The message to take away from Dr Stefan Hajkowicz's thought-provoking keynote address to the National Medicines Symposium in Canberra is that just because the world is changing it isn't necessarily ending.
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The respected CSIRO futurist, who has penned a book called Global Megatrends, identified some of the many challenges facing humanity in the years ahead.
He also expressed confidence they could be mastered as long as people were innovative, worked together and were prepared to embrace change.
Dr Hajkowicz's thoughts on the disruptive influence of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, on the future of work are instructive at a time whole industries are closing down.
"We need to learn how to race with the machine, not against it because it is getting so much better," he said. "But plug your skills and what you do into this advanced artificial intelligence, automated systems and robots and you'll become a lot better in your job."
Health services, which cannot continue to devour tax revenues at an ever increasing rate, are one instance of where such flexibility could improve outcomes while reducing costs.
If, as Dr Hajkowicz asserts, much of what is done in health care could, and should, be automated this would allow people to do what people do best.
"If automation changes some of the roles of a nurse in a hospital I hope we don't lose the nurse, but that we put them where the patients are saying they want more nurse time, more interaction and someone to talk to."
This logic can be applied across many different endeavours, especially in the ever-growing services sector that now accounts for 60 to 70 per cent of all Australian employment.
Such positive outcomes will only be achievable if the private and public sector corporate warriors wedded to using technology to reduce head counts to cut costs take time out to ask where they want their organisations to be 10 and 20 years from now however.
If this is not done the outlook is bleak. With some studies suggesting 47 per cent of jobs are at risk of being taken over by robots and computers, the prospect of major social change, including the collapse of the middle class and an increased concentration of wealth at the top of the pyramid, opens the door to a dystopian future.
On a happier note the prospect of mass starvation on a global scale, a nightmare scenario that has haunted the thoughts of many since the release of Paul and Anne Ehrlich's The Population Bomb in 1968, seems more avoidable now than at any point in human history.
"There is more than enough as long as we are smart," Dr Hajkowicz said. "The trouble is we aren't always smart."
The ability of individuals to re-imagine, to innovate and to pressure governments and corporations to do the smart thing, not just the easy thing, is the key to using the current wave of change to build a better tomorrow.
As Bryan Brown observed in the 1991 film Blood Oath "The future of the world isn't worked out on a grand scale. It's worked out by ordinary people doing ordinary jobs."
