The Fourth Industrial Revolution will mean that, over the next four years, a third of the skills the economy needs will change due to automation. It is therefore impossible to predict which “hard skills” children in today’s classrooms will need for jobs they will enter in 15 years’ time. Who could have conceived two decades ago that there would be a whole new industry in search engine optimization?
Adoption of Industry 4.0 will result in elimination of lower skilled jobs through automation and the increase in productivity could result in an overall reduction in the number of jobs available. With the increased automation levels, Industry 4.0 will result in job migration back to the developed economies which will result in further reduction of jobs in the low cost manufacturing countries. Given high dependence on low skill labor in the BRICS (for example, only 2% of the labor in India is skilled), re-skilling or up-skilling will be required by all the developing countries to make them ready for the new requirements. For countries like South Africa where the unemployment rate is close to 25%, such reduction in the number of jobs would further fuel the challenge. Similar case exists in India where around 10 million additional jobs per year are to be created by 2020 to ensure adequate opportunities for the young population.
Services sector jobs have been the largest absorbent of unemployed youth but with Innovations in AI we may perhaps be inviting mass scale joblessness
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