Well, it´s official. 23,000 people from 21 countries deem 2016 to have been a bad year for the world according to a new YouGov survey and most Americans and Europeans are pretty pessimistic that things will improve in 2017.
We are certainly living in tumultuous times with an increase in nationalism and ideological extremism.
Here are four key trends that will have an organizational impact this year and beyond.
1. Robotics
The media is full of apocalyptic stories about robots taking over our jobs. Studies such as Deloitte and Oxford, Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BOAML) and Boston Consulting Group predict that 35-47 percent of jobs currently carried out by humans will be automated by the next decade. A Bank of England study suggests up to 80,000 million US jobs will be displaced, and automation will threaten 77 percent of jobs in China and 69 percent of jobs in India according to a World Bank report.
If predictions come true, future generations of robots will be less clunky, more artificially intelligent and living alongside us in offices hotels and homes, giving us legal advice, delivering our pizzas, working in our factories, nursing us and beating us at board games. Even Wall Street trading jobs will be displaced by “servers running trading algorithms.”
This Fourth Industrial Revolution will not be without consequence. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, predicts a rise of technological resentfulness and Neo-Luddism where “anti-technology movements will be active in the U.S. and elsewhere by 2030.”
Related: Robots Will Play a Bigger Role in the Coming Years, But Not as Big as You Think.
2. Uber-nomics and the gig economy
I was in Brazil recently and I ordered an Uber car. Uber has been operating in Brazil since 2014. The twenty-something driver is typical of the modern worker: in the mornings he studies, in the afternoons he drives for Uber and in the evenings he works as a swimming instructor.
Welcome to the gig economy. There are currently more than 55 million Americans freelancing which is 35 percent of the US population. This People Hour Survey predicts that by 2020 one in two of the working population in the UK and US will be self-employed.
These new ways of working are also bringing traditional forms of resistance. Trade Unions are demanding better pay and conditions for contract workers and New Zealand recently outlawed zero contract hours. Moreover, traditional sectors that are impacted by the shared economy are taking to the streets. 2016 saw a steady rise of protests by traditional taxi drivers against the uberisation of the taxi business.
Related: Freelancers Make Up 34 Percent of the U.S. Workforce. Here’s How to Find, Hire and Manage Them.
3. The ascendency of the millennials
By 2025, the millennial generation will make up 75 percent of the workforce…