Now showing items tagged automation

Across the board, organisations are changing. Post-pandemic workplace practices, changing tech trends and generational shifts are impacting the way organisations must run and respond to the world. Local governments are not exempt from the trends dominating the workplace and the world at large, which represent a whole new set of opportunities, or threats, for those paying attention.

Here are 5 trends local governments need to watch.

We live in an age where more and more of our daily lives is being monitored and measured by AI-powered tools. On the health and wellbeing front, this is often referred to as the Quantified Self Movement. Smart watches and monitoring apps are now widely used to track users’ health across a range of metrics. But more than simply counting our steps or evaluating our sleep, the emergence of wearable health trackers has the potential to revolutionise healthcare.

The tech world is off to a great start this year with the famously ground-breaking and mind-blowing tech convention, CES, presenting some breakthrough innovations. The Las Vegas megashow is known for showcasing the most futuristic and quirky of the tech world’s inventions, and this year’s event lived up to its reputation.

Here are some of the most promising gamechangers.

You’ve likely read the headlines regarding how many million jobs will be taken by robots, or what percentage of professions will disappear in the coming years. While some of these predictions are deliberately crafted for dramatic effect, they may well be close to the mark.

The most thorough and widely reported research looking at the potential of automation-led job losses in the coming years was conducted by researchers at Oxford University. These researchers found that as many as 47% of total United States employment had a ‘high risk of computerisation’ by the early 2030s[1] — more than 64 million jobs in all.[2]

While current trends like the Great Resignation are placing powers in the hands of employees, the technological advancement that the pandemic accelerated is highlighting the many industries that are increasingly vulnerable to disruption. The lockdowns and distancing measures of the past few years have resulted in more and more businesses embracing automation, and recent technological developments reveal just how few jobs are immune to the effects of automation.

With the last couple of years boasting an unrivalled pace of change, 2022 is approaching with promise of further transformations in the way we live, work and shop. With global crises exposing inefficiencies and issues of remote living raising demands for new solutions, technological innovations have been quickly adopted by businesses and are set to continue taking over our work and play.

Future-proof teams are ones that can confidently walk into tomorrow, knowing that they have prepared for what is next. The future of our work is demanding greater levels of innovation, creativity and original thinking than it ever has before. In order to maintain the forward thinking that tomorrow requires, our teams need to have the people and structures in place today.

We have always known that the future of our work will look dramatically different from the present. What we did not know is that the global pandemic would pave much of the groundwork for this future’s arrival.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal published an article marking the 100th anniversary of the word ‘robot’.[1] First coined in a Czech play by Karel Čapek, the term ‘robot’ has gone on to represent everything from dystopian images of machines posing as humans to simple chatbots that converse with people on websites. Interestingly, the term predated the actual object by a couple of decades.