Date: 2024-09-27 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00016715
World Economic Forum
Socio-enviro-economic progress
Productivity ... Industrial Revolution 4.0
The idea that economic growth is a good thing in all situations is simply stupid. Rather, there is a need for economic efficiency and social impact and environmental impact that is positive and not negative. This example reflects improvement in economic efficiency which is good ... and quality of life is improved for the staff of the company, and that is good as well.
Peter Burgess
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https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/working-fewer-hours-makes-you-productive-new-zealand-trial New Zealand firm adopts its four-day working week permanently
A man sleeps during the final of the Gold Cup British Open Polo Championship match between Ellerston and Loro Piana at Cowdray Park near Midhurst, southern England, July 20, 2008. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor (BRITAIN) - GM1E47L07MW01
When a New Zealand employer trialled a four-day week, the result was an 'unmitigated success'. Image: REUTERS/Luke MacGregor 20 Jul 2018 Briony Harris Senior Writer, Formative Content Join our WhatsApp group Sign up here Most Popular This is what 24 of the world's most iconic flags mean Iman Ghosh · Visual Capitalist 16 May 2019 These are the best and worst countries in Europe for LGBT+ policies Hugo Greenhalgh · Thomson Reuters Foundation trust.org 17 May 2019 These universities are making the most impact on society Ellie Bothwell · Times Higher Education 16 May 2019 More on the agenda Explore context Workforce and Employment Explore the latest strategic trends, research and analysis The New Zealand firm that trialled a four-day working week has now confirmed it will adopt the measure on a permanent basis. The will-writing company Perpetual Guardian carried out an eight week trial earlier this year, giving their 200 or so employees an extra day off every week, while all pay and employment conditions remained unchanged. Academics who studied the trial reported lower stress levels, higher levels of job satisfaction and an improved sense of work-life balance. Critically, they also say workers were 20% more productive. The trial has attracted a huge amount of interest around the world, with an audience of 3.2 billion people in 32 countries engaging with the idea via 10,000 social media posts and 3,000 news articles, according to the firm’s founder Andrew Barnes. “I think this is a global conversation now,” Barnes said in an interview with the New Zealand Herald. “Groups like the Trades Union Congress in the UK - as a direct result of our trial - have come out and said they want to explore bringing in a four-day week.” Social benefits The company expects the bulk of its staff to choose to work a four-day week. But it is still an option, with Barnes stressing that flexibility is key. Staff will be able to come into the office and work normal hours for five hours, if that is their preference. Others will be able to start or finish early to avoid traffic congestion and manage their childcare commitments, while others could opt for compressed hours. The trial was measured by Jarrod Haar, professor of human resource management at Auckland University of Technology. He found job and life satisfaction increased on all levels, both at home and at work, with employees performing better and enjoying their jobs more than before the experiment began. Those findings were exactly as Barnes had predicted. Indeed he says the decision to test the new way of working was “the right thing to do”, after looking at several global productivity reports. “This is a bit of a crusade for me now. I think it’s important to change how we work but I also want to identify all the social benefits that come with changing our thought processes about our work patterns,” he says. All hours aren’t equal The experiment has many implications, reigniting questions about productivity and a culture of long working hours, as well as the way in which part-time workers are valued and rewarded. One thing that is already clear is that longer hours do not necessarily mean greater productivity.
South Korea, for example, ranks near to the bottom of OECD countries for labor productivity despite having a culture of working very long hours. Similarly, within Europe, Greece has one of the longest working weeks, but comes out bottom in the OECD’s measure of GDP per hour worked.
Not all the hours worked contribute the same to GDP. Image: OECD via Statista
Japan is another example of a country where a culture of long working hours does not tally with increased productivity. Japan is now deliberately cutting down on overtime, and using tactics such as turning the lights out at the end of the working day, in order to reverse this trend.
There have also been a number of trials which look at increasing productivity by shortening the working day rather than the working week.
Increased costs? In Sweden, for example, the government has trialled allowing workers at a retirement home to work six hour days. Although the employees reported an improved quality of life, with less stress and more time to spend with their families, it was also an expensive experiment for the local council who had to hire extra workers to make up for the shortfall in hours. Iceland conducted a similar trial, allowing some Reykjavik city workers to reduce their working week by four or five hours. In that experiment, productivity continued at the same level, meaning costs remained the same as well. The employees also had greater work satisfaction and fewer days off sick. These two studies suggest that it may be the nature of the work which is critical in deciding whether reducing the length of the working day is cost-effective. For shift workers such as nurses, security guards or careworkers a continual presence is needed, meaning the employer will need to find somebody else to cover the jobs. But for office workers it may be a case of Parkinson’s law which states that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” Or to put that a slightly different way, workers will become more efficient if there is less time to complete a task. Ironically, of course, part-time workers are often paid less than their full-time colleagues, even though many working parents will also recognize the truth that they achieve in four days what others do in five. Part-time work can also help increase the diversity of the workforce, and is reported to be one of the reasons behind online retailer Amazon’s experiment with shorter days. One thing is certain, this is just the start of the conversation. And many policymakers and companies will continue to reflect on the results of Perpetual Guardian’s experiment and examine how to both increase productivity and improve work-life balance. Have you read? https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/fourth-industrial-revolution-massive-productivity-boom-good The Fourth Industrial Revolution will bring a massive productivity boom This country works the longest hours in Europe https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/talk-less-about-disruption-to-firms-and-more-about-disruption-to-society There will be much less work in the future. We need to rethink our societies Share
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https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/talk-less-about-disruption-to-firms-and-more-about-disruption-to-society Written by Mark Dodgson, Professor of Innovation Studies, University of Queensland David Gann , Vice President, Imperial College The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum. There will be much less work in the future. We need to rethink our societies
File photograph shows the rear of a Lexus SUV equipped with Google self-driving sensors during a media preview of Google's prototype autonomous vehicles in Mountain View, California September 29, 2015.
Britain said on March 12, 2016 it will begin trialling driverless cars on motorways for the first time in 2017, as it moves towards its goal of allowing autonomous cars to take to the streets by 2020. Finance minister George Osborne will announce plans on Wednesday to test vehicles on motorways and say the government will bring forward proposals to remove regulatory barriers to the technology, the Treasury said. Alphabet Inc GOOGL.O unit Google wants to eventually be able to deploy fully autonomous vehicles without human controls, and major automakers are racing to develop vehicles that can drive themselves at least part of the time. REUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage/Files - RTX28TLD Driverless cars may help the environment, but what impact will they have on jobs in the transport sector? Image: REUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage
14 Dec 2016
Mark Dodgson
Professor of Innovation Studies, University of Queensland
David Gann
Vice President, Imperial College
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Digital Economy and Society
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The future of work is a key topic at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting 2017. Watch the Promise or Peril: Decoding the Future of Work session here.
A war on wheels has been raging in London since Uber started operating there four years ago. Traditional black cab drivers have been up in arms about the new high tech disruptor.
Uber has accused London’s Mayor of siding with the black cabs and has taken legal action against Transport for London, which is planning new regulations to limit the number of private hire vehicles. In November, more than 100 Uber drivers mounted a 'go slow' protest in London to put pressure on the company to pay the minimum wage.
Most of the digital disruption debate has focused on the implications for competition and employment in the corporate world. But what about the broader consequences for society?
More than 30,000 Londoners per week are signing up to Uber. The consequence? London now has more than 40,000 private drivers registered with Uber, in addition to the capital's existing fleet of regulated black cabs. There are now thousands more vehicles on the streets and greater traffic congestion, resulting in slower, more expensive journeys, and more emissions: 9,000 Londoners die every year as a direct consequence of air pollution.
London cab drivers protest against Uber in central London, February 10, 2016 Image: REUTERS/Toby Melville
Technology will provide even further disruption, as, within a decade or two, driverless electric vehicles will partly address the air pollution problem. What will the redundant drivers then do, aside from breathing cleaner air? Numerous conferences, workshops, books and websites are devoted to building “disruptive know-how” in companies, but all of society needs to think critically about disruption. Applications being developed for the use of artificial intelligence, robotics, big data and the Internet of Everything are enormously consequential. Yet the disruptive effects of innovation are nothing new: the farm worker, transported to the industrial factory in the latter half of the 18th century, would have experienced levels of devastation to their lives and society that make the present changes seem minor in comparison. These changes, which continued for more than a century, sparked backlashes from the Luddites, revolutionary ferment from Karl Marx, and inspired Benjamin Disraeli’s lament that Britain had become “two nations” almost irredeemably divided. Creative destruction - or poverty trap? While society has made transitions in the past, contemporary reality is extremely troublesome. According to an Oxford University study, 47% of US jobs are threatened by computerisation. Casualisation or zero-hours contracts pose threats to many. Large proportions of those put out of work will be in their 40s and 50s, with decades to wait before they can claim pensions. A new poverty trap may be opening up. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney warns of the “first lost decade” in wage growth “since the 1860s” when “Karl Marx was scribbling in the British Library.” As Joseph Schumpeter argued 75 years ago, innovation is a process of creative destruction. The social and political challenge is to accentuate the creative and mitigate the destructive. We need to balance the debate that celebrates the virtues of rapid change, agility and entrepreneurship; with consideration of the ways societies, and their citizens, cope with and benefit from the considerable turbulence generated by technological change. The political backlash to this comparative lack of concern is seen in Trumpism and Brexit. Globalisation, productivity and innovation may be the mantra for their beneficiaries, but for many they mean job losses, working harder, and ever more uncertainty at work.
Image: World Economic Forum, Accenture Analysis The challenges are immense. Take the car industry: responsible for more than 50 million jobs and perhaps incalculable wider economic benefits. Yet its products pollute, and more than 1 million people every year are killed on roads. We may have a solution: electric and driverless cars. But the largest employment group in the USA is truck, van and taxi drivers, many of whom would lose their jobs. If you own a Tesla car that needs maintenance, the problem is often fixed by an overnight software update rather than taking it to the nearby garage. The Taiwanese contract electronics firm Foxconn, maker of the iPhone, has replaced half its workforce with robots since the iPhone 6 was launched. Accentuating the creative and mitigating the destructive in such circumstances is extremely confronting. There are many pessimistic views on the onslaught of technology, with suggestions that all but the most creative and skillful of jobs are under threat – though computers are being trained to take on creative and even artistic functions too, as Martin Ford explains in The Rise of the Robots. Jobs can be protected temporarily and expensively from technological progress, but, in the end, what matters is social adjustment. Technology is an artifact of the society that creates and uses it, and its impact results from its co-evolution with citizens and institutions. Algorithms are not impartial, but products of culture, politics and society – the same things that shape the humans who design and use them. Students of innovation show how the disrupting effects of the vast waves of technological change since the industrial revolution are accompanied by social changes, including new skills, industrial relations and regulations. In contrast to these past disruptions, today's occur in a period of unparalleled prosperity in many parts of the world. Keynes' vision of a 15-hour week Here it is worth remembering John Maynard Keynes: writing in 1930 about the “economic possibilities for our grandchildren”, Keynes acknowledges the need for painful readjustment to technological unemployment. He writes of the dread and 'nervous breakdown' in society, as people experience its adverse consequences, and how this is “a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents”. Keynes also refers to the challenges of a period of prosperity: the confrontation, for the first time, of freedom from economic cares; and working three-hour shifts and 15-hour weeks. To manage this, he argues, we must “honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously” and “how to occupy the leisure (…) to live wisely and agreeably well”. The real question is how we adjust to a world with significantly less of what we know as work. Companies have a duty to use their expertise in disruption to help deal with this enormous social turmoil. Technological disruption is exacerbating social inequalities, and we need to talk seriously about the virtues of a social wage. We need to fund people to work, without necessarily being employed, in a manner that allows them to help others or practice their skills in ways that they find meaningful and rewarding. To this end, education needs to change from readying people for a (probably non-existent) job to preparing them to create self-defined work. Embedding coding in the curriculum is great, but it only gets us so far. Education systems need to reject the barbarism epitomised by the UK's national school curriculum, which no longer includes the study of art history, classic civilization or archaeology. Given the UK’s cultural influence internationally, such moves are remarkably short-sighted. In a world where conventional jobs are fading away, but we have greater opportunities to “live wisely”, T S Eliot’s dictum, that culture is what makes life worth living, is an important guide. Have you read? How artificial intelligence could change the face of business Should we let computers decide how to rule the world?
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https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/fourth-industrial-revolution-massive-productivity-boom-good
The Fourth Industrial Revolution will bring a massive productivity boom
An exhibit symbols the fourth industrial revolution 'industry 4.0' during the Hannover Fair in Hanover, Germany, April 25, 2016. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay - D1BETHKEVDAB Image: REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay - D1BETHKEVDAB
15 Jan 2018
Rajeev Suri
President and Chief Executive Officer, Nokia Corporation
Written by Rajeev Suri, President and Chief Executive Officer, Nokia Corporation
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
Fourth Industrial Revolution
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This article is part of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting
What good is technology?
I believe technology serves us best when it gives us more time to do things that are uniquely human. This includes activities that are enjoyable, creative, and productive.
For nations and societies, the “good” or benefit of technology is often expressed in economic terms, in measures such as workplace productivity and business growth.
As we move into the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the digital transformation of life as we know it, the potential benefits and risks of this new era are in ongoing discussion, in Davos and elsewhere.
Will the Fourth Industrial Revolution deliver on its promises? Is it simply hype, or will it be a massive engine driving productivity gains, economic growth, and business success?
Image: I. Saniee, S. Kamat, S. Prakash and M. Weldon,
Lessons of the past
Nokia Bell Labs researchers have analyzed historical data from previous industrial revolutions to model and forecast the potential impact of the next one.
During both the First Industrial Revolution (which was fueled by iron and steam engines) and the Second (which was powered by electricity, steel, chemicals, and telecommunications), productivity boomed. Starting around 1870, these two revolutions sustained a Golden Century of progress. The 1940s and 1950s, in particular, brought massive gains in the United States and elsewhere.
Then what happened? The Third Industrial Revolution arrived, ushering in the Information Age. Massive, world-changing innovations emerged in computing, the internet, mobile communications, and much more. Yet instead of revving up again, the productivity engine sputtered. In fact, since 1970, productivity growth has fallen to roughly one-third the rate of the previous 100 years.
If all the hard work, innovation, and investments in technology over the past half century have failed to pay off in productivity, what does this mean for the huge investments already taking place in the Fourth Industrial Revolution infrastructure?
A pessimist would say we should skip it and put our money elsewhere.
But I am an optimist. I absolutely believe that we are on the cusp of not just a technological revolution, but a productivity revolution. It will bring benefits for people everywhere, make our planet more sustainable, and provide new opportunities for businesses of all kinds.
Fortunately, Nokia Bell Labs’ research concurs with this view.
The causes of revolution
In analyzing what made the Golden Century of 1870 to 1970 possible, it becomes clear that four physical infrastructure technologies provided the underlying foundation for growth: energy, transportation, health and sanitation, and communication.
These fundamental technologies were important on their own, but two other factors were essential for accelerating growth. The first was when the diffusion – or adoption – of each technology was widespread enough to reach a tipping point. The second was a network effect: the technologies needed to work in tandem to drive growth. Only when all four technologies were widely diffused did fast growth happen.
Next, the research looked at today’s technologies. It found emerging digital equivalents that align with the four technology foundations of the Golden Century:
- Digital energy: combining smart power grids and smart meters into platforms that dynamically match energy generation and demand from both new and traditional sources.
- Digital transport: moving people and goods across oceans, skies, and land autonomously.
- Digital health: remotely enabling connected health care from anywhere.
- Digital communication: connecting billions of people and things, allowing them to interact in new ways.
A fifth foundational technology – digital production – was added to these. It will bring a paradigm shift, from centralized mass production to distributed, localized production, combining edge cloud computing and 3D printing to create goods in near real time.
Forecast for growth
By calculating when these digital technologies could reach their tipping points and by applying historical formulas, Nokia Bell Labs has projected a significant productivity jump, as much as 30% to 35% in the U.S., starting at some point between 2028 and 2033. This is a similar leap to the 1950s and could add approximately $2.8 trillion to the U.S. economy. Similar gains are anticipated in India, China, and other nations.
Projected diffusion of key enabling digital infrastructure network technologies Image: I. Saniee, S. Kamat, S. Prakash and M. Weldon, The widespread deployment of high-capacity, low-latency 5G networks is a major catalyst to the digital infrastructure of the future. This reality is not far off. Wide trials are taking place this year that could lead to full commercial 5G deployments in 2019. The U.S., China, Korea, and Japan are at the forefront of these efforts. 5G and cloud technologies will underpin and accelerate the digitalization of industries. In turn, this will create opportunities across nearly every segment of the economy, from health care to transport, energy, and beyond. Telecommunication companies that take the path to 5G now, and focus on software-defined networking and the cloud, have a massive opportunity to benefit from serving these industries during their transformations. As in each of the previous industrial revolutions, such gains come with economic trade-offs and elicit new challenges. An obvious concern is the implication for skills development as the workforce transforms. Policy work is also urgently needed, as the UN Broadband Commission reported, both between governments and within countries. It must determine how the public sector can help identify and realize the benefits of digitalization, primarily by providing a framework for collaboration across different sectors of the economy. Such work between governments, technology companies, and the emerging digital industries is an essential building block for realizing the massive potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This includes not just the economic potential, but also the personal and social benefits: making life better, preserving our planet’s resources, and giving people more time and freedom to connect with each other and the things they enjoy. After all, these are the greater good that technology is meant to serve. Key moments from World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Q&A between Professor Schwab and President Trump 26 January, 2018 13:24 Special Address by Donald J. Trump 26 January, 2018 12:35 Cyberwar without Rules 26 January, 2018 09:45 Tackling Depression 26 January, 2018 09:11 Bridges vs Borders: The Migration Dilemma 26 January, 2018 08:24 Welcome to Day 4 26 January, 2018 07:25 Follow the liveblog Explore context