New Report Explores Emerging Technologies’ Impact on Society & Work in 2030

In 2030 every organization will be a technology organization and as such businesses need to start thinking today about how to future-proof their infrastructure and workforce, according to a report published by Dell Technologies today. The research, led by the Institute for the Future (IFTF) alongside 20 technology, academic and business experts from across the globe, looks at how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality and cloud computing, will transform our lives and how we work over the next decade. The report, titled ‘The Next Era of Human-Machine Partnerships’ also offers insight on how consumers and businesses can prepare for a society in flux.

The report forecasts that emerging technologies, supported by massive advancements in software, big data and processing power, will reshape lives. Society will enter a new phase in its relationship with machines, which will be characterized by:

• Even greater efficiency and possibility than ever before, helping humans transcend our limitations
• Humans as “digital conductors” in which technology will work as an extension of people, helping to better direct and manage daily activities
• Work chasing people, in which by using advanced data-driven matchmaking technologies, organizations can find and employ talent from across the world
• People learning “in the moment,” as the pace of change will be so rapid that new industries will be created and new skills will be required to survive

Dell Technologies commissioned the study to help companies navigate an uncertain world and prepare for the future. Today, digital disruption is ruthlessly redrawing industries. For the first time in modern history, global leaders can’t predict how their industry will fare further down the line. According to Dell’s Digital Transformation Index, 52 percent of senior decision makers across 16 countries have experienced significant disruption to their industries as a result of digital technologies. And nearly one in two businesses believe there’s a possibility their company will become obsolete within the next three to five years.

“Never before has the industry experienced so much disruption. The pace of change is very real, and we’re now in a do-or-die landscape. To leap ahead in the era of human-machine partnerships, every business will need to be a digital business, with software at its core,” said Jeremy Burton, chief marketing officer, Dell. “But organizations will need to move fast and build capacity in their machines, ready their infrastructure and enable their workforce in order to power this change.”

“We’ve been exposed to two extreme perspectives about machines and the future: the anxiety-driven issue of technological unemployment or the over optimistic view that technology will cure all our social and environmental ills,” said Rachel Maguire, research director, Institute for the Future. “Instead we need to focus on what the new relationship between technology and people could look like and how we can prepare accordingly. If we engage in the hard work of empowering human-machine partnerships to succeed, their impact on society will enrich us all.”

Other report highlights include:

• In 2030 humans’ reliance on technology will evolve into a true partnership with humans, bringing skills such as creativity, passion and an entrepreneurial mindset. This will align with the machines’ ability to bring speed, automation and efficiencies, and the resulting productivity will allow for new opportunities within industries and roles.
• By 2030 personalized, integrated artificial intelligence (AI) assistants will go well beyond what assistants can do now. They’ll take care of us in predictive and automated ways.
• Technology won’t necessarily replace workers, but the process of finding work will change. Work will cease to be a place but a series of tasks. Machine learning technologies will make individuals’ skills and competencies searchable, and organizations will pursue the best talent for discrete tasks.
• An estimated 85 percent of jobs in 2030 haven’t been invented yet. The pace of change will be so rapid that people will learn “in-the-moment” using new technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality. The ability to gain new knowledge will be more valuable than the knowledge itself.

Dell Technologies partnered with Institute for the Future to explore the emerging technologies shaping the future of the human experience over the next decade, and the specific impacts and implications they will have on society and work. To execute this, IFTF relied on its decades-long study on the future of work and technology, in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, and the opinions and ideas generated during an all-day facilitated workshop with a diverse set of experts from across the globe.

At its inception, very few people anticipated the pace at which the internet would spread across the world, or the impact it would have in remaking business and culture. And yet, as journalist Oliver Burkeman wrote in 2009, “Without most of us quite noticing when it happened, the web went from being a strange new curiosity to a background condition of everyday life.”

Today’s emerging technologies also feel like strange, new curiosities. Artificial Intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality, home robots, and cloud computing, to name only a few of the sophisticated technologies in development today, are capturing the imaginations of many. The advanced capabilities of today’s emerging technologies are driving many academics, entrepreneurs, and enterprises to envision futures in which their impacts on society will be nothing short of transformative. At a recent expert workshop hosted by Dell Technologies and the Institute for the Future (IFTF), participants suggested that the technologies in play over the next decade have the potential to “solve some of the intractable problems that humanity has faced for so long,” offer the opportunity to “increase productivity [such that] all our basics needs [are taken care of],” and fundamentally reframe “notions of what it means to be a person.”

With this in mind, Institute for the Future set out with 20 experts to explore how various social and technological drivers will influence the next decade and, specifically, how emerging technologies will recast our society and the way we conduct business by the year 2030. As a result, this new outlook report concludes that, over the next decade, emerging technologies will underpin the formation of new human-machine partnerships that make the most of their respective complementary strengths. These partnerships will enhance daily activities around the coordination of resources and in-the-moment learning, which will reset expectations for work and require corporate structures to adapt to the expanding capabilities of human-machine teams.