Category: The Changes

Posted on

The Role of the Government

“The future is not preordained by machines. It’s created by humans.” These are the words of Erik Brynjolfsson, director at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the continuing automation and digitization of our world and our workplace is a seismic shift.

The truth is that the reality is changing, and the society should accompany with it. The job market is some of the many areas that need to embrace the development in a way to stabilize and contribute a healthy economy.

Tomorrow’s jobs will look dramatically different from those of today. Fundamental changes in technology—the ‘digital revolution’—are breaking down barriers and building new bridges with unprecedented speed. Together with the retirement of the baby boomer generation and the rise of the Millenials generation, we see a workforce with new characteristics. Interconnectivity and globalisation are weaving a new economy that connects the world at great speed, creating new powerhouses and threatening traditional models

However, not all growth is assured in this rapidly evolving environment. Tomorrow’s jobs require new skills and many employers are left with a potential workforce severely lacking in these necessary competencies. The skills shortage may become a major stumbling block for companies, investors and entrepreneurs who face difficulties in finding the right people to help them grow. Traditional educational models and career paths no longer service the new economy and adjustments will be needed in order to bridge the skills gap.

A recent “Future of Jobs” report investigated the top 10 skills categories heavy the current jobs market, and how they’re probably to change by 2020. Some of the skill’s key to our contemporary labour market isn’t even on the list for 2020. What that means is that a shift to lifelong learning is essential.

As the bound of technological change accelerates, we need to be sure that employees are keeping pace with the exact skills to prosper in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. That smears to both technical and soft skills because there will be changes in both areas.

Learning and innovation skills

This set of skills (which include critical thinking and problem solving, communication and collaboration, creativity and innovation) will be one of the main differentiators in the workforce of the future and will be at the core of individuals looking to become life-long learners.

Critical thinking and problem solving: Repetitive tasks will not be serviced by the worker of the future as they are outsourced or eliminated by technology. This will make the ability and capacity to solve difficult and diverse problems vital.

Organizing and analyzing complex data, understanding systems and interactions, and producing novel and innovative solutions are the skills most valuable to modern companies.

Communication and collaboration: New technology, digital tools and an increasingly demanding lifestyle will require a complex portfolio of communication and collaboration skills. Being able to communicate effectively at all levels –verbally, written, visually and digitally — will be of key importance. Multi-cultural and multi-generational teams will also require exceptional communication skills to collaborate effectively. The next decades will also be marked by an explosion of user-generated content. Blending technical know-how with the ability to communicate across disciplines and cultures will be seen as an asset. The world’s problems are becoming progressively too complex for single-discipline solutions. The growing convergence of disciplines, sectors and technology will lead to increasing levels of collaboration amongst transdisciplinary teams. According to Howard Rheingold, an expert on the matter, “transdisciplinary goes beyond bringing together researchers from different disciplines to work in multi-disciplinary teams. It means educating researchers who can speak languages of multiple disciplines – a biologist who understand mathematics, mathematicians who understand biology”. We can expect this trend to move well beyond the research realm. The workforce will need to possess a detailed understanding of a particular subject while still remaining knowledgeable of a broad range of disciplines. As lifespans increase and individuals undergo multiple career shifts wherein they are exposed to different industries and disciplines, transdisciplinary skills will be particularly important.

Creativity and innovation: We expect most of the innovation of the future to take place at the intersection of disciplines, combining different fields and technologies. In this scenario, innovative problem-solving methods, investment in and understanding of new technology, and a hunger for an invention of ground-breaking industries and knowledge will be highly regarded.

Information, media and technology skills

This set of skills has the potential to provide the next generation with an unprecedented power to think, learn, communicate and create.

Technological literacy: Digital competence has ceased to be solely under the jurisdiction of the IT department. The workforce of the future will be required to retain an increased level of digital competence and the ability to constantly adapt to new technological developments

Information and media literacy: The ability to proactively and intelligently engage, access, evaluate, apply and manage information will be essential to the future workforce. Furthermore, the explosion of consumer-created content will require employees to critically assess and develop content using new media platforms to engage and persuade audiences (Davies, 2011).

Data literacy: Employers mainly interpret literacy as the ability to manage, understand and interpret large amounts of data. Most important will be the ability to turn data into relevant and useful insights that can increase productivity and lead to further innovation. Moreover, data literacy is not simply reading and understanding data, but also the ability to assess the quality of the data and veracity of the models built on that data alongside the capacity to react in the absence of data and recognize what that absence is indicating.

So, It is already necessary a redesigned paradigm on which to build an develop, transformed and current base in order to adapt the employees to the employment that have been asked by an emergent tech job market.

 

References:

Posted on

Can the 4Th Industrial Revolution Combat Inequality?

After the beginning of the era of globalization, changes are being made all over the world when it comes to inequality. The truth is that despite what people believed, the globalization has widened the gap between the rich and the poor. This phenomenon is still happening. Globalization hasn’t even started in many countries. But while this is happening, the Industry 4.0 is starting in a way much faster and, because of this, way more unpredictable. The question is, now, can the 4th Industrial Revolution combat inequality?
The World Inequality Report found since 1980, the top 0.1 percent of wealth owners, about 7 million people, captured as much of the world’s growth as the bottom half of the adult population: around 3.8 billion people. These 3.8 billion people are usually the ones who lack access to many of the basic needs in life, let alone contact with this new world that is getting developed.
According to the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2017, “the Fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to raise income levels and improve the quality of life for all people. But today, the economic benefits of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are becoming more concentrated among a small group. This increasing inequality can lead to political polarization, social fragmentation, and lack of trust in institutions. To address these challenges, leaders in the public and private sectors need to have a deeper commitment to more inclusive development and equitable growth that lifts up all people.”
Let’s now forget now what the important people say and pretend this is a discussion between a pessimist and an optimist. As you may understand, the pessimist is going to defend that the industry 4.0 is going to impact negatively our society and the optimist thinks the opposite way.
So, the optimist tells us that we will all be pushed below and, because of that, we will all be on the same level. For example, an industrial worker will be replaced by a robot the same way an accountant will be by an artificial intelligence device. The pessimist has something to say too: “Isn’t it easier for an industrial worker to be replaced rather than an accountant? Robots have been here for almost a century, and artificial intelligence is still a field that needs exploring. Plus, people are receptive to AI and didn’t seem to be about the robots on the 3rd Industrial Revolution.” About this, a report from the McKinsey Global Institute in 2013 found that up to $9tn in global wage costs could be saved as computers take over knowledge-intensive tasks such as analyzing consumers’ credit ratings and providing financial advice.
On the other hand, it is true that usually, the richer are more easily prepared for the future than the poor. For example, one that doesn’t have the money to pay for higher education won’t even get the chance to acknowledge that studying engineering, IT or robotics is a tremendous asset to have. Of course, the optimist rebuts that in Portugal the access to college isn’t that expensive anymore, and the Government ensures equity, which means that the least wealthy has the financial support of the Government.
“For many, the First Industrial Revolution didn’t even hit them, how can we expect that these people, who don’t know much about technology or the internet, get on the same page as we do? A child in Africa, the continent of the poorest people, will have any improvement in the market, comparing to me or you who are riding the wave of the industry 4.0? They barely have access to water, how can they have access to the internet?” says the pessimist. The optimist believes that if there is an era in which the poor have more opportunities it is now, more than ever. Climbing the social ladder is way easier than it was without a form of being globalized.
To conclude, it is important to understand that as much as we like and engage the new exciting things that the Industry 4.0 brings us, we must not forget that work to give those who never had the opportunities and missed out on all the increases of quality provided by the first, second, third and now, the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Posted on

Employment

The evolution of industry through time has always been a caused of changes at economy levels. From the very first beginning industrial revolution promoted alterations: economic activities in many communities moved from agriculture to manufacturing, production shifted from its traditional locations in the home and the small workshop to factories, the overall amount of goods and services produced expanded dramatically and the proportion of capital invested per worker grew, new groups of investors, businesspeople and managers took financial risks and reaped great rewards.

“The future is not preordained by machines. It’s created by humans.” These are the words of Erik Brynjolfsson, director at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the continuing automation and digitization of our world and our workplace is a seismic shift. The truth is that the reality is changing, and the society should accompany with it. The job market is one of the many areas that need to embrace the development in a way to stabilize and contribute to a healthy economy.

The Industry 4.0 will and already is also causing several changes on areas such as economic development or employment. With this technology revolution business and management can become more accurate and predicitve as well as the consequences that come from them. Given this, it is expected with the improvement of technology and the help of new tools and methods such as Internet of Things (IoT) or Machine Learning  the following benefits:

  1. Profit promotion
  2. Job creation
  3. Consumer attraction
  4. Cost reduction
  5. Anticipation and risk management
  6. Pursuit of competitiveness over time

 

Apart from that, the 4th Industrial Revolution will also change the way work is done in very distinctive factors:

  • It is breaking down the traditional silos that separate the different departments within a business, so that with real time time information they can optimize conditions and improve orders and production output. In short, sharing data makes manufacturing more agile, bringing the days of moving in silos to an end.

 

  • It is dawning a new age of personalised manufacturing, combining customised production with the speed and on-time delivery expectations of today’s consumers. Intelligent and integrated systems play a vital role for manufacturers that want to put their customers first, delivering instructions to machines about specific customer orders as they progress along the production line, in an inversion of normal manufacturing.

 

  • It requires a cultural change in the way humans work with machines. Not only will employees be able to work closer across different departments in an Industry 4.0 world, sharing real-time data and insights to make accurate decisions in the workplace, they will also be able to have some of their tasks automated by machines, allowing them to work on new, less tedious tasks instead, and crunching delivery timescales.

 

Resultado de imagem para industry 4.0 economic changes

 

In brief, there is a generic consensus that attitudes and special vision need to shift, as manufacturers break down barriers between departments, embrace customisation and work in tandem with machines. It is up to employers and their teams alike, to embrace these changes and change their mindsets, as they grow their businesses in the Industry 4.0 world.

 

 

 

 

References: 

Posted on

Environment

The advent of the Industrial Revolution left behind the agricultural and manual mode of production, using machines to help and even replace human actions and thereby expanding production and markets. However, caused significant environmental effects from the consumption of natural resources and the generation of waste.

The transformation that man has made to nature, with the use of machines and the ever-increasing need for raw materials, has given rise to a new relationship between man and nature, in which human beings dominate and exploit natural environments, especially in consequence of consumerism. Environmental degradation was increasing and rampant during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with obvious consequences in the 21st – air pollution, water and soil contamination, forest withdrawal, etc., which made future predictions for life on the planet sombre.

The Industrial Revolution led to urbanization, which, in turn, also caused problems related to the generation of solid waste (litter), the disordered occupation of the soil with deforestation and waterproofing and the contamination of river flows with sewage and solid waste.

Resultado de imagem para environment changes caused by industrial revolution

As we can check on the graphic, human factors, moved by the industrial revolution, had, still have and will have a decisive role in the climate changes and on the way environment is affected.

With the industry 4.0, the world looks up in a new perspective, given that the revolution will have a positive impact on the three pillars of sustainability (economic, social and environmental). This last one responsibilities will help population, resources and natural problems, such as global warming since it englobes several changes:

  • Larger conservation of energy and resources
  • Improvement of consumption of renewable and less polluting energy
  • An easier process of recycling
  • Packaging minimization
  • Considerable reduction of carbon emissions

We have learned from our past, and as the world becomes more global, it is sure to see that people are more aware of the harm we can do to our main protector, nature. Isn’t it a good idea to have an Artificial Intelligence responsible for recycling, or even having itself thinking about the environment?

Imagem relacionada

In conclusion, the 4th Industrial Revolution will have a large positive impact on the way we look to the environment, the way we manage it but above all, it will help us to reduce negative effects such as pollution or energy consumption on a scale that we never could.

 

References:

Posted on

Education

With technology changing faster than ever our economic, cultural and social realities, the big questions that remain unanswered.

How to prepare the younger and even the current, generation for the fourth industrial revolution? How should we educate them? Are our education systems and programmes relevant to this new industrial revolution? And if not, how do we reconstruct our education systems?

Image result for education 4.0

The truth is with the massification and the standardization of education stirring worldwide over the past decades, the strategy of both the traditional and contemporary education systems has failed to certify access to quality and appropriate education for the new generations. As such, there is a need to redesign contemporary education systems to create an adaptable and flexible system able to support and go along the changes of the new society.

In order to educate for the fourth and future industrial, there is a necessity to embrace the technologies associated with them. Education systems and programmes need to be flexible, consenting to students’ interests. They should be relevant to unpredicted work and social issues and qualifications must be assessed and awarded for knowledge across formal, non-formal and informal avenues.

However, the system itself is not the only problem that education will confront with during the fourth industrial revolution. Of course, teachers, who are the primary architects of learning, should also be constantly learning so they can acquire the indispensable skills and competencies to adapt and use current and new technologies into the continuously changing required learning process and environment.

Image result for tech in education

In brief, there is a need to emphasis on ICT and future technologies, teacher education and lifelong learning for an adaptable and flexible education system. Only with this measures, we can give to the job market the professionals it requires and we can prepare new generations, young and adult, to have the means to pursue lifelong learning and acquire the necessary skills and competencies to survive and contribute to a rapidly changing society.

If not now, when? If not us, who? If we don’t do it now, it may be too late. The new reality is already shouting for a change. If we cannot answer in the right way to this need, the world’s future population and citizens will not be prepared for the rapidly changing society.