Maritime IR 4.0 in Southeast Asia: Costs and Benefits in Troubled Waters
The Asian maritime sector has been raring to meet the challenges of the latest innovations in technological progress that are packed under the label of the Industrial Revolution 4.0. As outlined by the UNIDO (2017) Nazery (2017) and Hiribernik (2016) among others, there is a great deal of interest in using what some countries have and are planning to do in order to race to the top. Assuredly though, technological adoption and innovation are no standalone concerns of leading actors of industries that are relied upon by their respective countries and stand to benefit from acquiring the means to implement great changes in the current mode of production and service delivery. While countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore have inched up the competitiveness ladder, Indonesia, Myanmar, Vietnam and the Philippines with substantial traditional maritime human resources, geostrategic location and investments in education and training, they may still seem to lag behind, especially as regards their maritime sector. The ADB (2017) also seeks an ASEAN to which aforementioned countries belong to be in step with IR4.0. National and outside wishers' wishes notwithstanding, it is still important to ask not only what it immediately requires to join the IR4.0 bandwagon, but what could stand in its way. Furthermore, one must also ask the price tag of IR4.0 quest. Intuitively though, the maritime industry is not oblivious to these questions. IR4.0's innovative ways in digitization, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, 3D printing, big data and its analytics, robotics, etc. all point to impact on labor and its productivity, as it has already been happening in other industries outside southeast Asia. Countries with long running problems inside and out ought to know under what environment (Lloyds Register, 2017) IR4.0 in the maritime industry may be reliably beneficial. By surveying current positions and attitudes towards IR4.0 of some ASEAN countries, this paper argues that the IR4.0 in the maritime sector in southeast Asia may be aided more by specific state interventions than shared regional efforts and wishes given the differences of each state's social, legal, etc. environmental conditions.