A glimpse into the digital future of work
Routine knowledge work will be automated while small R&D teams will accelerate growth, says Michael Davies.
Wednesday, November 23 2011 || News || BY Unlimited
At today’s Itex business technology show Davies, a lecturer at MIT and London Business School, said technology had significantly reshaped the workforce, particularly since the mid 2000s.
“The reality is a number of full time jobs are being eliminated,” Davies said, pointing to a lag between recovery from recession and the return of job opportunities. “New enterprises aren’t creating jobs. There was a big decline around the mid 2000s. New businesses are now much smaller than they were in the past. You can form a new company with fewer people and that’s because of technology.”
Jobs that could be automated out of existence included driving and gardening, said Davies, citing Google’s driverless car (a task it was previously thought only humans could perform) an Massachusetts startup Harvest Automation, which is developing co-operative robots for market gardening.
IT was reshaping the workforce, but jobs that required rich interaction with people would not be automated out of existence, said Davies.
“At one end things don’t go away. They involve rich personal interaction. In the middle we’ve been using people to do drone work and that will go away.
The automation of routine work would mean more part time work and portfolio careers, Davies said. “That will be more meaningful as people think about what they really want to do. In the future CEOs will have to automate everything routine to free up people’s time and energy.”
Davies challenged the notion that all people were an organisation’s biggest asset, saying it is only those who make a “disproportionate contribution” and were “the difference between getting by and excelling.”
“The point is to support them and nurture them. We have to invest in these people to leverage their time well.”
New Zealand would be at an economic advantage in future as it had smaller companies that would be more effective at R&D, he said.
“The bigger you are as an R&D organisation the less effective you are and the less wealth created by individuals working in core R&D. So economies with smaller companies should be much more effective.”
