Gartner 2020 trends and thoughts on this
Lead yourself to lead others
23 Ekim 2019
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4 Aralık 2019
Gartner published “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020”. Their predictions as a principle of continuity rely on the last five year’s “Intelligent – Digital – Mesh” strategy.
Key findings are as follows
■ Trends have significant potential to create and respond to disruption and power, both transformation and optimization initiatives.
■ Artificial intelligence (AI) is a foundational catalyst for advanced process automation and human augmentation and engagement.
■ Physical environments, including factories, offices, and cities, will become “smart spaces” within which people will interact through multiple touchpoints and sensory
channels for an increasingly ambient experience. ■ Privacy, digital ethics, and security challenges are fundamental to maintain trust and avoid legal entanglements.
■ Artificial intelligence (AI) is a foundational catalyst for advanced process automation and human augmentation and engagement.
■ Physical environments, including factories, offices, and cities, will become “smart spaces” within which people will interact through multiple touchpoints and sensory
channels for an increasingly ambient experience. ■ Privacy, digital ethics, and security challenges are fundamental to maintain trust and avoid legal entanglements.
Ten technologic trends for 2020 are classified into two main pillars, which are people-centric and smart spaces.
Technology is changing people’s lives, enabling the ongoing digitalization of business and driving organizations to continually refresh their business models as the analysts summarise the current process. For sure, innovation has a substantial potential to ease our lives, but are we entirely aware of the possible downsides of all these developments if not treated carefully?
As an engineering graduate, my first profound learning in Management 101 lecture was, ‘No matter what the level of automation is, people should earn money to buy the goods and services which the companies offer for the market place.’ Pretty clear, there should be a balance between the lost and created jobs and which was the actual case till now, in all the industrial phase shifts the workforce faced.
In the beginning, economies relied on land production for human survival, then power created by steam engines in the 1700s changed three centuries of the workplace, which led to eliminating many farming jobs while creating new manufacturing jobs. Even this acceptable lost and created jobs cycle caused social unrest in society. The computer chip indicated the Service Transformation in the 1970s and “emptied factories faster than the emptied farms,” but also expanded the service sector.
Hyperautomation is the first item of people-centric trends that deals with the application of advanced technologies, including AI and machine learning, for increasingly automate processes and augment humans. In summary, this means many white-collared specialty needed jobs are vanishing with this trend. Robots are doing the tasks without asking leave, and for every second they run. Unfortunately, profiting by eliminating jobs proves far more comfortable than creating them.
The bright side of this trend is, AI delivers a perfect set of data for making sharp decisions, creating new ideas, exploiting the untapped opportunities, which are summarized as augmenting people to perform new jobs in the changing workplace. However, the problem with all new such tasks, they will demand high levels of expertise, and will therefore not solve the problems of unemployed, low skilled laborers which represents the majority.
In his book “21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari summarizes as follows
As an engineering graduate, my first profound learning in Management 101 lecture was, ‘No matter what the level of automation is, people should earn money to buy the goods and services which the companies offer for the market place.’ Pretty clear, there should be a balance between the lost and created jobs and which was the actual case till now, in all the industrial phase shifts the workforce faced.
In the beginning, economies relied on land production for human survival, then power created by steam engines in the 1700s changed three centuries of the workplace, which led to eliminating many farming jobs while creating new manufacturing jobs. Even this acceptable lost and created jobs cycle caused social unrest in society. The computer chip indicated the Service Transformation in the 1970s and “emptied factories faster than the emptied farms,” but also expanded the service sector.
Hyperautomation is the first item of people-centric trends that deals with the application of advanced technologies, including AI and machine learning, for increasingly automate processes and augment humans. In summary, this means many white-collared specialty needed jobs are vanishing with this trend. Robots are doing the tasks without asking leave, and for every second they run. Unfortunately, profiting by eliminating jobs proves far more comfortable than creating them.
The bright side of this trend is, AI delivers a perfect set of data for making sharp decisions, creating new ideas, exploiting the untapped opportunities, which are summarized as augmenting people to perform new jobs in the changing workplace. However, the problem with all new such tasks, they will demand high levels of expertise, and will therefore not solve the problems of unemployed, low skilled laborers which represents the majority.
In his book “21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari summarizes as follows
‘In 1920 a farmworker laid off due to the mechanization of agriculture could find a new job in a factory producing tractors. In 1980 an unemployed factory worker could start working as a cashier in a supermarket. Such occupational changes were feasible because the move from farm to factory and from factory to supermarket required only limited retraining. But in 2050, a cashier or textile worker losing her job to a robot will not be able to start working as a cancer researcher, as a drone operator, or as part of a human-AI banking team.’
As Gartner is stated in the trend report:
“The model will shift from one of the technology-literate people to one of people-literate technology. The burden of translating intent will move from the user to the computer.”
The idea is perfect as formulated, who can deny? Technology will ease your life, all-immersive, adding value over where you live, how you wish to work, augmenting what you have. However, the real challenge is to find the right questions, an instinct to oversee, a skill to know where to check. We should be realistic; the significant majority of the workforce is far below these mental skills, earning their lives with basic thinking and repetitive tasks.
My intention is absolutely not to kill the idea or ignore the trends and possible benefits for society. But sometimes ideas are overvalued, and people are ready to disregard the downsides. Here is a real challenge not for the business or a single person but for the whole society. Inequality, social welfare is not getting better than yesterday and looks like no good news for the immediate future.
I think the majority would recall the movie ‘Elysium/2013’, which tells about a fight between a minority who have-alls and a majority who have-nots in the 22nd century. Those with the means have fled to a beautiful Halo-style ringworld orbiting Earth, while the rest scrape by on the overpopulated and polluted surface. Though many might regard this as a dystopian idea, the reality, this scenario might be closer to realize earlier than expected. The evolving technologies might lead to increase inequality between the social classes, not experienced as before. (A shift of votes to populist propaganda might already be a beginning)
My thought is clear; I always described myself as a sincere technophilic. However, applied technology must be sincerely people-centric; ethics has to be the guidance in every step of any significant shift. All the industries, educational institutes should work together with the governments to rewire people in the workforce ready to accept the new tasks in the near future. More important for the new generation in their educational journey should be revisited to wire their thinking, decision making and make them ready to rewire their brain for learning new skills whenever is needed.
My intention is absolutely not to kill the idea or ignore the trends and possible benefits for society. But sometimes ideas are overvalued, and people are ready to disregard the downsides. Here is a real challenge not for the business or a single person but for the whole society. Inequality, social welfare is not getting better than yesterday and looks like no good news for the immediate future.
I think the majority would recall the movie ‘Elysium/2013’, which tells about a fight between a minority who have-alls and a majority who have-nots in the 22nd century. Those with the means have fled to a beautiful Halo-style ringworld orbiting Earth, while the rest scrape by on the overpopulated and polluted surface. Though many might regard this as a dystopian idea, the reality, this scenario might be closer to realize earlier than expected. The evolving technologies might lead to increase inequality between the social classes, not experienced as before. (A shift of votes to populist propaganda might already be a beginning)
My thought is clear; I always described myself as a sincere technophilic. However, applied technology must be sincerely people-centric; ethics has to be the guidance in every step of any significant shift. All the industries, educational institutes should work together with the governments to rewire people in the workforce ready to accept the new tasks in the near future. More important for the new generation in their educational journey should be revisited to wire their thinking, decision making and make them ready to rewire their brain for learning new skills whenever is needed.