Marla is a fifty-eight-year-old native of Oakland, California, with three children and two grandchildren. Marla started her career as a secretary on a typewriter, processing letters, notes, and invoices. As computers made their way into mainstream society, she progressed to a clunky desktop, eventually a laptop, and now works for an artificial intelligence startup and finds her tablet indispensable. With retirement in view and more time to spend with her grandchildren, Marla keeps puzzling the future of her grandchildren: what is the future of work for them?
In 2018, 10-15 disruptive technologies sit on the horizon to usher in “Industry 4.0” or the fourth industrial revolution. As with those in previous centuries, it’s hard to imagine the future in a concrete sense: cities and towns, jobs, school, transport. It’s hard to imagine because there are so many disruptive technologies that individually and collectively will change the economy, society, jobs, and the workplace.
Disruptive Technologies
Renowned Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen first wrote about disruptive technology and innovation in the 90s describing it as when one technology displaces an established technology and changes the nature or structure of an industry. Disruptive technologies tend to be new and aren’t incremental improvements on existing technologies. Fordham University professor, Milan Zeleny, went a step further to say that disruptive technologies must change the structure and organization, the architecture, of that which supports existing technology.
In short, disruptive technologies force companies to alter how they do business lest they become obsolete, sometimes quite quickly. Today, disruptive technologies include:
- Autonomous vehicles — cars, drones, trucks
- The Internet of Things
- 3D printing
- Renewable energy, energy storage
- Advanced robotics with senses, dexterity, intelligence
- Blockchain (and as of recently, hashgraph)
- High-speed travel
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning
- Advanced materials
- Gene editing
- Spatial computing — augmented reality, virtual reality
What Does Tomorrow Look Like?
Most of us have heard of these technologies, but would struggle to have a discussion on what the implementation and implications of each technology looks like, let alone in combination. Partly the challenge is comprehending the impending changes and creating or analyzing the new relationships between humans, technology, society, business, and government.
Take for example 3D printing: imagine not going to a shop or ordering off Amazon. People will print most of their needs: houses, clothes, wood, utensils, cars, even Nutella. One city is printing a metal bridge. The future is so bright for 3D printing that printers could make organs, eyes, ears, or bones. As a result, humans could live healthier, longer, and the relationship of consumer to retail and producer may cut out most retail shops and change what cities and towns look like.
To go a step further with health, gene editing will help to eliminate diseases before birth or during early childhood. Gene editing will make crops heartier and more productive. Does this mean the end of cancer, epidemics, and world hunger? Will we even need robots to perform surgery? (Yes – humans are still human and accidents, falls, and emergencies will still happen.)
The agricultural industry has already experienced significant change, but imagine autonomous tractors, smart robots, and connected land and water surveillance: humans won’t need to pick fruits and vegetables, spray crops, or survey their fields by plane or helicopter.
Farmers and consumers will likely be less concerned about the potential pollution of their crops due to the increase in renewable energy use. Advances in renewable energy technology and changes in consumer preferences will eliminate fossil fuel use, gas-powered cars, and thus gas stations. Soon enough, electricity will be free.
If electricity is free, the internet is everywhere, and machines and devices have sensors, infrastructures and machines will be “smart,” the factory and city of the future will look quite different than what we know today. Warehouses and factories will be 99% machines with the occasional human. Machines will predict wear and tear and move to preventative maintenance: no more broken trains, buses, water pipes, etc. Groceries will be delivered and robots will have packed and shipped everything; the likes of Safeway and strip malls will be things of the past. Deliveries will be done by drones and USPS may not have the traditional mailman anymore. High-speed travel will make travelling from one city to another faster and easier: no more short-distance flights, airport hassle, or long road trips.
Impact on Jobs and Skills
Clearly, the world will be quite different. The city Marla grew up in won’t be the same city that her grandchildren grow up in, though they remain in Oakland. Hundreds have studied and tried to quantify disruptive technologies’ impact on jobs and the future of work: the breadth, depth, and scale of impact, which jobs will disappear and which will remain, how will the skillsets demanded change, etc. Overall, predictable physical work with repeated tasks, will be automated. Office support and administrative duties will be automated. Construction will likely need far fewer builders because machines will build. Jobs with customer interaction will shift, such as hotel and travel workers, food-service workers, retail workers, etc.
McKinsey predicts that in 60% of occupations, at least one-third of job duties could be automated. The World Economic Forum predicts an increase in freelance work to more than half the workforce. The OECD predicts that those in their teens will be the most at-risk for being put out of work by automation.
In 2018, we face a significant number of disruptive technologies that will, in accordance with their nature, disrupt life and the economy as we know it. Jobs will be automated out and will change in nature, but equally new jobs will be created that don’t yet exist today. Workers will need to be flexible, collaborate, be capable of digital navigation, handle high complexity, respond to a high number of requests or demands for attention and response, manage/filter signals and noise, and align themselves with work through skills-based not knowledge-based economies. Undoubtedly, there will be an increase in IT-related jobs, however they’re more likely to be in combination with other roles and industries as the lines blur, IoT pushes us to connect everything, thus technology and humans become ever closer.
UC Berkeley Innovation and Entrepreneurship newsletter from Dr. Christine Gulbranson.
Read more at https://www.ucop.edu/innovation-entrepreneurship/innovation-resources/dr-christine-articles/the-future-of-work.html.