards exponentially producing more job-destroying AI systems, it threatens overall social cohesion. The challenge, then, is to somehow maintain a healthy level of engagement and empowerment for workers in general.

Even though official unemployment levels are fairly low, massive state resources are already squandered attempting to deal with bottom-of-the-cliff casualties deriving from that relatively small percentage of the population not gainfully engaged — particularly where attitudes have become inter-generationally entrenched.

As with Mr Sant'ana's pupils, the benefit comes primarily through the individual's personal engagement — the activity itself is almost irrelevant. In the fourth industrial revolution, the private sector will be incapable of replacing the plethora of current jobs that will soon evaporate, despite the new tsunamis of social media and video gaming industries.

The state must therefore become a major facilitator in promoting not only individual participation and life-skill building, but meaningful work as well. To not do so will commit the country to a disastrous expansion of current social dysfunction levels.
Perhaps we can start by making classes for proficiency in handstanding compulsory.