For the most part of human history, it was believed that one’s brought in the world endowed with a unique set of talents, determined by his birth. Therefore, people pursued the same careers throughout generations to fulfill one’s purpose in life with their work. Career was the destiny determined by one’s birth – Career 1.0; over 95% of our history is founded on Career 1.0.
Expansion of the industrial revolution in the early 19th century marked the beginning of the shift from traditional family occupations to industrial work and throughout the 20th century, public education and economic progress led to a boom in the industrial and service sectors. A plethora of jobs and vocation emerged and one could make a career or a profession by getting educated in the chosen field. This was the Career 2.0.
The advent of the 21st century is marked by unprecedented pace of change fuelled by the omnipresent and omnipotent change agent ICT and the ‘super-educational’requirement for all careers. We are also witnessing a gradual disappearance of traditionally stable career paths, an organically global economy, appearance of many new job profiles that hadn’t existed a decade ago and an entirely novel challenge of competing against virtual men (the software robots). To top it all, mutative changes in the socio-cultural context across the globe are only sharpening the cutting edge of economic revolution. Personal and professional boundaries are fairly fuzzy.This is the beginning of Career 3.0.
The following three articles will acquaint you with the on-going shift in the industrial, service and creative sectors of the economy and what it entails for us. For many of the professions we know, the shift has already taken place, for others it is a matter of time. As in the words of William Gibson, “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”
Swedish Wikipedia surpasses 1 million articles with the aid of article creation bot
On June 15, 2013, Swedish Wikipedia hit one million articles, joining the club of English, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish Wikipedias. The article that broke the barrier was the butterfly species Erysichton elaborata. There is, however, one fact that separates this million article milestone from almost all others.
The one millionth article was not manually written by a human, but created by a piece of software (a “bot”). The bot, in this case, Lsjbot, collects data from different sources, and then compiles the information into a format that fits Wikipedia. Lsjbot has to date created about 454,000 articles, almost half of the articles on Swedish Wikipedia.
Bot-created articles have led to some debate, both before Lsjbot started its run, and currently. First, there was a lengthy discussion on Swedish Wikipedia after the initial proposal by Lsjbot’s operator, science teacher Sverker Johansson.
The bots use as many datasets as their operators can find, but many sources are behind paywalls or are incomplete across entire taxon (covering only selected species). The upside of this criticism is that each statement in articles created by bots is supported by references, something that doesn’t happen in many other articles. This means that more references are added to Wikipedia by bots than by humans. This is of course not in itself a sign of quality, but it is a start for human contributors to search for more information. As with any article in Wikipedia, readers can also help make bot-created articles better.
Is this the future for Wikipedia, to let software create articles?
So far, bots have shown that they are much quicker to create articles. In that respect, I, for one, bow to our robot overlords.
Auto companies huddle together to keep Silicon valley away
Rival auto giants have united to prevent Google and other Silicon Valley companies from dictating the future of automobiles. German automakers Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz along with Chinese search company Baidu and private equity firm General Atlantic have reportedly formed a consortium to buy Nokia’s mapping business. Google revolutionised the smartphone market with its free open source mobile operating system Android. The auto industry is sleepless over the likelihood of Google doing the same for self-driving cars.
Automated and networked autopilot drive, data and software services are regarded as future business in the automotive industry. Google is already testing prototype of self-driving cars and it is estimated that around 54 million of them will be on road by 2035. Maps, of course will be a crucial element in such cars.
The perceived threat that tech companies like Apple and Google could control key technologies in the car is spurring the auto industry to join forces. Many tech companies like Facebook and Uber have approached Nokia for sale of it’s mapping unit which has been valued at $3 billion. Maps are the most natural visualization tool for local services, as proven by smartphone apps. Perhaps with the acquisition of Nokia maps, Uber will be able to provide vehicles just as one of the many commodities delivered on-demand.
Tech reskilling and automation are way forward for Infosys and Wipro
An overhaul is being witnessed in the Indian IT sector with big players like Wipro and Infosys betting on automation of commoditised service lines and creating a leaner and multi-skilled workforce.
The Economic Times reports that Wipro has revamped its internal training framework for employees and launched at least three technical training programmes over the past year to reskill its staff in newer areas of technology, especially digital, amid evolving customer needs in a rapidly changing technology landscape. In a departure from the past practice of training the employees well in a single skill area, these programmes are focussed to equip the employees in multiple skills. Infosys is also known to be reorganising their training framework given the need for reskilling employees and identification of top talent to work on most demanding of tasks.
Apart from reskilling, both IT majors are also keen on building automation capabilities for their service lines.
According to Livemint.com, about 200 executives at Wipro have also been working on building next-generation technology platforms focused on artificial intelligence for close to two years now. Wipro has already started using the in-house automation technologies in a few of its service lines, including infrastructure management, and the early results have been encouraging. “On delivery, we see hyper-automation reduce cost of operations significantly. In three years, people deployment will come down by 35% for the same scope of work,” Wipro CEO T.K. Kurien told analysts in New York.
Infosys in early 2015, acquired Panaya, Inc., a leading provider of automation technology for large scale enterprise software management. This acquisition reflects Infosys’ strategy to enhance the competitiveness and productivity of current service lines by leveraging automation, innovation and artificial intelligence. “We rolled out the Infosys Automation Platform within infrastructure management service to the first 10 clients and we saw productivity improvement of up to 37% and people savings of up to 17% in those cases,” Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka said during an investor call in June 2015.
Why we authored this book?
The personal motivations driving us to write this book are many; to list a few:
- Ill-deliberated career choices and preparation are increasingly the key source of stress and friction within families with adolescent children.
- The overwhelming majority of ‘family businesses’ cannot really be ‘transferred’ to the children in the family as their profession because all businesses are getting comprehensively redefined in the technology-laden design, production, distribution and service.
- One of the co-authors – Sandeep – discovered a complete lack of comprehensively curated work on life and professions ahead while researching on the same for his daughter in class XII (in 2015-16)
- There is a window of opportunity, as always, in these times of upheaval to stand on the right side of the new divides and climb several steps of the socio-economic ladder within one generation. Social-economic entitlements are up for grab, but are we equipping our children to join the ‘race’? History is repeating itself with a vengeance – gold rush, ‘land grab’, ‘trade routes dominance’, colonisation of the world, etc. are being re-enacted in the virtual world in ways far bigger (and rapidly) than ever before!
- The real opportunity is to focus on creating wealth and not to keep the focus on increasing income; in these times wealth is reconcentrating, focusing on just maximising income will be a myopic understanding of the current times.
- There is a crying need of linking school (and higher) education to career building and a few issues in education need an urgent revisit while children are in school. We adults need a dedicated resource to tinker with our own living and career to be effective role models for our children and duly handhold them; children are highly stressed out due to lack of role model adults (the usual suspects – the ill-effects of technology, TV and peer influence are all just the symptoms of ‘absentee role models’).
- Interestingly, in these times of ‘humanoids’, our schools and students (and parents in less measures) are fairly excited about study of robotics in schools. This is just another example of the ‘gapped out schools’ because they are focusing on ‘mechanical robots’ while the world has moved on to ‘social robots’; schools are ‘teaching’ about robotics 50 years late!
- School career counsellors face maximum queries around new-age careers and they may all just be as clueless as all of us. Given the important role they play in schools of the day, there is a need to contemporise their contribution and give them a tool to ‘convincingly and appropriately crystal-gaze’ the living and careers at least a decade ahead (even a class X student will enter her profession a decade ahead).
- To raise the bar of debates, discussions and dialogues about the changing employment landscape and set a common denominator for thinking about careers, creating wealth, internship, creativity, communication, collaboration, media literacy, innovation, gender roles, and socio-economic revolution.
- Most critically, career seems to have moved the center-stage of life; we’re pushing our children to seek ‘good careers’ and then ‘try and find a way to live a good life’. We have suddenly upturned the millennia-old essence of life on earth – focus on living a good life and find a profession that will support the same. We hope to put the ‘life & career’ linkages out in the open again.
To be true, this book is more about the boundless opportunities to assert oneself and change the course of human history as the world takes a turn towards a better future. We hope to keep updating the book through yearly editions and soon bring around a far more interactive and crowd-sourced, yet curated, digital platform for children, teachers and parents to create an engaged community about a better tomorrow for self, children and the world.
This book is just the beginning.
The unique design of the book
To be honest, we are just as unqualified to write this book as many of the readers. We wanted to learn for ourselves the direction and pace of change in personal, social and economic spaces we live in. Never before the entire humanity has participated in co-creating a common new future, the world as a ‘global village’; acts of individuals in the remotest of villages is impacting lives in the thickest of urban centres.
It may be no big exaggeration to think that any ‘human indignity’ is beyond the radar of resolution. That’s truly what’s new – seeking solutions using software rather than hardware; software is immensely malleable, unlike hardware, and limited only by the resolve to find solutions and business modeling for reaching and serving target communities across the world.
The only way we could bring around a curated view on life and career ahead of us was to go back to the collective – collate the commentaries of the thought leaders and leading researchers – and attempt to decipher meaning out of it in terms of lessons to be learnt and anticipatory actions initiated to maximise the gains from change.
To be honest, no one in their senses would want to stick the neck out to stake a claim about the turn of things in the future in these times of unequalled innovations. However, all of us must get an insight into the future – there is too much at stake for us and our children.
Expectedly, we have briefly quoted the commentaries (and we have tried to quote in a way that the portions of the commentaries presented in this book do not go against their essence) and for each topic provided our interpretation (through the ‘What we think’ notes) of the same from the point of view of the likely impact on the life and profession of each one of us and our children.
We must also add that we have kept our own inferences to minimum (through the ‘Gazing through the crystal ball’ notes) so as to first push the dimensions and boundaries of debate and not pre-maturely suggest ways and means; obviously, we don’t harbour illusions about our ‘expertise’ in forecasting the changes in future beyond a point. Our goals about this book are modest and we do expect ourselves to learn the most from the debate and discussion this book is expected to unleash among all the stakeholders in education.
We hope the book is a better organised reading.
