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o be curious. This will be one of the great skills ---skills as it is now called--- to successfully navigate the fifth industrial revolution. The ability to ask questions is seen as the great differentiating element with machines, which will end up doing everything that is automatable or digitizable in all areas of the economy and life in general. "Talent will be measured by the capacity to be curious. The difference between one company and another will depend on who has the best questioners, that is, those who know how to ask the best questions to machines, to software; those companies will be winners," predicts Marc Vidal, an expert consultant in digital transformation and industry 4.0, in an interview with The New Barcelona Post.
Next Tuesday, October 6, Vidal will be the first of the twelve Inspirational Speakers who will participate in BNEW, the disruptive event designed by the Consorci de la Zona Franca de Barcelona to help reactivate the global economy in five strategic areas: logistics, real estate, e-commerce, economic zones, and the digital industry.
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According to Vidal, to ask good questions, one must first know technology very well, which is why he encourages us to embrace it. "Machines are very good at answering, but not so much at inventing questions. When the calculator was invented, mathematicians thought they were dead and no longer needed. But that was not the case; calculators disappeared, but mathematicians embraced the technological potential of calculators to go even further and enormously sophisticate their equations and their questions," explains the expert.
Having people with skills that are not automatable or digitizable will have incalculable value"Talent is already the great added value of companies, but in the immediate future, having people with skills that are not automatable or digitizable will have incalculable value," he emphasizes.
In his opinion, humanity has a major opportunity before it: "we can be, thanks to technology, even more human." "We must embrace technology, because it will give us time! Time that we can dedicate to being more human, that is, to doing things typical of people and not mechanical or automatable actions that machines can already do, that is the great challenge!" asserts Vidal with great passion and optimism.
Artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, 5G technology, and other technological tools that are yet to come are all those "machines" that place humanity before the great challenge of entering the fifth industrial revolution: "how we convert the world we now know into an automatizable world, that works for us and allows us to do the things that distinguish us as human beings."
According to Vidal, the only good thing about the Covid-19 pandemic is that "it has forced us to embrace technology." "We live in an environment of sadness, of health and economic crisis, we have realized the vulnerability we have as a species, but it is true that the pandemic has acted as an accelerator of a digital transformation process that we were doing too slowly." "Suddenly, we realized that technology cannot be an adjective, it is something structural in the human being, it is the tool that civilizations have always had to prosper, be better and have more time," he states.
The expert assures that he had the feeling that we were still living in the 20th century, because the entire digital transformation process was being carried out very slowly. "The pandemic is an accelerator that definitively marks the entry into the 21st century; suddenly we realized that we couldn't do many things and that the only way to do them was by embracing technology," says the consultant, who recalls that 78% of Spanish companies ---including micro-SMEs and self-employed workers--- still do not have a website.
And when is the fifth industrial revolution expected and what does it consist of? According to Vidal, the fourth industrial revolution began in the nineties with the digitalization process and the fifth is expected from 2030 onwards. "I estimate that in 2030-2035 we will reach technological singularity, that is, the moment when computers, artificial intelligence and robotics will be able to be independent and will not require human activity to manage themselves," he advances.
In 2030-2035 we will reach technological singularity, that is, the moment when computers, artificial intelligence and robotics will be able to be independent and will not require human activity to manage themselves"We enter a scenario wheretechnology will no longer be a tool, but will become part of our identity", he predicts. "Now, in a company you can decide whether or not to have a robot, but in the future this option of being able to choose will be impossible. That's why we humans must ask ourselves what skills we will need to develop to coexist in this new scenario. We must consider how many of the things I do now, no matter how computerized they are, a software will do within five years, because if it doesn't, I won't be competitive," points out the technology expert.
Artificial intelligence, increasingly present in all economic and social spheres, is a good indicator that we are already on our way to the fifth industrial revolution, where so-called cognitive intelligence will become widespread: "an intelligence capable of responding without you asking it anything." "Now ---Vidal explains--- we have predictive artificial intelligence, that is, it gives you answers to all the questions you ask it. With cognitive intelligence, with massive data analysis, a step further is taken, since machines will be independent, they will work on their own, they will be answering us."
The technologies being developed in the medical sector are a great example of future applications of cognitive intelligence. "The difference between the current doctor and the doctor of the future is that now you go to the doctor twice a year or never if you feel well, while in the future there will be sensors in our body that will make us, technically, call the doctor 300 times a day, because we will be sending him data permanently. Then it will be the doctor who will call you directly to warn you, for example, that in ten minutes you are going to feel bad and that you should go to the hospital."
Marc Vidal will present these and other issues in his inspiring talk at BNEW, an event that will be streamed worldwide between October 6 and 9 and in which more than 8,000 people have already registered.