Do we (humans) have room in the future of work?

There are 7.7 billion people on the planet. 3 billion are employees.

In the next ten years, between 15% and 30% of them could be replaced by technology.

Over the next few years we are going to experience some of the most dramatic changes that humanity has ever gone through. Moreover, all those changes are going to happen at a rate that we can’t even comprehend, although predicted and expected for a quite a long time.

What’s painful and truly concerning is how oblivious and unprepared we (humans and our institutions) are for what’s about to come.

Our world is in social and economic turmoil. And we continue missing how important it is for the future of humanity to get together and discuss how we are going to deal with massive unemployment, dramatic demographic shifts, brutally gigantic diasporas of political, social and environmental refugees, and, equally important, “technological refugees” (those trying to readapt after being quickly replaced by technology), how our economies our going to cope with a tech-driven world, how the Earth and its limited resources will support our unsustainable rate of growth and resource-utilization, among other things.  

After each of the previous three industrial revolutions that we went through in our history, the end-result always was a better world than before. But usually the transition from one model to another was chaotic, complex, uncertain and very challenging.

For too many reasons I foresee a far more complex situation now, during this so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, than what we faced in the three previous revolutions. And perhaps the most important reason and the one I am most concerned about is this: the speed at which technology is developing and the speed at which we are getting ready for it.

Technology is developing at a mind-blowing exponential rate. And we are just become aware of what’s happening at a painfully slow linear (if at all) rate (becoming aware... not even getting ready). The end-result is easy to see: technology quickly surpassing us in the things technology can traditionally better than us, but also us not being able to even catch up and become better in the things we are supposed to be doing better (human skills).

As we become a more technology-dependent society, the question becomes whether we (humans) will have room in the future of work.

And I believe the answer is yes, but not if we continue in our current path and the pace at which we are moving.

We must get together, government, private sector, nonprofit organizations, academia, and discuss our global contingency plans for the dramatic and painful transition we are about to experience over the next ten years. We also need to paint, in a “begin with the end in mind” kind of mindset, the kind of future we want to have.

At the rate we are doing it now, the future will be dire for most humans.

I don’t want to be over-dramatic. But we can’t continue sugarcoating the reality. We either get ready, raise awareness, discuss about the future we want to have, reskill our workforce, legislate for an ethical use and development of technology and to avoid technological monopolies, or our suffering we will be higher than it needs to be.

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About the Enrique Rubio:

Enrique is an HR and Tech Evangelist and founder of Hacking HR Forum. Enrique came to the United States from Venezuela as a Fulbright Scholar. Prior to coming to the US, Enrique was the CEO at Management Consultants, a firmed specialized in Human Resources and Corporate Social Responsibility in Venezuela. Before Management Consultants, Enrique worked in the telecommunications sector as a Senior Project Engineer for Telefonica. He currently works in Human Resources at the Inter-American Development Bank. He is also the cofounder of Cotopaxi, an artificial intelligence based recruitment platform focused on Latin America and the Caribbean. Enrique is a guest author in several blogs about innovation, management and human resources. He has over twenty years of experience. Enrique holds an Electronic Engineering from Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela and an Executive Master’s in Public Administration from Maxwell School in Syracuse, New York. Enrique also holds a Design Thinking certification from Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, he is certified Scrum Master and PMP.

The views expressed in this post are Enrique's.