Robot-Proof Work Capabilities

Author(s):  
Richard A. George ◽  
Marcus Bowles ◽  
Nicholas Nouri ◽  
Ria Bhargava

Jobs are changing fast as many firms automate or augment work-tasks. Constant change is the new normal as technology relentlessly infiltrates all industries and businesses. This puts pressure on employees to upskill and stay relevant. While some jobs are relatively immune from disruption, these are in the minority. Most employees will need to continually build the necessary skills and capabilities that will help them safeguard their current careers or shift to entirely new careers or industries. This chapter describes an approach to answer the following question: What are the core work capabilities that students and employees should be learning now to future-proof their careers? The authors apply a prediction of automation and augmentation to work-tasks to model the change to the future workforce and analyse the remaining work skills and abilities required in the future. These future skills and abilities are further grouped to determine 32 future-work capabilities, including 13 digital and data literacies that can be targeted by employees, firms, and governments in L&D programs.

Author(s):  
Anna Leander

Exploring the similarities between the Future of Enterprise Technology trade fairs and the ITU AI for Food Summit, this chapter focuses on trade fairs as spaces of political performance. It explores how trade fairs do politics and what the implications of this are. The chapter begins by showing that trade fairs play a crucial role in generating and enshrining the legitimacy and authority of decentralized, distributed market orders that are in constant change. The trade fairs are rituals where a “tournament of values” is performed through which the hierarchies of this order are negotiated. This helps manage but also enshrine the uncertainties associated with decentralized governance. Second, as ritual performances more generally, trade fairs engage the sacred and magical and the affective and embodied to anchor order not only broadly but deeply and individually. Finally, the chapter discusses the quality of the ordering performed in trade fairs, suggesting that what is performed in the trade fair is a form of institutionalized liminality. However, and contrary to the hopes Victor Turner placed in institutionalized liminality, here it is far from progressive. It builds inegalitarian instability into our societies. Precisely because of this, tending to trade fairs is of fundamental import. The trade fair form has become pervasive in governance, including when it involves public institutions (as epitomized by the AI for Good Summit). Understanding trade fairs as ritual political performance at the core of neoliberalism is therefore a condition intervening politically and for realizing the urgency of imagining alternative forms of governing.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 4219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Expósito López ◽  
José Javier Romero-Díaz de la Guardia ◽  
María del Carmen Olmos-Gómez ◽  
Ramón Chacón-Cuberos ◽  
Eva María Olmedo-Moreno

European living environments are well placed as an essential means through which cities become functional, modern, and liveable places, and are the ideal setting for the innovation and implementation of businesses and ideas. In addition, they are a place in which existing gaps in labour market inclusion are easily widened amongst those who, for various reasons, have not received adequate training, such as immigrants (including unaccompanied foreign minors) and young people without qualifications that have several difficulties in the access to higher education. Further, as is noted in the Phoenix report entitled Future Work Skills 2020, our educational system suffers from a lack of training with regards to the employment skills that need to be integrated into current society, as these have a crucial role for achieving success in the workplace. The aim of this study is to analyse the key skills for the inclusion of Unaccompanied Foreign Minors (UFM) in the workplace, developing a scale for the assessment of ten basic skills for the work of the future. These individuals are mostly young people without qualifications trying to make it in the new environments of current Smart Cities. This study employs an empirical and experimental methodology with two comparison groups of UFM adolescents. The UFM population is contextualised by the migratory flow from North Africa to Europe. Multistage sampling was used to select 345 participants. An approximation scale of the level of Future Work Skills was created as a data collection instrument through simulations of Horizon 2020 (EA-HFL-SH2020). Multivariate analysis was performed which revealed significant differences between school variables, work experience and educational level. The results are aligned with the evaluation of skill acquisition level for the working future of UFM and with the proposed training model of work skills that facilitate their inclusion in the world of the European workforce, as a function of the significant differences found. In addition, the emphasis is placed on the interest of identifying this type of skills in this group in order to develop appropriate training programs in higher education for employment success.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sung-Ae Lee

To displace a character in time is to depict a character who becomes acutely conscious of his or her status as other, as she or he strives to comprehend and interact with a culture whose mentality is both familiar and different in obvious and subtle ways. Two main types of time travel pose a philosophical distinction between visiting the past with knowledge of the future and trying to inhabit the future with past cultural knowledge, but in either case the unpredictable impact a time traveller may have on another society is always a prominent theme. At the core of Japanese time travel narratives is a contrast between self-interested and eudaimonic life styles as these are reflected by the time traveller's activities. Eudaimonia is a ‘flourishing life’, a life focused on what is valuable for human beings and the grounding of that value in altruistic concern for others. In a study of multimodal narratives belonging to two sets – adaptations of Tsutsui Yasutaka's young adult novella The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Yamazaki Mari's manga series Thermae Romae – this article examines how time travel narratives in anime and live action film affirm that eudaimonic living is always a core value to be nurtured.


1997 ◽  
Vol 113 (12) ◽  
pp. 986-988
Author(s):  
Shozo MIZOGUCHI
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Pasi Heikkurinen

This article investigates human–nature relations in the light of the recent call for degrowth, a radical reduction of matter–energy throughput in over-producing and over-consuming cultures. It outlines a culturally sensitive response to a (conceived) paradox where humans embedded in nature experience alienation and estrangement from it. The article finds that if nature has a core, then the experienced distance makes sense. To describe the core of nature, three temporal lenses are employed: the core of nature as ‘the past’, ‘the future’, and ‘the present’. It is proposed that while the degrowth movement should be inclusive of temporal perspectives, the lens of the present should be emphasised to balance out the prevailing romanticism and futurism in the theory and practice of degrowth.


Author(s):  
Daphna Oyserman

Everyone can imagine their future self, even very young children, and this future self is usually positive and education-linked. To make progress toward an aspired future or away from a feared future requires people to plan and take action. Unfortunately, most people often start too late and commit minimal effort to ineffective strategies that lead their attention elsewhere. As a result, their high hopes and earnest resolutions often fall short. In Pathways to Success Through Identity-Based Motivation Daphna Oyserman focuses on situational constraints and affordances that trigger or impede taking action. Focusing on when the future-self matters and how to reduce the shortfall between the self that one aspires to become and the outcomes that one actually attains, Oyserman introduces the reader to the core theoretical framework of identity-based motivation (IBM) theory. IBM theory is the prediction that people prefer to act in identity-congruent ways but that the identity-to-behavior link is opaque for a number of reasons (the future feels far away, difficulty of working on goals is misinterpreted, and strategies for attaining goals do not feel identity-congruent). Oyserman's book goes on to also include the stakes and how the importance of education comes into play as it improves the lives of the individual, their family, and their society. The framework of IBM theory and how to achieve it is broken down into three parts: how to translate identity-based motivation into a practical intervention, an outline of the intervention, and empirical evidence that it works. In addition, the book also includes an implementation manual and fidelity measures for educators utilizing this book to intervene for the improvement of academic outcomes.


Author(s):  
Rosemary Foot

Over a relatively short period of time, Beijing moved from passive involvement with the UN to active engagement. How are we to make sense of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) embrace of the UN, and what does its engagement mean in larger terms? Is it a ‘supporter’ that takes its fair share of responsibilities, or a ‘spoiler’ that seeks to transform the UN’s contribution to world order? Certainly, it is difficult to label it a ‘shirker’ in the last decade or more, given Beijing’s apparent appreciation of the UN, its provision of public goods to the organization, and its stated desire to offer ‘Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind’. This study traces questions such as these, interrogating the value of such categorization through direct focus on Beijing’s involvement in one of the most contentious areas of UN activity—human protection—contentious because the norm of human protection tips the balance away from the UN’s Westphalian state-based profile, towards the provision of greater protection for the security of individuals and their individual liberties. The argument that follows shows that, as an ever-more crucial actor within the United Nations, Beijing’s rhetoric and some of its practices are playing an increasingly important role in determining how this norm is articulated and interpreted. In some cases, the PRC is also influencing how these ideas of human protection are implemented. At stake in the questions this book tackles is both how we understand the PRC as a participant in shaping global order, and the future of some of the core norms that constitute global order.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-14
Author(s):  
Ryan Scott ◽  
Malcolm Le Lievre

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore insights methodology and technology by using behavioral to create a mind-set change in the way people work, especially in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Design/methodology/approach The approach is to examine how AI is driving workplace change, introduce the idea that most organizations have untapped analytics, add the idea of what we know future work will look like and look at how greater, data-driven human behavioral insights will help prepare future human-to-human work and inform people’s work with and alongside AI. Findings Human (behavioral) intelligence will be an increasingly crucial part of behaviorally smart organizations, from hiring to placement to adaptation to team building, compliance and more. These human capability insights will, among other things, better prepare people and organizations for changing work roles, including working with and alongside AI and similar tech innovation. Research limitations/implications No doubt researchers across the private, public and nonprofit sectors will want to further study the nexus of human capability, behavioral insights technology and AI, but it is clear that such work is already underway and can prove even more valuable if adopted on a broader, deeper level. Practical implications Much “people data” inside organizations is currently not being harvested. Validated, scalable processes exist to mine that data and leverage it to help organizations of all types and sizes be ready for the future, particularly in regard to the marriage of human capability and AI. Social implications In terms of human capability and AI, individuals, teams, organizations, customers and other stakeholders will all benefit. The investment of time and other resources is minimal, but must include C-suite buy in. Originality/value Much exists on the softer aspects of the marriage of human capability and AI and other workplace advancements. What has been lacking – until now – is a 1) practical, 2) validated and 3) scalable behavioral insights tech form that quantifiably informs how people and AI will work in the future, especially side by side.


2021 ◽  
pp. 103530462110147
Author(s):  
Mark Dean ◽  
Al Rainnie ◽  
Jim Stanford ◽  
Dan Nahum

This article critically analyses the opportunities for Australia to revitalise its strategically important manufacturing sector in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It considers Australia’s industry policy options on the basis of both advances in the theory of industrial policy and recent policy proposals in the Australian context. It draws on recent work from The Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work examining the prospects for Australian manufacturing renewal in a post-COVID-19 economy, together with other recent work in political economy, economic geography and labour process theory critically evaluating the Fourth Industrial Revolution (i4.0) and its implications for the Australian economy. The aim of the article is to contribute to and further develop the debate about the future of government intervention in manufacturing and industry policy in Australia. Crucially, the argument links the future development of Australian manufacturing with a focus on renewable energy. JEL Codes: L50; L52; L78; O10; O13: O25; O44; P18; Q42


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 5057
Author(s):  
Wan-Yu Yu ◽  
Xiao-Qiang Huang ◽  
Hung-Yi Luo ◽  
Von-Wun Soo ◽  
Yung-Lung Lee

The autonomous vehicle technology has recently been developed rapidly in a wide variety of applications. However, coordinating a team of autonomous vehicles to complete missions in an unknown and changing environment has been a challenging and complicated task. We modify the consensus-based auction algorithm (CBAA) so that it can dynamically reallocate tasks among autonomous vehicles that can flexibly find a path to reach multiple dynamic targets while avoiding unexpected obstacles and staying close as a group as possible simultaneously. We propose the core algorithms and simulate with many scenarios empirically to illustrate how the proposed framework works. Specifically, we show that how autonomous vehicles could reallocate the tasks among each other in finding dynamically changing paths while certain targets may appear and disappear during the movement mission. We also discuss some challenging problems as a future work.


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