The rising digital era sympolizes the end of manpower

The digital era has made our life easier than ever with the invention of touchscreen mobile electronic devices and the cheap wireless internet services available to the public. Surely everyone like us is enjoying a delightful moment of instant communication in principle anytime anywhere on earth making us a global citizen in a boundless world, without realizing the invisible fact that value of manpower or so called 'human resources' has deflated significantly. In a densely populated city like Hong Kong or Singapore, the impact is even more severe than anywhere. Yet, the end of manpower might soon approach.

Swift and effective information flow used to be the fundamental competitiveness of both cities in the analogue period where information was circulated in an efficient channel within a second; with the physical geographical advantages, both cities had enjoyed a relatively high competitive edge for the decades until the rise of digital era in the 2000s. In a generation where information flow is open to all over the world at a second for free, both cities found their lost in information advantage. In particular, the developing regions with low labour cost can now instantly access crucial electronic information as the developed regions do, why on earth shall Hong Kong or Singapore continue its information edge? The immediate impact on fast information flow around the world is the shifting of back office from developed regions to developing regions that share same language. In addition, the electronic mail or correspondences system also leads to closure of post office that produces thousands of jobless postmen who are deemed to be useless.

Reducing need of an agent is another important issue along with fast information flow. Now every one of us can be an agent using our electronic devices to serve our needs. Under what circumstances should an agent be necessary when we found it much cheaper or even costless to serve ourselves by us than other parties? When we enjoy the free or low cost applications that enable us to address our needs on our devices, aren't we knowing that the system has eaten up all the memory of our devices as well as existing job opportunities of us? The era of profitability of an agent will terminate after all as none of us worth more than outdated applications with zero download rate after release for a while! Who do we human think we are in this innovative time？

Smart people create artificial computer system and applications for the benefits of the community whilst ordinary people adapt to the electronic life where only artificial intelligence has it own value to sustain. Next time, when we are playing our Ipad or Iphone, let us think about whom is to dominate in future!