ALLANA MANAGEMENT JOURNAL OF RESEARCH, PUNE - Volume 10, Issue 1, January 2020 - June 2020

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Deriving a Socialistic Future for the Next Generation | Work and Life With Emphasis on Generation Z preceded by the Millennial and succeeded by Generation Alpha

Author: Mr. Shridhar Aiyer

Category: Human Resource Management

Abstract:

All industries and environments racing through the turbulence of Artificial Intelligence and Cyber-Physical systems over the next several decades will not be able to do so without deriving a comprehensive meaning to the socialistic future of men and women of tomorrow.

This paper tends to probe the future of work-life and family life along with friendships in an era dominated by computing intelligent systems. Deriving a socialistic future is important to be looked at closely, not merely concerning future systems but also from the vantage place of the living and working of- men and women who will occupy those spaces.

The author in the research paper has suggested that the accelerative thrust that we will now experience in the future in our work and personal lives has sociological as well as psychological consequences.

The paper also tends to, in its small part, attempt to explore systematically the effects of this accelerative thrust and contends with the fact that this is an elemental force.

A study of the forces mentioned above as in the research paper in depth will then help us to grasp not the destination but also the rapid pace of adaptation for a socialistic future. It will help us comprehend that the pace of change with futuristic systems is more important than the direction of change in the work and life of the future individual.

Full Text:

Introduction:

Change is inevitable and everyone who lives and works in today's fast-paced world will agree that this is true more now than it ever was.

It is said that your daily newspaper carries more information than the average person in the 17th Century could learn in his lifetime. If the invention of the air conditioner allows us to live anywhere and the invention of the smart phone allows us to work anywhere, the basic concept of working and living has been in a constant state of change for the last 20 years and will be all the more so in the next 20 years. Changes in demographics across countries are asking us to modify the way we live and work traditionally.

With continued advances in technology and a radically transforming demography, impactful changes will be seen over the next decade for defining employment and culture in the industry. For those organizations that are not fast-footed enough to lead this revolution or at least follow the rest, these changes will have a huge impact and this game-changing evolution is now global. The ever-changing digital world is approaching us with the speed of light. E-commerce statistics speak a lot about the direction the whole world is going, entire societies are getting service-oriented where other people or cyber-physical platforms are doing our work for us and we are then able to do things that interest us better.

A healthy and inspiring change in the future will be one that intersperses political, economic and social aspects of the work-life on one hand and issues with technology on the other hand. The outreach of a socialistic future should be for all future work forces. Disruptive Technologies that are changing at the speed of light are now enabling us to create values that are in accordance with us. This paper deals with understanding those values and ideals and ensuring they are ones we can commit to the fullest for the coming generations who will work, live and play in this fast-changing socialistic future.

Aim and Objectives:

To emphasize the problem of Artificial Intelligence and a fast-changing scenario in a digitized era. To also point out that it can be very easy to accept algorithms and complex equations as non disputed truths, but to understand the world; these algorithms are insufficient and flawed. To also emphasize that people at work and life in the future will have to move beyond these systems to create a socialistic cohesive future.

Relevance and Significance:

Rapid Urbanization, demographic conflict, migrating population and crime are just some of the things that come to mind when we think of fast-paced changing systems in today's society. To try and comprehend, if this skyrocketing change , with jerks in most directions and rapid interspersing of artificial intelligence in daily commerce and commercial activities has grown too complex to manage. This is of utmost relevance to Generation Z along with Generation Alpha to comprehend the present and get ready for the future.

Scope and Limitation:

The research paper emphasizes the need to pay attention to the problems of a fast-paced digital era. The research attempts to showcase the different sides of artificial intelligence and a fast encompassing decrease in personal privacy. It does acknowledge the tremendous benefit to mankind due to digitization and wishes to draw attention to some of the issues that may be faced in the future due to complex systems. This research paper though logical is mildly speculative and is yet to be tested as the years go by as would be the case with Artificial Intelligent Systems

Building coping mechanisms with education for a socialistic future:

Space research for the last 40 years has concentrated on exploring planets and landing softly on these places of mystery. In the race to put our machines and men on those planets huge resources are put to make their landing a soft one. Every system and subsystem of the landing ship is geared for this and the billions of dollars of machinery are at stake with this very landing. Similarly in the education of the modern world, today a billion human beings are fast going towards a super digital future with Artificial intelligence the very basis of learning. A soft landing can be achieved if we look closely. The shadows of tomorrow's society now are emerging from a fog and as we accelerate our approach towards the future, there is increasing proof that one of our most critical apparatus for a soft landing - education - is malfunctioning.

Today what we tend to pass off as education in most of our top schools and colleges is quite anachronistic by nature. Most parents look at educations as a tool to fix their children for a life in the future. Most educationists warn you that a lack of education will destroy a child's chances in tomorrow's world. Government ministries and the media all influence the young to stay in school saying that like never before, your future is dependent on education.

Yet despite all this, our education system looks more backward towards an anarchic system rather than forwards to a new socialistic society. To help avoid this shock in the future we must search for methods and objectives of the future than the past.

In the digital systems of the future, fluid, rapid and self-regulating machines will deal with the flow of physical materials and people with rapid information and knowledge.

Digitized systems will be responsible for routine jobs while men will be responsible for creative and intellectual tasks. Machines and men together will be distributed all over the globe with amazingly sensitive cyber-physical systems that are linked to productivity. Entire computerized ecosystems are synchronized today and we are already going towards this. The factory whistle has vanished and so has the clock to some extent in most homes. Lewis Mumford called the clock once long ago as the key machine of the modern industrial age. Similar organizations of the future will have to shift from a sense of permanence to transience from a present concern to future focus.

The technology of the future demands not millions of men conforming to a particular job or industry and not men who take orders blindly but it requires men and women who are critical in their judgment, who can weave through new environments of a digitized future and quickly spot new relationships in a rapidly changing new reality. Unless we can manage to slow the rapid pace of change and there are slim chances we can now, the individual of the future will have to cope with even more rapid change than what we do today.

It is a very clear lesson for education that its prime objective now has to be to increase the coping mechanism of our children in schools along with their mentalities to absorb the future pleasantly. It is no longer enough for our education systems to understand the past and see the future, but they should be also able to anticipate the future and the directions of change. This education system should be capable to make long-ranging assumptions of the future. We need to generate more assumptions about the kinds of professions and jobs and alternative vocations that may be needed 20 to 50 years from now on. We also need assumptions on the new structures of families that may emerge very soon, the new relationships that will prevail and the new ethical and moral problems we may face. It is only by generating such assumptions and defining and systematically updating them can we deduce the nature of the skills of cognition and affection that the children of tomorrow will need.

For those educationists who recognize the bankruptcy of the present education system and the inefficiency that subsequently brought in the organizations where the products of this system are them employed, a council joint movement will provide a great purpose. With an alliance towards the young generation and by attracting community and parent participation this council movement can thus garner huge support.

Such a movement will be responsible for 3 objectives.

1. Transform the current organizational structure of our educational system
2. To revolutionize its curriculum and
3. To also encourage a more future-focused orientation.

Life and work at the pace of light:

Not very long ago the Sheraton Group of Hotels carried an advertisement of the executive man in a hurry. His picture was everywhere. On TV, in posters that looked at you at airports and railway stations along with magazines. He was the character of fiction with whom even today most of us working class will identify. He was young and well dressed with an enormous butterfly-shaped key protruding out of his back with a caption that asked all of us to unwind and relax. This wound up man is even today the symbol of the men and women of the future, millions of them who feel just as hurried and driven as if they too had a huge key in their back.

The average person knows very little and doesn't care about much of technological advancements or the relationship between acquiring knowledge and the pace of change. On the other hand, that person is keenly aware of his pace of life. This pace of life has been frequently commented upon but strangely has received almost no attention from psychologists or sociologists .This pace of life influences behaviour very strongly often evoking strong and contrasting reactions from different people. It is not wrong to say that this pace of life draws a line through humanity often dividing the current and future generations into camps, triggering bitter quarrels and misunderstandings between parent and child, between the haves and the have nots, between men and women and between different environments.

Futurism in Humanity:

The people who inhabit this earth are divided not only by nation, religion or ideology but also in a sense by their position of time. Examining the present populations of the globe we find a tiny group who still hunt and food forage as men did centuries ago. Others that are the vast majority of mankind today depend on agriculture. They live in many ways very similar to what their ancestors live. These groups are perhaps taken together to compose a significant portion of mankind. These people are fast becoming the people of the past.

By contrast, more than 40 percent of the world's population can be found in industrialized societies leading modern lives. They are in effect the products of mechanization and digitization and are the people of the present. The remaining people who live in the urbanized modern world are inadvertently the agents of the future. For within the main centres of cultural and technological advances are millions of men and women who it can be said are already living the life of the future. Without being aware of it, trend makers today often live as millions will live tomorrow. They indeed account for only a little percent of the global population today, but they already form a nation of the future between us. These men and women are the advance agents of mankind and the earliest citizens of a super digitized era of the future.

What makes them different is not only do they work and live differently and the fact that they might live fuller lives but what specifically marks them is the fact that they are already caught up in a new up step pace of life. They live faster than the people around them. The attraction of the accelerated pace of life is immense. Some people feel very nervous or anxious if this pace slows down. They seriously seek to be at the place of the action and not particularly care what the action is as long as it is fast-paced and interspersed with their social media.

Preparing for tomorrows workforce in a world run by machines

(Leonhard, 2019, Presentation at La Futura in Dubai)

The Concept of impermanence:

A lot of what we speculate about socialistic and futuristic change presents a solid picture of a man in very permanent environments. It also presents an incomplete picture of the man who is truly present in the day. A vital difference is missing when we describe the working man of the past or the present and the working individual of the future. That difference can be encapsulated in one word and that is impermanence.

This concept of impermanence gives us a link that was long missing between socialistic theories of change and the basic psyche of a human being. Juxtaposing both, we then begin to analyze the issues of fast-paced changes in a new way. It then also gives us a tool, rustic though to see and measure this rate of change in a socialistic future.

Impermanence is the new way of being contemporary in today's life and will be all the more so in the future. This impermanence results in a mood of transience. Most philosophers for centuries have always maintained that man is transitory. In this holistic sense, impermanence has always been a way of life, but today more than ever, this feeling of transience is more fitting and correct. An entire new generation of nomads has sprung in all parts of the world that are now travelling and working at the same time. It is said that in 2020 around 2 billion people will reach out and travel to all corners of the world which includes volcanoes, islands, deserts, and even jungles. This age of impermanence along with rapid globalization, immigration and technology has pushed our wanderlust and made the next generation more hungry for wilder frontiers.

“Our Earth is still a wonder, all the more so now that the clock ticks on its preservation”

(Rafanelli, 2019, Conde Nast Traveller)

Nowhere than before has this generation found an acute connection with the planet. A socialistic future increasingly demonstrates that some of us do not live in houses of safety and almost all of us are desperately trying to connect with our neighbours more than ever. The future generation of people who work and live will be in fact citizens of the age of impermanence. What seems impermanent in the socialistic future is not only the way we relate to people, but it possible to divide certain classes of relationships if we try very hard.

1. Relation with things - Along with the nature of how a person relates to another one we can also try and see how he relates to things.
2. Relation with places- We can then also see how he relates to the places he travels or the places of his abode.
3. Relation with workplaces - It is possible to analyze the individual's relationship with organizational environments
4. Relation with ideologies or information flow in social media - Much can be derived when we investigate a person's flow of ideas and consumption of social media along with numerous news feeds.
5. Relation with people- A huge amount of these changes are directly and indirectly influenced by the people he meets and loves and thus a study of those people will reveal a lot about his nature.

These five relations and then his relation with time will then truly give you the fabric of the socialistic future. Hence the basic components of all situations are people, things, places, organizational environments, and ideas.

And just when exactly the future worker's relationship with these components becomes shorter, relationships that lasted a lifetime will now have shorter life expectancies. It is exactly this shorter expectancy that gives rise to our feeling of impermanence.

Impermanence can be demonstrated by the simple fact that the rate at which our relationships turnover is huge. While it may be difficult to demonstrate that situations take less time to pass through our experiences, what can be done is to break down these components stated above to measure the duration of our relationships.

The concept of impermanence is perhaps best demonstrated in the local supermarket. Food and beverages in the supermarket have a higher turnover than maybe cosmetics. This is why they are sold and hence replaced very rapidly. The through fare is faster. Most huge supermarkets of today know the impermanence of these items and perhaps even welcome it likening it to the health and business of the supermarket. We can thus think of impermanence as the rate of turnover in relationships of the future worker's life. This is why even today most of us can be defined by this rate of turnover. For some of us, life is marked by a much higher rate of turnover than the others.

Individuals from the past and the present tend to live lives of less impermanence and their relationships with these 5 components seem to be long-lasting. But the individual of the future or generation alpha will live a life of high impermanence. In this condition of high impermanence, the duration of most of their relationships will be short and the turnover will be extremely rapid. So for the socialistic future, most structures will get used up very quickly. This situation will without a doubt have its advantages and its disadvantages.

This will tremendously affect the way they will see reality and will also immensely affect their ability to have a coping mechanism or the lack of it. It is this complexity in the environment of the future that will hugely affect the socialistic future in which our next generation will work and play.

Conclusion and recommendation:

It is said that artificial intelligence will replace thousands of jobs in the near future, in the process of simply making the industry more efficient. The world economic forum reported in 2016 that 5 million jobs would no longer exist by 2020 which is the year of writing this research paper. Most of these jobs will be replaced by AI, robotics, and nanotechnology. In the same time frame, it is reported that many new jobs will be created in computing, architecture, and mathematics. The effects of this digital revolution will be more profound than ever experienced before. Today social bonds are interwoven so tight that contemporary situations and their consequences are radiated instantly throughout the world. An event that affected only a few people in the past due to the sheer boundary and geographical constraints now has the power to affect millions.

If further studies prove it to be feasible and viable then we must attempt to understand what does a socialistic future hold as we move into a new age and analyze the concept of impermanence. The work and life of men and women of the future cannot be understood unless we comprehend the psychology of transience. Human Values will have a huge importance in the digital future more than today.

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