The year 2020 and the emergence of Covid-19 have been touted as factors that have accelerated the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the workplace.
Employees using laptops and connecting via Zoom in their home offices with interesting bookshelves behind them have ushered in a new way of working.
Organisations that had not invested in digital solutions for their employees had been caught napping. Those who invested in laptops and 3G were way ahead and could send their employees home to be productive during the various stages of the lockdown. This has lulled employees and employers to think that they are in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the 4IR.
What is 4IR?
The World Economic Forum, led by its chair, Klaus Schwab, defines it as the fusion of the physical and digital worlds. It is described as the revolution that will change the way people relate to one another, the work people do, the way economies work, and what it means to be human. 4IR elements are the Internet of Things, robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles and so on.
The way our economies work means that the global world will experience an increase in productivity. Granted some people put in 27% more work when they were remote working during the lockdown, using up the non-commute time to be more productive. But this is not 4IR. 4IR as a revolution involves the automation of work where repetitive tasks are replaced by robots, thereby freeing humans to concentrate on tasks that robots cannot perform.
Jobs are being shed by the Covid-19 pandemic but this is also not 4IR. What the pandemic has done is prepared people for the worst to come, where 4IR demolishes our traditional understanding of work.
The work people do is going to change as jobs become more automated; even the most sophisticated and intricate tasks are overtaken by robots. Robotic surgical operations that are conducted on the other side of the globe are such examples. The article I am writing can be crafted by artificial intelligence using set-up algorithms. No one is going to be safe from 4IR.
Our parents worked for one or two employers for the rest of their working lives. The future of work is going to be jobs that are semi-permanent, freelance and are job-shared by workers from various parts of the globe. In the past, the call centre back office was managed globally by countries such as India, but increasingly jobs can be done anywhere in the world. When you think that you are competing with a pool of potential candidates in your home city or home country, this has changed the labour market because that job can be done elsewhere sometimes for less.
It could potentially change the powers of trade unions. That is 4IR changing the world of work, not working from home. Your new Covid normal of working digitally is just the Third Industrial Revolution exemplified.
Knowing the difference is important lest you embarrass yourself like that parliamentary question that we cannot simply forget. 4IR is hardly here in South Africa, and once it hits the world of work and everywhere it is going to change everything we do.
Monde Süssmann is the owner of 4IRMediaSA.
The Star