New Technology and an Older Populaiton

The world’s population is getting older and we’re faced with the issue of a shrinking workforce. The Global Trends 2030: Alternate Worlds report categorizes aging as a “tectonic shift” – a large scale change that will affect how the world functions. Dobbs, Manyika and Woetzel also highlight aging as a major factor in “The Four Global Forces breaking all the trends”, stressing that this aging population will result in a smaller work force that will need to be increasingly productive. As our workforce declines we’re faced with finding new ways of being increasingly effective with a smaller number of workers, will the creation of new technologies that reduce the need for certain workers be able to compete with the aging population and need for more labor? How do we maximize the use of technology to help address this problem?

As we think about how to deal with some of the larger scale problems we face in the coming decades, we need to take into account the constant and rapid increase in technologies. “Disruptive Technologies: Advances That Will Transform Life, Business, and the Global Economy” presents a dozen technologies that they’ve identified as having the potential to be “disruptive technologies,” ones that can greatly change and impact the way we go about our daily lives. Three have the potential to address the challenge of dealing with a depleted workforce – “automation of knowledge,” robotics, and autonomous vehicles. Advances in these areas could allow for replacing human workers in certain roles and helping to fill the gap in employment left by the aging population. There is, of course, the challenge of having the resources to train, or retrain, workers for roles that would require human workers but it seems like the opportunity is endless and benefits both workers and suppliers. If we can imagine a scenario where either government, corporations, NGOs or other organizations are able to provide the education necessary for these new higher skill jobs it’s not hard for me to believe that these machines and systems could help fill gaps left by an aging population exiting the workforce.