Will a Robot take my job?

What if I tell you that the job you have been working on or your dream job that you want to work on with might be automated in the next few decades. There was a time when automation was a means for factory machines to do a repetitive task. But today they can drive a car, land an aircraft and trade stocks. But wait, has not automation been around for decades? What’s different this time?

Our past and innovation

For the longest time, humans worked in agriculture for a living. With the rise of the Industrial Revolution, this shifted to production jobs and then to the service sector as automation became more widespread. Now only a few moments ago we entered the information age. In the past things were simple. Innovation made human work easier and productivity rose, which means more services could be produced per hour but with less or the same number of people. This eliminated some jobs but also created many other jobs that were better because of the growing population required more work.

Automation this time - is it different?

Change make people panic but things evolve regardless, so we accept it and move on. And with this so-called Fourth industrial revolution, automation is going to replace some jobs, but it will also create new ones, probably by creating new jobs that never existed before. But what’s different is that our jobs are being taken by machines much faster than they were in the past. Industries that used to dominate the market are now becoming old and will not be able to produce millions of jobs that they used to.

Is the Internet our savior?

The internet definitely created new jobs but they are not creating enough jobs to keep up with the population growth or to compensate for the industries it is killing. For example, you can reach up to a million people with just the internet but a T.V. station need a way more amount of people to reach that level.

Conclusion

We are entering a new era that is allowing machines to do a lot of tasks that previously only humans could do. Automation is making the workplace safer, more efficient for sure. What we need to do is to figure out how to integrate them with us and not to replace us, to make us more productive and creative. It’s not just the jobs that are being changed by machines and A.I. but us.

Resource :

The book that I've referred to:  Martin Ford's The Rise of Robots