Industrial revolution 4.0 has been the hottest topic in the 21st century. Firstly coined by the BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) of Germany, and brought out to the public at the Hannover Messe Industrie (HMI Fair) in 2011, the term refers to the significant merging of automation technology with many industrial sectors. And this phenomenon may be either good or bad news to you.
All Work Fields Will Be Affected
Manual labors will surely feel the most impact of automation, but the white collar jobs will soon experience the same. According to Bhagwan Chowdhry, a professor in the University of California, Los Angeles, the weaving industry was the first industry that showed how automation changed the course of workforce drastically. Manufacturers no longer relied on human workers to do almost 70% of the tasks. And this phenomenon led to significant unemployment in the local populace.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has developed and reached advanced sophistication that allows it to perform complicated jobs. For instance, chatbots have replaced many customer service officers in the e-commerce business. Automated chat robots these days can comprehend your chats and provide you with the needed assistance.
Another exciting news in this section of technological development is that an AI called Case Cruncher Alpha that can predict the audibility of payment protection insurance mis-selling cases with 86.6% accuracy. Human lawyers, on the other hand, had only 66.3% accuracy on reviewing the cases.
Jobs That Will Be Safe
Jobs that are most likely to survive automation are the ones that involve high degrees of creativity and human interaction. Business negotiators, for example, have to think of many variables at once before striking a deal to a client. Robots are still far from developing such an ability. Besides, no executives will feel comfortable with doing business with robots, at least not anytime soon.
Artists that break the conventions are also going to irreplaceable assets to humanity. Robots do create artistic pieces, yet they are very strict at following the rules and customs embedded on them. Designers, painters, sculptors, dancers, and musicians are the jobs that will still be safe in the next decades.
Moreover, robots may not replace the workers in sophisticated jobs but to assist them. This integration can help to optimize the industry's productivity so that it can achieve what used to be inconceivable.
The Ethical Issues
As the massive impact of automation on employment, this breakthrough may stumble upon ethical boundaries, especially when it is applied to the workforce of developing countries. If their workforce is not vigilant to technological development, they will feel a sudden increase in unemployment once the industry 4.0 enters.
Companies that have invested some of their assets in the developing countries will face ethical problems because they are responsible for contributing to the local populace's wellness. And in that situation, we can expect them to either pull their resources out or adapt to the local's policy.