What does Industry 4.0 Mean for Work Force?
How technological and industrial changeovers will change the business world, especially the conditions of workers, has always been a matter of debate since the invention of steam engines. As in all changes, the pessimists argue that there will no longer be a need for people and machines will replace people, whereas the optimists say that change is irresistible, it holds a positive dimension for people/humanity, and that this change will transform us as well and they claim that the level of prosperity and happiness will increase. For Industry 4.0, the situation is quite similar. The most significant difference is the fact that whatever happens this time, will happen at a great pace and become widespread.
Shall the Optimists of Pessimists Win?
The current situation and investigations show that there are issues that both sides are as wrong as the existence of the subjects in which they are right. With this transformation, in many areas that can be replaced by automation, there will be no need for human labor and the working areas for people working in these jobs will have to change. On the other hand, the new occupations and subjects will indeed be platform-based structures that hold human security in the forefront, minimize the need for physical power, and even allow people to work flexible.
The most famous of these platforms is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. (https://www.mturk.com/) The workers of this platform are called “worker”, or in some cases “Turker”. This structure can be regarded as the equivalent of computer operation, which became widespread for data entry when changing over to computerized systems. The Amazon platform, which has been in use since 2005, had jobs mostly in the field of information technologies up to now, but although there are few examples in the global market, jobs such as product information writing or conducting surveys (used especially in e-commerce) have started to find their place on the platform.
What Kind of an HR website is Amazon Mechanical Turk?
We can say that the most important difference of this system from today’s human resources sites is the search for employees according to the job to be done, not the position. The tasks defined here are called HIT (Human Intelligence Task), the requirements and duration of the job are pre-determined, and a nominal fee is assigned to that duration. Although the highest earning jobs on this platform are video translation and subtitle editing, however, there are also jobs like photo elimination or data editing. If you ask, “Why cannot machines do it?”, the answer is: It is still much more difficult and expensive to produce software that can do these without human intelligence and awareness. In order to teach software how to do the job, you not only need a correctly classified or processed intense data but also need people to prepare this data.
In short, transformation comes along with change and new business opportunities are already waiting for employees who work in platforms open to the world, independent from the borders of the country. Within this change, the Mechanical Turkish system1 is among the rising values as a solution that people can achieve a small but easy profit and that relatively less qualified employees can hold down steadily more easily. These kinds of solutions tell us that not only the business types but also working styles will change, unemployment will not increase but the income may decrease, and therefore, that the person of the future will have expertise in many different areas and have to work in various jobs simultaneously.
