A workforce for the future
Center seeks to foster innovation and equality
By 2020, more people will have mobile phones than have electricity or running water in their homes or villages. More people are on Facebook than there are people in China or India. Cars are becoming intelligent robots on wheels. Factories are automating manufacturing, replacing tens of thousands of workers with robots. We have already outsourced a lot of work to algorithms: managing financial portfolios, qualifying loan applications, reading MRI exams, recommending products and optimizing travel routes. The human genome has become as readable and editable as a text document, transforming precision medicine.
These are the hallmarks of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, change that is sweeping the world much faster than previous technologydriven revolutions — steampowered mechanical production, electric-powered mass production and microprocessor-powered automation. This boundary-less technology revolution offers boundless possibilities — including some that lead to negative consequences.
By one estimate, nearly half of jobs worldwide could be at risk over the next two decades because of advances in artificial intelligence and automation. This could lead to a workforce development crisis, and contribute to growing global inequality.
We must create the economy of the future and bring the workforce of today along with us.
We can do that by investing in our youth’s science, technological, engineering and math education and partnering on vocational training with nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations and community colleges. I was at the White House roundtable on the skills needs of the 21st century workplace last week and proposed a workforce development moonshot: 5 million apprenticeships in the next five years, modeled on successful programs in Germany and Switzerland.
Also, in building this workforce, we need to ensure that women are paid the same as men — equal pay for equal work. Women on average have less than two-thirds of the economic opportunity compared with men, and the World Economic Forum forecasts economic parity for women will take 170 years — unless we make changes.
We will have to confront many challenges brought by this Fourth Industrial Revolution, from the ethical challenges of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence to those of global warming and food production.
We all individually can have a direct role in shaping our future, and creating economic opportunity for millions of people by investing our time and resources in helping others.
As business leaders, government officials, educators and citizens, we need to adopt a set of principles and values that will take us to the future that we all want together. We need to establish guardrails that keep innovations on track to benefit all of humanity.
This is the core mission of the new World Economic Forum Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco, which opened this week with offices in the Presidio. It will serve as a hub for creating the policies and frameworks governing advances in science and technology, as tech-enabled inequality spreads. Among the topics it will take up are the jobs of the future, artificial intelligence and ethics, national digital policies, cross-border data flows, civil drones, autonomous vehicles and technology affecting environmental commons.
Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, gave us a path for the center’s mission. “We must look past our own narrow interests,” he said, “and attend to the interests of our global society.”
We have tremendous resources close by to fulfill the center’s mission. The San Francisco Bay Area is the heart of global technology innovation, with amazing educational institutions — Stanford University, UC Berkeley, UCSF — and a special community of entrepreneurs, business leaders, thought leaders and scientists.
Technology is never good or bad — it’s what you do with it that makes the difference.