Technology is changing fast. What was state of the art a few months ago becomes outdated today. The majority of change today is enabled by the advancement of digital technology.
Significant technological changes have always triggered major social and cultural changes. The industrialisation era introduced engines amplifying human forces, transforming society from agricultural to industrial workers.
In the current transition, humans get amplified in many ways. This leads to many opportunities but also challenges as many simple and routine tasks and activities will become automated.
Complex activities will be exposed to automation as machines excel in processing the vast amount of available data. Machines are also entering the realm of white-collar workers like lawyers, managers and various professional service industries.
Areas where empathy counts or creativity matters will remain human-dominated but become increasingly machine assisted.
The digital transformation will likely be a much bigger challenge than the previous step changes in history. Reason due to the higher speed (within a life of a person) of change while prior changes happened over generations in the past.
In the past access to information was difficult – educated people typically accumulated a lot of knowledge and information. Today the access is rather easy, information is evolving rapidly and key skills have become to know how to use and combine various information sources and to gather and apply the collective knowledge. There are also creative elements and intuitions which become very important.
These changes are big challenges for countries that use to evolve slowly or try to preserve the past. All those who created big and complex structures will have increasing problems to keep pace. Companies with distributed and flexible structures outperform centralized ones.
If a country decides to move slowly, it can but others will not wait and continue to evolve. A chasm is opening between the ones who move with the time and others which become digital developing countries.
But also within a country, many things have to change such as education. The focus must move away from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation. Doing things well and being creative becomes more important than trying to be the same as all others. Education needs to amplify skills and passions rather than pressing all into one common scheme.
While the past may have been great it is only the future which matters as today’s future is tomorrows reality.
FINthinkers 