Christian Manrique’s new post

In this new post Christian Manrique explains the different stages automatization will go through within a short, middle and long term without representing a threat.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. When Leonardo Da Vinci (1425-1519) at the highest point of the Renaissance era designed and tried to produce some of his own inventions, like the bicycle or any other of his flying devices, always kicked off his projects under that motto. As Christian Manrique points out, what he never imagined was that those machines, technology and competitive intelligence will substitute or take the place of millions of workers and not only manual low qualified jobs. A new era is already here, let’s face it, this is the cyber renaissance of automatization.

This technological exponential advance (AI, robotics, deep learning and machine learning, among others) generates a high degree of automatization which also affects cognitive competences. As Christian Manrique underlines, a new phenomenon comes up: an intelligent automatization that will differ deeply from the previous ones. It will overtake economies, corporations and societies. And, at the same time, business models will be affected as well.

In fact, frightening job destruction cannot be tackled as something dramatic, but, instead, as a reality. With the right measures it could become an opportunity. It happened during Renaissance and during Industrial Revolution as well.

Magnitude of Intelligent Automatization

Automatization, therefore, as Christian Manrique states, is not a new issue and is global, but it will be segmented by regions and economies and by sectors and activities.

President of the United States Lyndon B. Johnson in 1996 and, more recently president Barck Obama in 2016, had been working on it and produced studies about the impact of technology over economy.

In a primary stage, the majority of works at risk are those that demand physical activity in foreseeable and organized environments. Also, Christian Manrique adds, data collecting and processing will be affected, as well as manufactures and call centres. Repetitive and automatic tasks will be the first ones to be replaced. Human mind is in disadvantage when it comes to data processing. Risks will take other paths putting in a situation high qualification tasks might within medicine and health working fields.  At the same time, within the transport area, driverless vehicles will increase; finance will profit from technological apps that will be able to recommend investments; and Media will probably generate intelligent content. Automatization will reach a cognitive level.

Four factors

Four key factors will transform automatization’s speed and magnitude. On the one hand, technical and economic viability will have to be taken into account to design and implement technology. At the same time, a market will be required. A profit shall be able to be made and it will have to be supported by a set of rules and social acceptance, as well.

To Christian Manrique the success adopting automatization will depend upon these factors’ fulfilment. Its rhythm will be faster than expected due to its technological exponential growth.

On the short and middle term, human being and machine mix will become a reality, due to AI limitations to replace the human factor, so to reach economic growth goals this combination will be needed. In those advanced and emerging economies with low birth rate and high population ageing trends this solution will be adopted. But, then again, there will be a transition from working trends and jobs as it existed in previous industrial revolutions.

Taking economy into account, the highest automatization potential will be focused on countries with large populations along with high salaries -if there is a high ageing population rate this will increase. It will also take place first in advance economies rather than in the emerging ones due to salary rates.

Competitive advantages  

Referring to macro levels, as Christian Manrique writes, automatization might become a catalyser to boost economic growth. Of course, on its own it won’t be enough and it shall be implemented along with measures to foster investment and innovation.

In micro levels, companies will be able to obtain competitive advantages improving productivity and quality. This means, less mistakes and more speed. Chances to enter other markets increase as well, although competition will be harder.

Machines will be able to develop a wider range of cognitive tasks, from judgments to feelings or even driving vehicles, but people, humankind, will be required as labour to guide machines up to the needed degrees of productivity to increase growth.

Measures needed to be taken by stakeholders will be as follows:

Private sector: change of the business model, reform and new placement of manpower in alliance with universities and public sector.

 

Public sector: investment and innovation fostering, workers’ education and new placement of manpower forced to move.

Manpower: acquiring new skills through education and reinvention as agility, resilience and flexibility. Creativity and critical thinking will become a basic asset.

Conclusions

Essentially, workers and citizens shall improve their skills to improve and plan, which is already a reality, but it shall be seen as an advantage and not as a threat.

• All professions, qualified and non-qualified, risk to become under automatization siege.
• On the short and middle term, combination between humankind and machine will be a fact, basically because super intelligence is still science fiction and the conjunction of both forces is still needed.
• Automatization represents an opportunity for world economic growth and slow down demographic ageing and slow birth rates.
• As automatization will increase, people will develop new jobs with less hours needed per person. At that point, companies will have to realize that new business models will be required to be competitive.
• All companies will have to go through an automatization process in order to be more competitive.
• Competitiveness will take place by regions, not by countries, involving more than one economy or less than one.

 

On the long term, and if technology allows us to do so, we might devote our lives to leisure. Maybe it’s not so far. Society then should manage this new trend, incredibly simple, but highly sophisticated at the same time.