The Smartphone
We are carrying around in our pockets incredibly capable computers that can run sophisticated apps and do a lot of heavy computational work, even though they are very small. Those devices are connected with each other through the network on the World Wide Web. With this, any mobile phone gets access to the cloud-delivered enterprise applications that can be accessed over the web.
New Technologies
These new-world technologies are pretty easy and inexpensive to deploy. The challenge is a mindset challenge, an awareness challenge, a use-case identification challenge, a change-management problem. Companies are good at change management. And they need to be good. The change is going faster and faster.
New technologies have the potential to change much of what we know about the way people work. Many activities that workers carry out today have the potential to be automated. More people will have to work with technology. Highly skilled workers working with technology will benefit. While low-skilled workers working with technology will be able to achieve more in terms of output and productivity, these workers may experience wage pressure, given the potentially larger supply of similarly low-skilled workers, unless demand for the occupation grows more than the expansion in labor supply.
New Jobs
Even while technologies replace some jobs, they are creating new work in industries that most of us cannot even imagine, and new ways to generate income.
An example can be the United States where one-third of new jobs created in the past 25 years were types that did not exist, or barely existed, in areas including IT development, hardware manufacturing, app creation, and IT systems management. The net impact of new technologies on employment can be strongly positive (MacKinsey, 2017).
This trend will probably continue in the coming years. Many jobs we know today will not exist in the future. Many jobs we today don’t know will be our work tomorrow.