The future of human potential – executive summary
Blog: End to End BPM
After a fruitful, global, collective journey, here is a condensed view coming out of the Task force of the future of human potential.
Progress is still needed to understand how open anonymous global data banks can contribute to address society challenges related with people upskilling, career progression, supply chain optimization, eliminate waste and surplus, identify risks, value chain decarbonization, promote wellness and quality of life. On the other hand, mechanisms are still needed and become a standard which people have the freedom to control data access and sharing and how those will prevent the propelling effect of general false truth, mistrust, unbalanced exercise of power towards workers and influence any form of bias.
To create understanding of the future of human potential, the working group has decided to organize their thinking around specific scenarios. It is through these scenarios that each of us can better understand which direction we will probably be headed to, which paths we can come across.
The scenarios
Intelligence to determine risks and create paths for preparing for the future
Every individual should gain accurate guidance about their options on personal development, based on data. Several factors can be potentially associated with the extent to which the existing and future working population acquires the right skills within the workplace, in a constantly shifting labor market. Such factors include multiple variables and dimensions such as: demographics, age incidence, the structural environment, referring mainly to the wider socioeconomic conditions and the levels of preservation of the urban setting, showing how the potential of facing unemployment or a degradation of income that can be often associated with the aforesaid structural factors, particularly when they are combined with technological evolution, lack of industry sector competitiveness or social deprivation.
Autonomous supply chains
Today we see extensive work being done to improve supply chains, warehousing, transportation, shipping, etc. All these activities are affecting jobs today, but there is much more automation and job disruption yet to come. To best envision this, think of supply chains that are completely automated from the acquisition of raw materials, through manufacturing, trade finance, shipping, and all the way to delivery. Predictive maintenance, and other AI models will help to keep the overall process running smoothly, while anticipating where there could be challenges across the entire flow. This will drive down the cost of manufactured products to be a much smaller share of income.
Transportation productivity
By 2030 this segment will see dramatic changes with autonomous vehicles being the predominant transportation mechanism. Most of the existing delivery and transportation jobs will be replaced, along with many of the supporting jobs. Furthermore, the safety of the transportation network will be dramatically improved, changing or eliminating jobs related to insurance, repair, and security.
We can also expect to see an entirely new set of products and services to be delivered as part of the autonomous vehicle experience. New specialized vehicles dedicated to sleeping, working, entertainment, partying, and others, will be combined with education and transportation will increasingly be the thing that is happening while riders are having entirely different experiences.
Changing nature of urbanism and the return of clean enterprises to the heart of the cities
Cities have always been places where commercial and industrial activities, working, and living were physically and functionally together. The rise of regulations related to environmental protection, shift of land value and operating supporting infrastructures, separate these functions in space. The re-invention of the modern urban image and unscrupulous consumption of public space has led to contemporary gentrification and decreased investment in the architectural preservation of the urban setting.
Human ingenuity for hacking and trolling
Over the next decades we should expect to see new opportunities for hacking and trolling to destabilize governments, corporations, and discredit individuals. These hacking and trolling opportunities fall into these categories.
Humanity against humanity
Since humans have always found ways to exploit each other for their own benefit, the benefit of their group, or even simply out of spite, we should expect to see this continue through new channels as work becomes more integrated with technology and distributed. As economic disparity grows, it will become increasingly important that both private sector and governmental organizations do more to ensure that people feel they have a vested interest in the success of the whole. Failure to do this will encourage further social unrest, anarchistic tendencies, and deeper class and ideological divisions.
Automated food supply technologies
Just as we see increased automation in supply chains for manufactured goods, we can also expect to see considerable change in both the food supply system and the distribution and preparation process. Farming jobs will become increasingly technological with farmers being technologists that must manage their AI models and robotic farm equipment. The multiple digital twins will tell farmers what fertilizers to apply, pests to mitigate, equipment to maintain, and a host of other inputs telling them what to do next and where attention is needed. Integration of farms’ digital twins with weather data will help farmers improve water usage while also protecting crops from risks. Many of the hands-on task’s farmers do today, related to monitoring their crops for pests and moisture, checking animal health and growth, tracking the farms output will be replaced by data streams and AI models in their digital twins.
Medical workers
Workers will undergo a gradual transition from devices that we carry, to devices, fabrics, or implants that we wear embedded with dedicated medical features – infused with interpretive artificial intelligence that can predict and advise based on indicators and conditions prior to medical events.
Increasing the wealth divide
Likely we will see a greater divide between the haves and the have nots as it relates to work. Those that will be doing the work they love, will also likely gain more wealth. This will be driven in part because of the increasingly technical nature of even what might be seen today as very manual. Furthermore, there will be fewer and fewer jobs where workers can simply show up and sell their time.
Assisted reasoning
We will reach a stage in which we will see humans assisted by automated systems allowing perception integration support – the required information contextualized with human cognitive task – it is not about the control panel or the alarm, it is about being advised “look at this piece of information and act, accordingly”, using simulation to predict or forecast results of actions taken.
Machine physical enablement
Use cases which humans collaborating with other machines will increase dramatically. Physical augmentation aims to enhances humans by improving, enhancing their inherent physical capabilities the strength and endurance for effortless manual tasks – due to heavy physical, sensorial, and cognitive workload – or recovering – in case the human faces challenges, according to the expected quality of performance criteria. Recovering capabilities will contribute for higher inclusion in the workforce and new employment opportunities.
Accessible artificial intelligence
AI running amok – As we look ahead, we anticipate that the creation of AI models will become much, much simpler, opening up the field for non-technical creators. It will be analogous to website creation in the 1990s. During the period of rapid World Wide Web growth, website creation skills moved from technical, to graphical, customer experience, and design expertise. In the same way, we expect that within the next 5 years, we will see a shift of AI model creation from technical creators to non-technical creators.
Virtual workspaces
Can be defined as a collaborative work environment that convey a sense of presence in the real world using visual, auditory, haptic, and other sensory elements. They use technologies and techniques of virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality, but also includes information search with a self-learning mechanism, as well as technologies for collaborative decision-making. Virtual workspaces will be adaptable for best productivity and human performance for that job role, designed to be used for multiple work purposes with opposing requirements.
Emotional response and wellness surveillance
As virtual interaction progresses, ways of detecting the dynamics of verbal and nonverbal signals will become clear, it will be possible to measure such signs as a same basic need – feeling transparency and engaged – as it happens in face-to-face-meetings. We will experience rapid progress in correct transmission of nonverbal signals, leveraging or combining the communication devices used (device microphone, camera, messaging) via detection of face expressions, posture, mannerisms, voice modulation, writing style.
Diversity and inclusion transparency
Just as millennials forced changes in labor practices with the introduction of “bring my own device” and “do my own thing”, younger generations such as generation Z will have a strong behavioral influence on the path to self-activism in defending values, they believe in. Organizations will be required to make publicly available open datasets about the nature of the workforce and that these data sources can be certified and scrutinized. In this way it will be possible to measure the effectiveness of diversity and inclusion programs, which will begin to move away from the instruments of action related with raising awareness on the topic. Diversity and inclusion will fade towards demonstrating a diversified workforce have power, there is equity, and equality.
The gig economy regressive evolution
The future oligopoly ownership of the personal, corporate and its extensions to societal data generated in transactions between digital platforms and their customers will become a momentous transformation in autocratic consumerism of big data. The information will remain in the hands of just a few big companies, even though it has immense value to other economic players.
This outcome would not be possible to accomplish without the contributions of: Dagobert Hartmann, Isaac Leigh, James Breaux, Nils Müller, Sharon Lim, Steve Leigh, Susan Choi, and the valuable influence of:
Kavita Meelu; Kendra Valentine; Kiwa Iyobe and Zarifa Ghafari.
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