WHY REMOTE WORKING ISN’T 4IR

2020 and COVID-19 pandemic have been touted as the acceleration of 4IR in the workplace?
Employees connecting via Zoom from home have ushered in a new way of working. Organisations
that had not invested in digital solutions for their employees were caught napping. Those who
invested in digital tools were way ahead, and could send their employees home to be productive
during the various stages of the lockdown. This has lulled employees, and employers alike to think
that they are in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

What is the 4IR? 4IR is defined as the fusion of the physical and digital worlds by the World
Economic Forum led by its chair, Klaus Schwab in 2016. It is touted as the revolution that will
change the way people relate to each other, the work people do, the way economies work, and
what it means to be human. 4IR elements are the Internet of Things, robotics, Artificial Intelligence
(AI), autonomous vehicles, etc.

The way our economies work means that the global world will experience an increase in
productivity. Granted some people put in 27% more work when they were remote working, using
up the non-commute time to be more productive. But this is still not 4IR. 4IR as a revolution
involves the automation of work where repetitive tasks are replaced by robots, thereby freeing
humans to concentrate on tasks that robots cannot yet perform. Jobs are still being shed by the
COVID-19 pandemic, but this is also not 4IR. What the pandemic has done is that it has prepared
people for the worst to come when 4IR demolishes our concept of work.

The work people do is going to change as jobs are automated; even the most sophisticated and
intricate tasks will be done by robots. Robotic surgical operations that are conducted on the other
side of the globe are such examples. This article that I am writing can be crafted by AI using setup
algorithms. No one is going to be safe from the 4IR.

Our parents worked for one employer for the rest of their working lives. The future of work is
going to be jobs that are freelance, semi-permanent, and are job-shared by workers from various
parts of the globe. In the past, business office processing was managed globally by countries such
as India; but increasingly many jobs can be done anywhere in the world. When you think that you
are competing with a pool of potential candidates in your home city or home country, this has
changed the labour market, because that job can be performed elsewhere sometimes for less. It
could potentially change the powers of trade unions. That is the 4IR changing the world of work,
not working from home. It is much bigger than going digital. New employment is about serial
employment, serial entrepreneurship, and side hustles. It is a mindset, an adapt or die situation.
4IR is hardly here in SA, and once it hits the world of work it is going to change everything that
we know forever.

By Monde Süssmann