By Alamelu Chelat
The world which we live is changing at a rapid rate, driven by advances and breakthroughs in technology. Digital disruption is set to transform the global economy, our work lives and herald in the fourth industrial revolution. The fourth industrial revolution is essentially a digital revolution, underpinned by the unprecedented scale and scope in the rapid proliferation of digitization, and the increasing receptiveness of people towards them.
Though digital disruption and technological innovations are assured to increase productivity and profits, the whole slew of forecasted changes are regarded with ambivalence and fear by those in the workforce and the ones seeking to enter it. Even as we are only on the cusp of this digital disruption, all over the globe, we are starting too percieve glimpses of how altered the landscape of our economy will be once we have succeded in completely disrupting it. Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, actually owns no property. Facebook, the world’s largest media company (though they vehemently denies being one), generates no content and Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no cars.
From where we are standing, it seems that job security and the benefits of a permanent workforce are going out the window in the post-disruption setting. Our world is increasingly shifting towards a gig economy, where workers are employed in short term contracts and earn their income through freelancing. Gig economy has certain benefits, mainly flexibility in setting work hours and locations to work from, the ability to choose projects that you may be interested in, and the variety of handling different kinds of work according to your schedule. This may sound good to some, but the lack of employee’s benefits, isolation, stress and burnout are cons that are too big to ignore for many, especially for those who are not from privileged or well- off backgrounds.
Another change is that companies are switching their operating paradigm with regard to labour and technology. Rather than technology assisting labour, it will be the other way around. Role of labour in organisation will move from “doing” to “thinking”.
Automation substitutes human labor in tasks – in both physical and cognitive spheres- which are repetitive, predictable and routine. Automation is considered to be one if the biggest things which will shrink the workforce, particularly threatening those working blue collar jobs. Amidst all the speculation regarding unemployment there is also the concern about who will benefit and who will be left out in this fourth industrial revolution.
However the future is not something that merely happens to us, we have the ability plan and decide how we are to deal with all these changes. With the increasing requirement for talent, evolving educational systems and skill training is becoming necessary. Companies are encouraged to see human capital just like any other capital and to invest in it. There us also growing consensus on the need to prepare students for the future. Schooling which emphasize creativity, empathy, emotional intelligence, lifelong learning will be most pragmatic, since job destruction and creation in in an ever changing flux. In the future, labour would have to work alongside machines rather than compete with them, thus it also makes sense to give main focus on skills not likely to be emulated by a machine.
However the determining factor is inclusivity. Government and stakeholders will have to take steps to ensure social protection for those likely to be affected and also to level the playing field so that participating and benefitting in the digital revolution is not confined to a minority of elites at the expense of the masses. Social security nets, universal basic income and socio-economic protection have to be made part of state policy. If accesibility to digital infrastructure and democratization of gains is prioritized and achieved, the tech revolution might be good news after all.
Dynamic technologies 