Tech revolution set to challenge future thinking
WE’VE seen the headlines: millions of jobs at risk as robots take over, but Nicholas Davis is here to tell you it’s not all bad news.
The Australian-born head of the World Economic Forum’s society and innovation department is in Sydney this week for the CeBIT conference on business and technology.
He says we are in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution in which physical, digital and biological worlds are coming together in ways that could have scary consequences.
“The digital revolution has a long way to run still,” Mr Davis said during his keynote speech.
“It’s these new systems that give us hope, but are also incredibly scary.”
While previous industrial revolutions had brought about an ever-increasing boost to living standards, he said, the dramatic changes under way now were not guaranteed to do so.
What the advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, nanotechnology and selfdriving vehicles would do, Mr Davis predicted, was “fundamentally change the way we create value and do business, and value ourselves as human beings”.
The risk was that without updating our social institutions, the tech revolution would create big winners and even bigger losers, sending our standard of living into a tailspin.
An analysis by the CSIRO last year found that 44% of Australian jobs – five million positions – were under threat from computerisation and automation, though many workers remained clueless about the big changes on their way.
The picture is even worse in Europe, where the WEF has a crack team of economists working on the issue in Geneva.
“No matter who you talk to about what will happen with the future of the job market,” Mr Davis said, “we don’t know. We have instead a series of increasingly interesting, but increasingly challenging, analyses and pieces of data that are making us concerned.”
Self-driving vehicles were expected to put longdistance truck drivers out of business within a decade, he said, while other jobs would be substantially altered.
According to the WEF, 35% of the core skills needed in the workforce will be transformed between 2015 and 2020 due to changes in technology.
Critical thinking, creativity, emotional intelligence and cognitive flexibility will be more important than ever before, as machines take over many tasks.
“You can get a lot of great jobs if you are good at relating to others, also if you are very technical, but what about everyone else?” Mr Davis said.
“This is a major challenge for Australia to address ... there are conversations we need to have, and the big question is, ‘how do we stay human centred?’”
This meant “getting our institutions up to speed”, he said, and “rethinking the reliance on jobs to distribute society’s wealth, with the possibility of introducing a universal basic income”.
He said despite the challenges Australians faced, our nation was living in the best time in human development, with the OECD economic development index showing life expectancy, education and income per capita at their peak.