Ville Korpela is a professional futurist and a consultant at Dubai Future Foundation
The recent Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally transformed the way we approach the concept of work. It is about time. Work as we know it has been around since the first industrial revolution. As we are now coming to grips what it means to live in the fourth industrial revolution, these radical changes will impact individual employees and organisations.
Our current paradigm of work is still based on the concept of the factory being the center piece of economic activity, in which the employee sacrifices his or her time in exchange for a salary, a monetary compensation based on the time he or she spends in the working place. The latest research from the International Labour Organization and the World Economic Forum shows that up to 70 percent of our current jobs could be replaced by robotic process automation in the next 10 years. For humans to compete with robots and artificial intelligence in the future, we need to develop our human intelligence at the same pace as we develop artificial intelligence.
In this new paradigm of work, the employee’s main task will be to act as the connectors of robot driven processes. This requires fundamentally different skills from those we learn in our current education systems. Government leaders often call for more coding education in the schools, whereas the real requirement is in the areas of systems and design thinking and business knowledge, how to design collaborative systems where the various automated processes are being put in action in such a way that they communicate and exchange data between the various platforms, both human and digital.
Technology is by nature forward looking, and designing technology requires us to imagine a new user experience, for which we are developing a mechanism to do something differently than today. To do so, we need to develop our creative thinking and imagination, for our current thinking will not help us solve the problems the same thinking created, as Einstein famously quoted.
In the fourth industrial revolution the core of work will not be on the unit of time as an input by a single employee, but rather it will be in the value created to the systems the employee will serve. The best way to understand this new paradigm of work is through network theory, which tells us that the nodes with highest amounts of connections to other units are more valuable than others. The compensation of each employee will be depending on the ways the employees can build new connections between the various platforms his or her organisation uses to communicate and exchange value between its user communities.
One of the major lessons from the pandemic has been that organisations have finally realised that the physical presence of employees in the premises of the employer has no direct link to their productivity. The world truly has become a global village, where countries and cities are now competing for the best talents. Dubai and the UAE have been among the pioneers in the push to attract the best global talent, through the introduction of the remote visa and other innovations in the field of allowing experts to easily relocate to UAE and use the country as a base for working in the new economy. The logic behind this has been to create a space in which the most connected individuals can create new connections, which will add value both to their networks as well as the location in which they are based. The city with the highest number of network supernodes will then attract even more such individuals, serving as a force of gravity pulling towards it individuals who are looking for ever more powerful connections.
Ville Korpela is a professional futurist and a consultant at Dubai Future Foundation. The opinions voiced in this column are his own and do not reflect the official position of Dubai Future Foundation
AB Future of Work Forum: Embracing the challenges of a new era
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by Staff Writer
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The future of work in the fourth industrial revolution
In the new paradigm of work the employee’s main task will be to act as the connectors of robot driven processes
Ville Korpela is a professional futurist and a consultant at Dubai Future Foundation
The recent Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally transformed the way we approach the concept of work. It is about time. Work as we know it has been around since the first industrial revolution. As we are now coming to grips what it means to live in the fourth industrial revolution, these radical changes will impact individual employees and organisations.
Our current paradigm of work is still based on the concept of the factory being the center piece of economic activity, in which the employee sacrifices his or her time in exchange for a salary, a monetary compensation based on the time he or she spends in the working place. The latest research from the International Labour Organization and the World Economic Forum shows that up to 70 percent of our current jobs could be replaced by robotic process automation in the next 10 years. For humans to compete with robots and artificial intelligence in the future, we need to develop our human intelligence at the same pace as we develop artificial intelligence.
In this new paradigm of work, the employee’s main task will be to act as the connectors of robot driven processes. This requires fundamentally different skills from those we learn in our current education systems. Government leaders often call for more coding education in the schools, whereas the real requirement is in the areas of systems and design thinking and business knowledge, how to design collaborative systems where the various automated processes are being put in action in such a way that they communicate and exchange data between the various platforms, both human and digital.
Technology is by nature forward looking, and designing technology requires us to imagine a new user experience, for which we are developing a mechanism to do something differently than today. To do so, we need to develop our creative thinking and imagination, for our current thinking will not help us solve the problems the same thinking created, as Einstein famously quoted.
In the fourth industrial revolution the core of work will not be on the unit of time as an input by a single employee, but rather it will be in the value created to the systems the employee will serve. The best way to understand this new paradigm of work is through network theory, which tells us that the nodes with highest amounts of connections to other units are more valuable than others. The compensation of each employee will be depending on the ways the employees can build new connections between the various platforms his or her organisation uses to communicate and exchange value between its user communities.
One of the major lessons from the pandemic has been that organisations have finally realised that the physical presence of employees in the premises of the employer has no direct link to their productivity. The world truly has become a global village, where countries and cities are now competing for the best talents. Dubai and the UAE have been among the pioneers in the push to attract the best global talent, through the introduction of the remote visa and other innovations in the field of allowing experts to easily relocate to UAE and use the country as a base for working in the new economy. The logic behind this has been to create a space in which the most connected individuals can create new connections, which will add value both to their networks as well as the location in which they are based. The city with the highest number of network supernodes will then attract even more such individuals, serving as a force of gravity pulling towards it individuals who are looking for ever more powerful connections.
Ville Korpela is a professional futurist and a consultant at Dubai Future Foundation. The opinions voiced in this column are his own and do not reflect the official position of Dubai Future Foundation
AB Future of Work Forum: Embracing the challenges of a new era
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