If you have been sleeping or watching television in the last year or so and not being reading or building your digital knowledge, skill and capabilities, then you are losing to machines or robots. As you may know, machines or robots don’t sleep or watch television. Indeed robotic automation or robotizationis the new “technological utopia” and it’s taking over jobs. The future of work has changed.

The term robotic automation or robotization refers to the automation of industrial and business processes using robots, of various guises. Robotic automation software refers to a class of software products used in the clerical context. Examples of robotic automation include the use of industrial robots in manufacturing and the use of software robots in automating business processes in services industries (Source: Wikipedia)

According to a  McKinsey report, 45% of the current jobs can be automated with present technology. The world economic forum estimates that 33% of future jobs do not exist.

The future of work has changed and all this is possible as a result of these 5 factors

1. Technology 

2. Connected, Portable, Wearable and Mobile Device

3. Globalization 

4. Changing Behavior

5. New Demographics (digital native)

Technology 

Raymond Kurzweil an American inventor and a futurist published a book called “The Singularity Is Near”. In the book, he explained the “law of accelerating returns” and predicted an exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence. He also argued that “law of accelerating returns”, would lead us to the singularity. He further argued that once the Singularity has been reached, machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. The singularity is also the point at which machine intelligence and humans would merge.

Today, it is safe to say we are almost at the singularity.  Technology such as collaborative platform and apps, modern devices, the  Internet, Machine learning and artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data, etc. has made and making work from anywhere in the world possible. These technologies, as a matter of fact, have come to improve productivity. 

In fact, automation and artificial intelligence is and will impact greatly on repetitive jobs. Today, Machines and humans have synchronized and a great example is Amazon fulfillment centers.  

Connected, Portable, Wearable and Mobile Device

The capabilities of portable or mobile computing devices continue to increase despite drastic reductions in their size and weight. The price-performance of these devices also continues to come down. For example, ‘In September 1956, IBM launched its 305 RAMAC, the first ‘SUPER’ computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5 MB of data.’ This cost, about $45,000 and you needed a plane to move it.

Today, a terabyte hard drive, weighs about 635 grams (1.39lb.), and it cost about $45, which disappears in to your pocket. Fast connectivity has also become available to mobile devices. Laptop and mobile devices such as smartphones are getting smaller or slim, smart and intelligent.

4G connectivity offers download speeds of around 14 Mbps, which is almost five times faster than its predecessor, the 3G network. Meanwhile, 5G is said to be a hundred times faster than the current 4G technology. 

Globalization 

It’s said to be the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide. Globalization is the point where we consider the world to be one big “global village” (the whole world considered as being closely connected by modern telecommunications and as being interdependent economically, socially, and politically). 

That is ,the integration of local and national economies into a global market economy. Globalization has grown due to advances in communication technology, and transportation. (Source Wikipedia and dictionary.com)

This means working from a particular location is no longer relevant and productive. For example some companies have outsourced their Customer Service to an Offshore Call Center. Ford Motors, GE, American Express, and Microsoft are a few of American companies with their call centres  in India. This is because the cost of operation is cheaper than it will be in America.

Changing Behaviors

Social media is encouraging new behaviors such as posting your resume on LinkedIn, have an open conversation on Facebook, ranting on Twitter, photos and videos on Instagram and snapchat. Post user Reviews and Recommendations in yelp. Indeed, one of the new behavior is the posting job vacancies on social media platform such as Twitter and Facebook. The new workplace of the new decade is social media.

New Demographics (digital native)

This defines the statistical data relating to the population and particular groups within it. 

The oxford dictionary defines digital native (noun)as a person born or brought up during the age of digital technology and so familiar with computers and the Internet from an early age. “the digital tools that are reshaping our economy make more sense to young digital natives than to members of older generations”

Hence, for the digital native, work is not a place you go but rather we carry work on mobile devices and its done anywhere and anytime.

In conclusion, this evolution of work is not stopping. 

Indeed, Technology is exponentially going to explode . The trends of connected portable, wearable and Mobile Devices are going to be the trend of the future, and are also going to continue to evolve with the advancement in voice assistance powered with artificial intelligence (that is Alexa, Siri, google assistant, etc) to make work much easier. 

Globalization, Changing Behavior and new demographic would greatly impact work in many ways. For example,  drone piloting is now a full time job. In essence one can live in India and fly a drone from Dubai to Iran. In effect one can live and work anywhere in the word.

To keep up, we need to be curious, insatiable and commit to lifetime learning.

Credit: David Arnoux- Growth Tribe and The Future of Work by Jacob Morgan