Disruptive Future

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is here and according to IBM’s CEO, 100% of jobs will change over the next 10 years. She doesn’t say jobs will be eliminated; she says they will change. So we gotta get cracking on reskilling. The source of the change will be analytics and artificial intelligence – not a surprise here.

She calls for a major mental adjustment on reskilling towards STEM – science, technology, engineering and math. Some choice types of jobs that may be available in the near future: software engineering, data science and analytics, cybersecurity, mainframe system administration, creative design and program management.

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““To get ready for this paradigm shift companies have to focus on three things: retraining, hiring workers that don’t necessarily have a four-year college degree and rethinking how their pool of recruits may fit new job roles,” Rometty said.”

“IBM CEO Ginni Rometty: AI will change 100 percent of jobs over the next decade”, CNBC @Work, Lori Ioannou, Aril 2, 2019.

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The problem with a lot of these STEM jobs is that a lot of them deals with numbers and formulas and computational logic and can be handled much better by computers. So data science and programming, including machine learning, will eventually be taken over by machines, maybe beyond the 10 years’ timeframe.

So, in the short term, we are going to need these STEM skills but in the long term we’re most likely going to need something else. For instance, today everybody talks about learning coding but I believe that programming or coding will be just one of the big 4 basics skills needed to succeed in the 4th Industrial Revolution: reading, writing, arithmetic and now programming. (Maybe the big 4 Rs: reading, (w)riting, (a)rithmetic, (p)rogramming?) Those skills are just table stakes: you got to have them to be at the table.

What else are we going to need? At this time, I’m thinking entrepreneurial skills, creativity, ability to learn, ability to adapt and change, and social skills. And it seems to me you are going to need a little bit of each but maybe a heavy concentration in one or two areas.

Right now I’m trying to read a book “The Robot in the Next Cubicle” by Larry Boyer and it’s distressing me because I’m at the point in the book where software and robots seem invincible and ready to take over all jobs. It’s just an endless recitation of all of the things robots or software can do today. So it’s slow reading because I have to put down the book and do something happier. I haven’t reached the point where the author provides suggestions on what to do in this era.

If this revolution does progress such that most jobs will be handled by robots and software, the concept of capitalism and markets get disrupted: there won’t be a market because there won’t be customers, at least not enough to sustain the capitalism that we know. At what point (30% unemployment, 40%, 50%, 90%?) it gets disrupted, I don’t know. Or two different markets develop: one for the super wealthy who will separate from the regular world (maybe they will become our gods?) and another one for the rest of the world. Or a third way that may come about from a change in our value system.

We are in the midst of the 4th revolution and we aren’t even preparing for it.

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“As she sums it up: “In today’s world company’s need to be agile and realize their workforce is a strategic renewable asset.””

“IBM CEO Ginni Rometty: AI will change 100 percent of jobs over the next decade”, CNBC @Work, Lori Ioannou, Aril 2, 2019.

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This is rich coming from IBM because they have been in the news for being sued for discriminating against older workers. I’ve been hearing that for a couple of years now.