By Md Arif Hussain
With the nationwide lockdown in India easing from June 1, the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be far from over. Safety, precautions and even apprehensions will become part of one’s life.
The Corona pandemic may have brought life to a still, but it also has a silver lining. What looks like a wall can also be a door. COVID-19 seems to be a wall but if we will navigate the time of lockdown and quarantine skilfully with openness and pragmatism, without compromising, it will open a door for the newer world. Providing great service is not enough we have to prepare for tomorrow. When the whole world is on halt as never before due to pandemic, this is clear evidence that we have neglected its existence and we were not ready to deal with it.
How will the world look like and behave post corona pandemic?
Social distancing will become new normal, masked faces and fewer meetings will be acceptable. There will be a call for prioritising the things—utmost important or can be postponed. Technologies will play a great role while industries, supply chains, markets may not function on their conventional pattern. Do we need to rethink our business continuity plan? The solution lies in wait not only for the industries, supply chain or services sector but for the economy at large.
There will be an Industrial Revolution 4.0.
Industrial Revolution 4.0 is not a catchphrase or a marketing buzzword, it will affect the very nature of our human experience. This pandemic will mark a long-lasting impression on the growing generation and the majority of the population will become homie. The vast population will be waiting for the services at their doorsteps. The market is moving exponentially towards digitalization. Previous industrial revolutions liberated the humankind from animal power and brought digital capabilities. Industrial Revolution 4.0 will be more driven by advanced technologies. It will engulf opportunities for low-skill, low-wage jobs because of automation, which will be enhanced with a smart and autonomous system supported by data and machine learning. The data input in systems is increasing the accuracy of the prediction, you can realize it while scrolling through social networking sites. Integrated system works so nicely that if you will search something on an e-commerce site you will see the advertisements for those products on every page you go through.
This pandemic lockdown will direct the world in a new direction. Work from home will become a new normal. There will be a huge increase in the digital and contactless payment, distance learning, telehealth, online entertainment, shopping and robot deliveries.
Wearable internet devices like smartwatches will track vital signs and initial diagnostics can be made by chat-bots based on the symptoms identified by the patient will help in primary healthcare. In the last decade transferring digital instruction to the physical world such as 3D printing has been improved drastically and it will transform the assembly facilities of the factories and lower down the human and machines physical interaction. This will work more precisely and accurately than a human.
Gone are those days, when we were directing the computer system either manually or through programming to perform a specific task. Artificial intelligence fuelled by Big Data, computational capabilities for Advanced Analytics and Machine learning will be powering Autonomous equipment and vehicles. Sensors and cameras are gathering information from the real world and putting it in the digital system in the form of Big Data which then processed into meaningful information. We are witnessing the beginning of a new era.
As pandemic has impacted each one of us directly in a similar fashion, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning will be positively impacting all of us. Being sceptical about the change is not a new thing; it was there since the start of the revolution. But what was considered as a disruption became a new normal. The transition from gold transaction to paper cash, now we are seeing the transition of things with digital value. News agencies are sharing pdf copies, which will have a very good effect on the environment. It will compensate for the damage done by previous industrial revolutions. Industry giants like Amazon, Microsoft are investing lots of money to build infrastructure to support cloud services, so there won’t be a need for on-premise datacenter to store run applications.
Robots were once affordable for the large organizations with a huge budget but now it is available and affordable to organizations of every size. Robots move goods around Amazon warehouse and reduce the cost and allow better use and arrangements of the floor space. Smart machines are using data in identifying the problems so you can fix it proactively. An African gold mine found ways to capture more data from its sensors. New data showed some unsuspected fluctuations in oxygen levels during leaching, a key process. Fixing this increased yield by 3.7 per cent, worth up to $20 million annually. The interaction between fields like nanotechnology, brain research, 3D printing, mobile networks and computing will create previously unthinkable realities. Technology will be accessible to everyone. Large to small organizations are conducting virtual meetings and wherever possible workforce is productive while working from home. Till now we were thinking and doing market research to find out a new segment of the products and targeting it to the right customers, positioning it correctly, coming out of the Red Ocean and creating a blue ocean. We have to create a blue ocean but not for the new product but to find out a way to produce the same product with new advanced technologies.
The new paradigm for the production will lead to unemployment on a huge scale. Many experts think that it will be favourable to rich and marginalize the poor. But this isn’t new. We have seen it in the past. Industrial Revolutions have begun with unevenness but as time passes it will be compensated by new human resource management skills. The introduction of mainframe computing, personal computing in the Industrial revolution had also been considered as disruption and favourable to the rich. But as time passes it also opens a door for new opportunities. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, once said, if the internet is getting accessible to 10 new persons then one job will be created. We have seen new opportunities through e-commerce. Technology can help make society more resilient in the face of pandemic and other threats.
Md Arif Hussain is a Senior Analyst Cyber Security in a US MNC based at Hyderabad. He can be reached at [email protected].