The Future of Work - GE Reading

" We believe the Future of Work will be as transformational as the industrial revolution, and possibly more ." 
Marco Annunziata, Chief Economist, GE
Stephan Biller, Chief Manufacturing Scientist, GE

I came across this interesting read and below are some keywords from the study and few takings that stood out to me:

• Industrial Internet - merging of the physical and digital worlds through the internet of things
• Advanced Manufacturing / Brilliant Factory - digitally linking together design, manufacturing, supply chains and distribution
• Global Brain - global collective intelligence integrated by digital communication networks

A powerful, deep and far-reaching transformation is underway in industry. It is fundamentally changing the way we design and manufacture products, and what these products can do. It is making the complex supply and distribution networks that tie the global economy together faster, more flexible, and more resilient. It is empowering human beings to unleash more broad-based and distributed creativity and entrepreneurship. It is redefining the competitive landscape in multiple sectors, with far-reaching implications that will reverberate through international trade patterns and the distribution of global growth. And it is affecting each of our daily lives through major advances in health care, energy, transportation, and the way we work.

This transformation is the Future of Work. Three major forces are converging
to shape it:

The first driving force is the Industrial Internet.

The lines between the physical and digital world are becoming increasingly blurred. The integration of cloud-based analytics (“big data”) with industrial machinery (“big iron”) is creating huge opportunities for productivity gains. As we have shown in previous studies, the rapid decline in the costs of both electronic sensors and storing and processing data now allows us to harvest massive amounts of data from industrial machinery. Using advanced analytics, we can then draw insights that can increase efficiency. 

Machines like gas turbines, jet engines, locomotives and medical devices are becoming predictive, reactive and social, making them better able to communicate seamlessly with each other and with us. The information they generate becomes intelligent, reaching us automatically and instantaneously when we need it and allowing us to fix things before they break. This eliminates downtime, improves the productivity of individual machines—as jet engines consume less fuel and wind turbines produce cheaper power—and raises the efficiency of entire systems,reducing delays in hospitals and in air traffic.

"We are entering a world where the machines we work with are not just intelligent, but brilliant."

Example: 
Ten percent of flight delays and cancellations are currently caused by unscheduled maintenance events, costing the global airline industry an estimated $8 billion—not to mention the impact on all of us in

terms of inconvenience, stress, and missed meetings as we sit helplessly in an airport terminal. To address this problem, GE has developed a self-learning predictive maintenance system that can be installed on any aircraft to predict problems a human operator might miss. While in flight, the aircraft will talk to the technicians on the ground; by the time it lands, they will already know if anything needs to be serviced. For U.S. airlines alone, this system could prevent over 60,000 delays and cancellations a year, helping over 7 million passengers get to their destinations on time.

The second driving force is Advanced Manufacturing.

At the core of the advanced manufacturing idea is the ability to digitally link together design, product engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, distribution, and remanufacturing (or servicing) into one cohesive, intelligent system—a Brilliant Factory. New production techniques like additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, allow us to create completely new parts and products with new properties.
They also give us more flexibility to produce prototypes faster and at lower cost. Engineers can “print” one part, test it and, based on the test feedback, quickly adjust the digital design and reprint an improved version of the part—all using the same additive manufacturing machine. This accelerates the cycle of design, prototyping and production. Adjustments to the production process, as well as to supply chain and distribution logistics, can be calculated and enacted in real time.
This will turn the traditional factory into a Brilliant Factory. Risk-mitigation and resilience-enhancing strategies will be easier to develop, and will become an integral part of the Brilliant Factory’s automatic response/adjustment system. Moreover, as we explore below, advanced manufacturing will accelerate a shift toward distributed production, micro-factories, and mass-customization.

The third driving force is the Global Brain.

Technological progress and economic growth are contributing to a seismic shift in the role that human beings play in the production process. Technological progress, notably in High-Performance Computing (HPC)2, robotics and artificial intelligence, is extending the range of tasks that machines can perform better than humans can. This may have painful short-term costs as some jobs are displaced and some skills made obsolete. But it dramatically augments the power and economic value of the areas where humans excel: creativity, entrepreneurship and interpersonal abilities.Meanwhile, economic growth is extending to tens of millions more people both access to the Internet and the time to take advantage of it, since better access to food, clean water and health care will free up precious hours. Millions more people will join the ranks of those who can both tap and contribute to the global stock of knowledge. The global brain—the collective intelligence of human beings across the globe integrated by digital communication networks—will grow bigger and more powerful. The global brain is, in effect, the human version of HPC.

Open-source platforms and crowd-sourcing are two of the most effective ways to unleash the creativity and entrepreneurship potential of the global brain. Industry is increasingly relying on both in a trend that will deliver greater flexibility and greater rewards to both employers and employees—and redefine relationships between the two. Employers will gain access to a larger pool of talent, which could vary depending on the task at hand; and workers will gain greater entrepreneurial control over their skills and talents.

Note: These are only key takings from the GE study "The Future of Work"