Caribbean must adapt to new world of technology or risk becoming irrelevant

Business

An Hour Ago

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Covid19 is a glimpse into the future of work.

Once software has eaten the world, far fewer people will be qualified to do the work that is required. Up to 80 per cent of the population will likely end up without a job.

To prevent civil unrest, governments will likely raise taxes and redistribute the money towards some form of universal basic income.

Although most people will be relatively poorer in money terms, their standards of living will be much higher. Almost endless, near-free virtual entertainment and information will be available to all. With the rise of self-driving electric cars powered by dirt-cheap solar energy, almost no one will need to own a car. If they need to drive, they will order one from an Uber equivalent and a car will come to them.

Outside the major technology hubs, where the most educated will live, property prices will likely fall, as places expand. Why not move to the suburbs, if there’s no need to pay a premium to live near your office?

Far fewer people, however, will be able to afford a house. The personal wealth of Generation Z will be less than previous generations.

To many, unlimited free time and knowledge, with basic needs cared for, sounds like paradise.

But how will we deal with this psychologically? In today’s society, so much of our self-worth is bound to work.

An optimist might point to the potential to unlock creativity. Many more people will be able to create art, music or film, in an increasingly democratic arts scene. For many creative people this will be liberating.

The darker side of all this is that people won’t change but become resentful; if we’re not careful we’ll end up with a lot of angry, frustrated young people without jobs or opportunities, and an increasingly inequitable society.

Too many people in TT still don’t get it.

If your job involves any kind of fixed rules or logic, then it can be easily automated using technology available right now. Professionals are sometimes the most complacent – those working on factory floors know all too well how fast the march of automation is.

Medical diagnostics is one example. Determining whether a patient has one condition or the other is simply a matter of assessing the information in front of you, and determining the next course of treatment based on that information. This is a logical decision tree: “If A, then B.” That is exactly the language of computer programming.

Collecting the actual information required to put through the information is the main hurdle now, but is becoming easier by the day with advances in image and language recognition. If you’re a doctor, you’re best off specialising in some form of surgery (robotics are still lagging behind) or investing in patient pastoral care or public health.

Yet most doctors aren’t aware that this type of technology in many cases already exists. Radiology as a profession is likely to almost disappear in two to three years.

Most paralegal work is likewise falling prey to natural language-processing software, as is a lot of day-to-day legal work like conveyancing or standard loan contracts, which largely depend on templates anyway.

This is hollowing industries – the “middle of the road” is no longer an option. High-end expertise will still be important, but middling expertise not so much.

Of course, you’d expect most people not to take much notice of things until they start affecting their daily lives. But what alarms me is that many young people in the Caribbean, the ones who are just at the stage of making career choices, are still making decisions based on what their parents think: namely, they want to be doctors, lawyers or engineers, or work in the same old way.

I’m seeing this in lots of recent graduates from local universities, and I don’t blame them, because that’s largely what they have been exposed to. Their first jobs, many in the public sector or in family firms which use cutting-edge 19th-century technology, don’t help much either.

Living and working during covid19 is a glimpse into the future. If it hasn’t been a wake-up call for our students and young professionals, then it better be now.

Its encouraging to see the Arthur Lok Jack School of Business taking the lead with its conference on the future of work, but most workers in businesses and Caribbean institutions are still largely asleep, outside of some outliers and top management.

Young people – all of us – need to demand support from our educational and workplaces to adapt aggressively to a new world of technology, or risk becoming totally irrelevant.

Kiran Mathur Mohammed is an economist and co-founder of medl, an IDB lab-backed social impact health tech company

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