Jesper Roine, professor at the Stockholm School of Economics has divided them up in a useful manner.3     Automation – a machine doing the work of a person. Digitalisation – converting information to a digital form. Technological advances – broader concept that covers the other two but also other things. The concepts are of course related. Digitalisation can enable automation and is an example of technological advances. In this speech I focus on digitalisation, but will also touch on the automation that follows on from digitalisation. I wish to include in the concept of digitalisation here machine learning, artificial intelligence, 3D printers and the use of cloud services and Big Data. A common collective name often used for several of these technologies is Industry 4.0 or the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Will productivity increase? How far have we come with regard to the digitalisation of the business sector? One hears an awful lot about technological developments in the media and in business journals. From what is written one might easily gain the impression that we can do more and faster. But official data on productivity does not confirm this. The fact that statistics and reality sometimes appear to be disconnected from one another is nothing new. In 1987 economist Robert Solow wrote “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics”, when describing the emergence of information and communication technology (ICT) and the relatively low productivity growth in the United States in the 1980s.
The original target date of 2020 was advanced to 2015 this year. Obviously, there are practical difficulties of integration given the diversity in the region and the different levels of development. ASEAN leaders have tasked an Eminent Persons Group to come up with an ASEAN Charter to guide ASEAN's future development. This will mark a new phase of deeper ASEAN integration. Geo-strategic shifts The re-emergence of India and China, and the revitalisation of ASEAN are taking place within a broader geo-strategic context. Let me now examine some of the larger trends. At one level, Asia is slowly but surely coalescing. The entire region is being sewn together by changing patterns of trade, investment and production chains. Increasing economic integration is reflected by the rapid expansion of intra-Asia trade. From 34% in 1980, intra-Asian trade as a share of the region's total trade has grown to more than 50% in 2005. The transformations taking place in Asia are of a depth and scope historically unprecedented. The combined population of Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia and India is well over 3 billion, about half the world's population. Changes of the scale that are currently underway could be profoundly unsettling to international order. Strong growth will give Beijing and New Delhi the resources to pursue wider strategic interests across Asia and beyond. Strategic stability is not to be taken for granted, particularly in Asia where there are many territorial and other unresolved issues left over from historically complicated relationships. Great power competition and rivalry are facts of life.