How the fourth Industrial Revolution is starting in the palm of your hand
The disruption to businesses and labour markets is already being widely felt, and will only become more apparent as robotics, A.I, machine learning and mobile grow in stature, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution takes hold.
There are undoubtedly a huge number of factors, both socio-economic and technological, at play in bringing about this change, and a massive shift in skill sets will have to be navigated in order to keep up with them. One of the key driving factors in both, however, is mobile technology.
Making the move to mobile
The World Economic Forum’s report showed that, in socio-economic terms, the main driver for change – ranking above things like age, gender and the green economy – was the changing work environment and flexible working arrangements. As the report notes: “Work is what people do and not where they do it.” The workplace is shifting away from the traditional office environment, and moving more towards mobile, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and remote working to accommodate these adjustments in company culture and employee expectation.
Likewise, listed by the businesses surveyed as the top technological driver of change was mobile internet and cloud technology. The growth of these technologies over the last year has been explosive, with a wide range of services now able to be delivered at high speed and low cost, and offering a huge increase to workforce productivity.
Trustworthy technology
Nonetheless, suspicion about new technology entering the workplace remains stubbornly persistent. Overall, respondents to the Future of jobs report felt negatively about the introduction of innovations such as artificial intelligence, in large part due to fears about the future loss of jobs to smart machines. Mobile technology, as well as big data analytics and the internet of things (IoT) was welcomed, however.
Perhaps key to this is the fact that mobile technologies are already so widespread, and have already extensively proven their business value. Technological change is already underway, and where we’ve welcomed it into the workplace, the results have been uniformly positive, helping improve the employee experience immeasurably. It’s for this reason that even compared against futuristic technology like robotics, artificial intelligence and the like, mobile remains best placed to continue driving us forward to the next industrial revolution.
Challenge and change
Though binary attitudes still exist between those who see this next phase as a positive opportunity, and those who fear it will result in job losses, what’s really important in ushering in the revolution is the ability to manage change. As the report points out, “the challenge for employers, individuals and governments alike is going to be to work out ways and means to ensure that the changing nature of work benefits everyone.”
With mobile technologies already encouraging new skills and enabling new ways of working, we think it could achieve exactly that, ushering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution from the palm of your hand.
This article was provided by WorkAngel.
