21st Century with Knowledge Economy
- Ali Karim
- Jul 22, 2017
- 2 min read
Kampar, July 22 - The irony of development of technology and its assisting role with society is becoming clearer, said Mr Jeffrey Phang Fatt Kong, chairman of Friends of Kota Damansara (NGO).
His talk is a part of talk sessions with the theme of "Education in the 4th Industrial Revolution".
He also mentioned that the world has undergone so much changes in the economy.
"In 19th century, the main economy activities are agriculture, then we switch to industrial economy and now in 21st century, we are in knowledge economy."
Knowledge economy refers to the knowledge centered companies that relies more on technology rather than labors. While humans are still a necessity, they require a better contextual knowledge rather than just plain knowledge.
In easy analogy, if you know how to fry an egg is not enough, instead you have to know how to fry an egg based on customers' preferences.
This in return gave impact to labours where human force are needed lesser and lesser by day.
To make it bittersweet, the dilemma is between efficiency and employment, and of course the first choice is the priority.
"We need them to be general (undergraduates), only specifies when they go into Master and PhD," said Prof. Lee Sze Wei.
Aside from that, future education are ought to emphasise on passion, curiosity, imagination, critical thinking, and persistence.
Even so, the dilemma for medium and low income people still remains unanswered.
Companies are also facing threats, nowadays it is vital for them to be very "fluid". If they refuse to fit the complex market (which was simpler on the past) they will not survive.
Therefore one of the way is to be a network of small companies that completes each other rather than being a singular company.
"The company is virtually big, physically small," Jeffrey added.
The session is a part of UTAR R&D Colloquium 2017 (1.0) that was held on 22nd July in UTAR Kampar campus.
Other than education, current and interesting issues and researches are also shared. For examples, convergence traditional Chinese medicine and multimedia and virtual reality in medicine in Malaysia.
The colloquium started at 9am and ended around 3pm.
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