Well, as we saw in yesterday's catastrophic mutating event post:
WEF's Klaus Schwab: "Humans Might Not Survive the Fourth Industrial Revolution"
But for those who do survive - as I hope you plan to - let's not get into one of those "The living will envy the dead"* scenarios. Hence Fast Company with the headline story, May 3:
New technologies are on track to trigger leaps in productivity greater than we have ever seen before.
People want to believe that the company they work for not only creates innovative offerings that positively influence people’s lives but, in so doing, does not destroy the lives of others. So, by social good here, we mean the unique ability of nondisruptive creation to innovate new markets without causing the social harm of shuttered companies, lost jobs, and hurt communities that occurs when market creation comes with market destruction.
The rising importance of breaking this trade-off underscores one of the main reasons we believe that nondisruptive creation is likely to only grow in importance in the future. And why responsible executives cannot afford to ignore it. The other main reason lies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution that is upon us.
Understanding the Fourth Industrial RevolutionAlthough the Industrial Revolution is often thought of as a single continuous event, it can be better understood as four sequential revolutions or paradigm shifts. The first, which began in the late 18th century, was propelled by mechanization and steam power. The second, in the 19th century, was fostered by mass production, electricity, and the assembly line. The third, which took place in the 20th century, introduced computers, automation, and information technologies.The Fourth Industrial Revolution, which we are now experiencing, encompasses the advent and convergence of exponential technologies—from artificial intelligence and smart machines to robotics, blockchain, and virtual reality—that are already affecting the way we live. Whenever you query Siri, for example, to find a restaurant’s address, or ask Alexa to call your mom, you are using AI, whether you are conscious of it or not.
All these new technologies are on track to trigger leaps in productivity greater than we have ever seen before. And with these leaps in productivity will come increasingly lower costs and greater efficiencies. Which is good. Higher productivity and lower costs should theoretically translate into a leap in discretionary income or a rise in the purchasing power of every dollar we earn. Which is double good. Only there is a hitch.
To purchase these lower-priced goods and services and enjoy the promised higher standard of living that productivity has historically delivered, it goes without saying that people must have jobs and sound income. Without them, no matter how efficient, low-cost, and high-quality goods and services become through technological advances, people won’t have the means to purchase them. And if people can’t purchase them, the long-established relationship between greater productivity and a rising standard of living becomes illusory.
The double-edged swordHerein lies the double-edged sword of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Although smart machines and artificial intelligence are predicted to bring unimaginable efficiencies, they will do so by increasingly replacing a wide swath of existing human jobs. While historically jobs have always been around for human beings through technological revolutions, we have never had a technological revolution that has been capable of displacing so many human beings and so much human brain power as the one we are transitioning through now.According to a report from Oxford Economics, a global forecasting and quantitative analysis firm, smart machines are expected to displace about 20 million manufacturing jobs across the world over the next decade, including more than 1.5 million in the U.S. Other studies predict that smart machines, robotics, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, 3D printing, and automation will put 20% to 40% of existing jobs at risk over the next decades.
And a report from the Brookings Institution finds that 25% of U.S. workers will face “high exposure” and risk being displaced over the upcoming few decades. That translates to about 36 million jobs at risk of elimination, with another 52 million—36%—facing “medium exposure” to displacement. The bottom line in all these studies is that we can expect a high level of dislocation and a great release of labor, especially in the transition years as the economy adapts to the new reality.
Poor lower- and middle-class workers, you might think. But high-end jobs are equally at stake as AI and smart machines reach human levels of performance. You don’t have to look into the future to see this. Consider the elite sector of Wall Street investing. Already major investment companies are replacing employees with computerized stock-trading algorithms that far outperform them. In the next decade, financial institutions are expected to have replaced 10% of their human workforce, with some 35% of those jobs in the domain of money management. And consider journalism, where robots have begun writing reports on economic trends, and automation is even now used to generate election and sports coverage and to produce digestible articles from financial reports.
Look at dentistry....
....MUCH MORE
*usually when we use the "Living will envy the dead" construction it is meant, not so much in the variant ascribed to Khrushchev describing nuclear war, but in the pirate sense:
...And employees who broke their backs for these startups would realize just a how demoralizing the process can be. But those are the lucky ones....MOREAarrgh, them with the broken backs be the lucky ones and the living will envy the dead....
Having a strange attraction to the piratical (Climateer was a mashup of climate and buccaneer/profiteer/have aIf now-concerned reader had asked why I went with the pirate "living/dead" thing I couldn't have explained to save my life but it turns out there was a reason. From WikiQuote:beergrog) we have collected pirate tales since the blog's early days.
It all began with the official International Talk Like A Pirate Day website and went downhill from there.
They now have an international singalong (some quite creative) that I like to introduce with:
"There! That's what I think of ye. Before an hour's out, I'll stove in your old block house like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thunder, laugh! Before an hour's out, ye'll laugh upon the other side. Them that die'll be the lucky ones...
...Disputed
- The living will envy the dead.
- The attribution of this widely quoted remark about nuclear war to Khrushchev is disputed in Respectfully Quoted : A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
- In Russia this quote is usually attributed to the translation of Treasure Island by Nikolay Chukovsky: "А те из вас, кто останется в живых, позавидуют мертвым!" ("Those of you who will stay alive will envy the dead", originally: "Them that die'll be the lucky ones").[2]
