Regional collaboration to hasten ASEAN, industrial revolution — WEF

MANILA, Philippines — Member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are urged to strengthen their collaboration as they are expected to struggle with the technological and regulatory challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) said.

The new WEF report titled “ASEAN 4.0: What Does the Fourth Industrial Revolution Mean for Regional Economic Integration?” analyzes show emerging technologies will reshape Southeast Asia and identifies actions for ASEAN leaders to prepare for the deep transformations that lie ahead.

“The countries of ASEAN are politically, economically and  socially diverse. However, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will bring many common opportunities and challenges,” the report said.

For the Philippines, the WEF said the country is expected to be more affected than the others by the rise of artificial intelligence and robotics.

“Artificial intelligence and robotics are rapidly increasing the jobs that machines can perform better and faster than people. While this may reduce costs and raise productivity, it will also threaten jobs, and some members of ASEAN will be more affected than others. The immediate threats are to low-skilled, repetitive jobs (such as assembly line workers), but services jobs are also at risk, threatening to undermine regional success stories such as the rise of the business-process outsourcing sector in the Philippines,” it said.

The report said that to successfully deal with the profound challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, ASEAN member economies need to improve their collaboration.

It emphasized that ASEAN must think at the regional level and not at the national level.

“The Fourth Industrial Revolution is unfolding at tremendous speed. Indeed, the pace of change is accelerating. All over the world, governments are struggling to keep up. The traditional ways of shaping policy, writing regulations and setting standards are too slow, too top-down and too backward-looking. What is needed is an approach that is much faster, more agile, more experimental and more iterative,” said Justin Wood, head of Asia Pacific and member of the executive committee at the WEF.

“While there is a lot to celebrate on the 50th anniversary of ASEAN, we must not rest on past achievements. This revolution will transform everything, from economic structures to social systems. Many aspects of our lives will improve. But there will also be many worrying challenges, such as how automation and artificial intelligence are replacing jobs. We have to understand these issues and have appropriate policies to address them,” added Nazir Razak, chair of the WEF’s ASEAN Regional Strategy Group.

To prepare their institutions for the coming challenges, the WEF urged ASEAN leaders to replace long-term blueprints with three-year rolling plans as most forecasts will likely be outdated quickly considering the speed of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.