Reinventing Production Food Systems Energy and Transportation Information and Communications Materials and Resources
There’s no need to re-invent the wheel, RethinkX sums it up with clarity above all:
To understand where we’re at, how we got here and how we can create a healthier and more prosperous co-existence, we refer to the summation of RethinkX:
Extraordinary advances in information processing and communications have already led to plummeting costs, which have dropped towards zero as billions of people have been connected and empowered with tools that would have been unaffordable a decade ago and unthinkable two decades ago. The smartphone, as we have seen, was a key enabler, creating extraordinary new potential across all sectors of the economy.
Twenty years ago, the idea of having a large proportion of the population work, study, and socialize remotely was the stuff of science fiction and Silicon Valley futurists.
The recent Covid-19 crisis shows that the information and communications technology to make this happen is already largely in place.
But not every job can be performed from home. Factory or warehouse work, for example, requires humans to be onsite. However, the cost and capabilities of many key technologies such as sensors, communications, computing, 3D visualization, and robotics are expected to improve by several orders of magnitude over the next decade. As technology allows for an increasing portion of physical work to be performed remotely (via virtual, enhanced, or mixed reality), this labor could be sourced from anywhere in the world, before ultimately being replaced by automation. Over the last 20 years, we have seen white-collar labor become digitalized (so-called business process outsourcing) and manufacturing physically outsourced to low-cost labor markets.
Over the next decade, we will see a similar trend for blue-collar labor (factory process outsourcing), with physical production occurring locally and labor performed
remotely. The implications across the economy are profound – where we live and work can be almost completely decoupled. The impact of this on immigration, border controls, tax regimes, labor regulations, and even on concepts like nationalism, are extraordinary.