Ride Technology Wave for Rising in Career

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” 

- R. Buckminster Fuller

The technology revolution sweeping across the globe at a great speed is also termed as a 4^th Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0 (Short form I4.0). This is indeed transforming manufacturing and production processes, empowering better and faster decision making and global reach on a 24x7 basis for marketing and sale. The countries like South Korea, Singapore, Germany, Japan and the USA have taken a great leap forward and introducing state-of-the-art technology. India though 6^th largest manufacturing country, it lags behind in introducing Robotics and AI in its industries.  However, during 2017-2018 India has taken a big leap forward to maximize use of technology in manufacturing and ensure that manufacturing sector contributes 25% of Indian GDP by 2022.   Some people term technology as job snatcher, while others view it as a facility to bring the world closer together and network to share knowledge, experience and solve emerging challenges. Our lifestyle, work environment, travel, marketing, sales, communication, exchange of information, healthcare, automation of processes, delivery system and relationships continue to be impacted by ever-changing technology. Fast Internet access at affordable cost continues to influence our lifestyle, business practices and work environment. The Internet has removed time zones and geographical boundaries and the whole world is just one global village where we can work/interact on a 24x7 basis. In many cases, there may not be physical presence of other person but electronically we feel close enough and interact with full confidence and mutual trust. The technology revolution is unstoppable and we must enable ourselves to take advantage of this wave and do our jobs more smartly and efficiently.

Technologies like Laser, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Robotics, Drones, Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing will take away some routine jobs but also creates new jobs though requiring new skills. The automation and computerization will save time, cost and human-effort and increase our productivity and quality as it works without any fatigue and provides very high precision, accuracy and consistency. The applications and advantages of various technologies are too vast a subject to cover in one article. Hence the impact of technology as related to the enhancement of productivity, accuracy, consistency and support to human ingenuity has been covered.

Emerging Technologies impacting jobs.

·    Automation of offices works. Automation of office works related to housekeeping of records, text typing, data entry, accounting, ticketing and reservation for travel/hotels/ resorts, banking, insurance and healthcare have been already in vogue, in most of the countries. With digitization coming to the forefront, digital advertising, digital marketing, online billing and delivery systems have taken a big leap forward resulting in saving in time effort and cost. Therefore, employees in various fields must develop alternate skills and become more technology savvy to stay in demand.

·   Automation of industries. Automation of various industries related to manufacturing of goods,  vehicles, railways engines (Diesel, Electric,), aircraft, ships/boats, tools/ instruments, material handling equipment and earth moving machinery continue to move ahead at a great pace. Similarly, process control industries like an oil refinery, cement, fertilizer, power generation and power grid management, milk plants, drinks industry, food processing, and many others are fast adopting newer technologies to stay ahead in this highly competitive and uncertain global market. Technology helps to improve productivity, quality, efficiency and global competency. Consequently, it creates new jobs and processes but those need new skills and quick adoption of new technologies.

·    Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI software is based on a well-designed Algorithm by a team of experts from multi-disciplinary areas like data scientists expert in developing new algorithms, business managers with good domain knowledge, technologists of related electronics, communication and control systems, embedded software, Operation Research and statistics expert, psychologists, health expert.  AI is not a new phenomenon since LISP as a programming language for mundane jobs has been there since the 1970’s. However, people were solving simple problems related to health care, speech recognition, image processing. During 1990’s, ALGOL, PROLOG like languages have been used in technologically advanced countries like USA, UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Israel, Canada, Japan, Russia, China, in areas related to computer science, mathematics, neuron science, psychology, biology, philosophy, sociology. China plans to catch up with the west in AI utilisation by 2020 and lead the world in AI by 2030. AI is now being used extensively in many applications like:

§  Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS). These are being used in many Defence and some Business applications. There is great job potential for KBS.

§  Fuzzy Logic. It is finding vast applications for household appliances and business applications. A number of household appliance use fuzzy logic and PLC like devices.

§  Experts Systems. These are being used in agriculture, road transportation and weather prediction.

§  Speech recognition. Auto response to queries for travel and hotel reservations.  This technique has been further extended for voice to text typing.

§  Robots. The heart of Robot is AI and embedded logic.  

§   Machine Learning (ML).  AI forms a major part of ML Systems which are being used for diagnostics and interpretation of laboratory tests. ML is playing a major role in industrial automation.

§  Navigation and control system for space missions.

§  Global  Positioning/ Tracking  System ( GPS)

·         Embedded Technologies. Software embedded in microprocessors/microcontroller, PLCs forms the heart of Robots, Drones and  GPS navigation system. It uses lots of inbuilt controllers, which are programmable with autonomous built-in control and/or external remote control system. Embedded software and optical devices are facilitating many activities in areas of healthcare, diagnostics, physiotherapy and surgery.

·         Machine Learning (ML). ML is the most exciting field where many experts of multi-disciplines, collectively evolve complex and very exhaustive algorithms to carry out exhaustive numerical processing and analysis for recursive decision making. ML is not straight software programming but a  very iterative method of training a machine to respond to various situations. It is like teaching a small child to store various options in his/her brain and when required, respond very judiciously. A similar concept is being followed by leading manufacturers of cars for faults diagnostic and analysis. A traditional automation has an input to a computer resident program which processes input and gives output for further analysis. In case of ML, there is input and expected output both acting as input to the computer where software algorithm ( If this---, and that  or that---    do --  this else   do that – so many times using input from ---- )  is resident  to process inputs and generate a program which does the final task. ML is a very laborious task to cater for all types of situations and make the computer action autonomously and which is fully reliable.

·         Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is a step forward from man-machine interaction to machine-machine interaction. With advances in embedded technologies, AI and ML, the communication/interaction among digital devices and processors have increased by many folds.  It is reducing human intervention and increasing efficiency and consistency in performing certain jobs, which were so far being done by the people.

·         3-D Printing.  3-D Printing is commonly used for rapid prototyping of various 3D solid products. The product or a part could be of plastic, metal or any other material which can be in a molten state to flow through the nozzle and deposit the material layer by layer on to the designated platform. The logic and process are embedded in the software file which is generated from engineering CAD drawing. China and Russia have further progressed 3-D printing technology where instead of molten plastic dropping through nozzles to spread layer by layer, it lets concrete mixture like material to flow and deposit layer by layer, as per 3D building structure design provided by the architect. Two sets of two-bedroom houses have been constructed by Russians using 3-D printing technology in just four days. China has done even better.   France has also made a beginning in using 3-D printing technology and made three-room houses in 18 days. A Dubai based Construction Company, Cazza is planning to extend 3-D Printing technology to Crane Printing and build world’s first 3D-printed skyscraper in UAE. It will use steel and concrete. The company also plans to build the world’s first rotating skyscraper, in Dubai by 2020. It will stand at 1,375 feet tall, with each of its 80 storeys capable of rotating individually around a concrete core.   
·     Digital Manufacturing. Most of the mechanical and piping industries have been using CAD / CAM since the 1970’s. However, the new generation of software like CATIA, Solid Works 3-D, E- Design, Rivet (Open source) and Design Spark have revolutionized the drafting and designing of various types of structures. Likewise, CNC machines having programmable capability are handy for precision machining work. Digital manufacturing is the use of an integrated, computer-based system comprising of Simulation, 3D visualization, Analytics and collaboration tools to create manufacturing process definitions for the required product. Many of the long-term benefits from Siemens’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) cannot be achieved without a comprehensive digital manufacturing strategy. Digital manufacturing is the key to integration between PLM, shop floor applications and machines /equipment. Digital Manufacturing has considerably reduced design effort and production time. It also provides efficient documentation for version control and easy traceability of defects. 

·    Digital Marketing and Advertising. With the ease of accessibility and affordability of internet services and Digital networks like Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, WhatsApp and Twitter have given a quantum jump to digital marketing. In this, you can ask computers/ Smart-phone like devices for writing a compelling email, subject lines for large retail organizations and improve customer relations. Many companies are also experimenting with automated advertisement buying, instead of having people to choose which magazine to place their advertisement and on which pages. Digital marketing has extended the range from domestic to the global market. Marketing and advertising agents have many software tools for faster and extended reach.

·     Robots. Martin Ford, a software entrepreneur and the bestselling author of “Rise of the    Robots” has pointed out that most jobs can be broken down into a series of routine tasks and many of those can be easily and more efficiently done by the machine. The robot is an electro-mechanical device with built-in logic and controllers to perform certain routine jobs or jobs which are hazardous for human beings. Robots are already in use for the following:

§  Healthcare services, housekeeping in hospitals, hotels, restaurants.

§  Manufacturing plants, assembly-line and quality testing in production

§  Process control industries related to Oil refineries, Fertilizer and Cement

§  Drinks and food processing plants

§  Toys and Entertainment industry

§  Movies 

Robots duly integrated with optics and laser are doing a great job in surgical procedures. They are programmable and have consistent performance since they do not get tired. With embedded logic and AI, human-like Robots are becoming popular even to give company to lonely people in Japan. The robot will soon be deployed as soldiers in the combat zone.

·       Report and Speechwriting. Some forms of journalism, such as writing market reports, sports summaries, speech for politicians and CEOs are also being automated. 
 Lawyers and Para-legal staff. During the initial phase of any lawsuit, lawyers and Para-legal staff have to sift through thousands of documents, depending on the complexity of the case. Now with help of appropriate technology like Big Data including syntactic analysis will speed up sifting through large documents. The introduction of software like “Discovery” capable of analyzing large volumes of legal documents have been expected to reduce the number of legal clerks and paralegals, who act as human search engines.  It is likely that with the ML system legally trained to review past documents, precedents and case history can draft a legal brief for the senior advocate who is handling the case. A statistical model using     ML could predict the outcomes of major legal cases.

·  Transportation and Self-driven cars. Driverless (Self Driven) cars have embedded navigation logic module implanted inside with many sensors to monitor road conditions, movement of other vehicles in its lane and neighbouring cars lanes. It also tracks the shortest and safest route and responding to traffic congestion or any other obstruction so that occupants of the car reach safely and on time to their desired destination. The driverless or self-driven car developed by Google was successfully launched in 2017. This is going to affect a big shift in car design and manufacturing plans. Likewise, transportation and delivery of goods have been revolutionized by Amazon, Flip Kart, Snap deal and many others.

·      Material handling jobs. Robots and AI loaded machines will efficiently and timely handle all material and stock those in appropriate locations. These types of equipment will move the required material in/ out of the warehouse as per pre-scheduled time or as per the latest command from the central control room.

·      Power Grid management. Powerhouse management will deploy SCADA like software and engage fewer technical operators, as against many shift engineers. A number of power substations may be remotely controlled.

·  Drones. These are the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) used for surveillance, and transportation of logistics in difficult terrains.  They are slowly replacing pilots while dealing with hideouts of the terrorist’s organizations like those in Afghanistan.

·    Digital Photography. Analogue cameras and analogue video cameras using films have been replaced with digital cameras having embedded digital devices/memories inside, giving better colour visualization and composition of the scene/ object. The smartphone can scan/take pictures and make video clips to transmit those immediately over the internet to their destinations. Google has announced to introduce AI for Google photos and Gmail text typing in August 2018. 
Renewable Energy.  All countries are engaged to harness naturals resources like sunlight, wind and sea tides to generate electrical power. Technology is helping a lot in progressing development of various devices and components used to convert these freely available natural resources into energy for various applications. All these systems require technical manpower to do more innovations to make these systems more affordable and efficient.

·    Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services like servers, storage, databases, networking, application software, and analytics over the Internet. Companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo offering these computing services are called cloud providers and typically charge for cloud computing services based on usage. This has brought big revolution in IT industry and business management. Cloud Computing offers computing power like water supply or electricity where the user pays only for the resources used and for the duration of use. The user need not own expensive hardware and software to match the market requirements. It has also impacted the data centers and data warehouses,  since the customer can now use both hardware and software resources on a need basis, with the full elasticity of expanding and contracting computing configuration at will.  The old concept of in-house software development has paved the way for software application integration. Both big and small industries are rapidly adopting cloud computing environment.

·    Cloud Computing services. Most cloud computing services fall into three broad categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service(SaaS). These are sometimes called the cloud computing stack because they build on top of one another. Knowing what they are and how they are different makes it easier to accomplish your business goals.

·     Cloud Computing Models.  In general, there are three models:-

·      Public  Clouds. Amazon Web Services ( AWS), Google, Rack- space, IBM’s    Blue seal, Microsoft’s Azure.

·      Private Clouds. This belongs to one or few more enterprises that have full control of data location and its security.

·      Hybrid Clouds. This is a judicious mix of the public and private cloud.

·      Benefits of Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a big shift from the traditional way businesses thinking about IT resources. Major advantages of cloud computing are:

·   Cost reduction. Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site datacenters.

·    Speed in configuring. Most cloud computing services are provided for self-service and on demand. A large vast amount of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility.

·     Global Scale (Elastically). The benefits of cloud computing services include the ability to easily scale up or down. It means delivering the right amount of IT resources, computing power, storage and bandwidth when it’s needed and from any geographic location.

·    Productivity of IT Team. Most data centers typically require a lot of “racking and stacking” hardware set up, software patching and other time-consuming IT management chores. Cloud computing removes the need for many of these tasks so that the IT team of the customer can spend time on achieving more important business goals.

·    Performance. The biggest cloud computing services are run on a worldwide network of secure data centers, which are regularly upgraded to the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. This offers several benefits over a single corporate data center, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale.

·    Reliability. Cloud computing makes automatically make provision for timely data backup and disaster recovery. This makes business continuity easier and less expensive because data can be mirrored at multiple redundant sites on the cloud provider’s network.

·         Survey of Job creation due to AI and IT. The techno experts and owners of high tech facilities emphasize that technology will save in time, effort, cost and improve consistency, productivity and quality of products/services. It’s about enabling existing manpower to adopt new technologies rather than replacing them. Few technical companies have confirmed that with the introduction of AI, their productivity and efficiency had gone up. For instance, Accenture has managed to automate 17,000 jobs till 2016 without any cut in existing staff and by in 2017, they have automated 25,000 jobs. Likewise, another market research company, Forrester has highlighted that by 2025, 16% of US jobs will be replaced, while the equivalent of 9% jobs will be created. Therefore net job loss will be only 7%. . Some common area for new job creation are:

o   Radiology.  Dr Barani, of San Francisco, states that Enclitic technology empowers even average practitioners to be experts.  Therefore instead of making some of them lose their jobs, the technology helps them in filling the shortage of specialists.

o    Self-driven vehicles. Self-driven vehicles may need remote operators to cope with emergencies.

o    Human Touch. Despite the use of advanced AI, ML and Robotics, some jobs are always likely to be better done by humans, where empathy is needed. Doctors, therapists, hairdressers and personal trainers fall into that category. Analysis of the British workforce by experts at Deloitte has highlighted the significant rise in health care jobs of nursing, technical assistance and care-workers.

The cumulative impact of technology on jobs.  Technology may disrupt certain jobs, but it also provides smarter, faster and more productive jobs. Global competition is forcing many employers to quickly adapt to emerging technologies and restructures their organizations to stay competitive. In such a scenario, employees need to quickly learn new technologies for multitasking and remain relevant to this dynamic market and highly productive for their employers. You need a good knowledge of emerging technologies, related to your career path plus domain knowledge. You should be technology savvy to get the best of your time and effort. Devices like 3-D printers, Smartphone, digital testing tools and intelligent testing instruments/tools like “Lab View” (also called virtual Lab. allowing remote logging and processing) and MATLAB have added more productivity for business to grow in the electronics industry.

AI has been gaining a lot of momentum since 2005 and some people feel threatened about their jobs being taken away by AI. This is just an apprehension by those who are a bit lazy to upgrade their knowledge and add AI to supplement their skills. The idea that routine manual work can be carried out by the machine is quite old and well known to all. AI-based machines can perform tasks which were earlier done by the knowledge workforce. We all know that computer/logic controlled machines can do many forms of routine manual tasks, but now these machines are able to perform some routine cognitive tasks too.

There is no need to suspect technology a threat to your job and panic. Technology momentum is going to stay and rapidly grow further. It is up to us to harness emerging technologies properly and do our job more efficiently. Technology will be there to support and enhance human endeavour in every field like manufacturing, processing industry, transportation, teaching in universities, health care in hospitals, digital marketing, Supply Chain Management (SCM) or Customer Relation Management ( CRM). This trend will continue since technological development is going at a much faster pace than evolving new rules, regulations, operating procedures and business practices.  However, if you are proactive, have required knowledge, skills and are adaptable to quick learning of emerging technologies, the jobs will be always available to you.

For more details refer to my books/e-books, available on www.amazon.com

1)       A2Z 26 steps for Assured Success

2)       Career challenges during Global Uncertainty  

 DR. Sarbjit Singh, Former Executive Director, Apeejay College of Engineering,
  Gurgaon, Haryana, India