In the next 10 years, 9 million jobs will be lost to automation
The march of the Robots was a situation that worried the founder of Cybernetics Norbert Wiener just after WW2 when he could see from the advances of the by our standards primitive computer, that humans would lose out in the workplace to automation.
So what's at stake? For you as a potential victim, you need to take safeguard action.
Firstly, you need to get yourself transferable skills that you can take to new jobs.
Secondly, you need to be interested in things that Robots cannot do and learn to do those.
The Cyber Human is perhaps less than 50 years away
We hear a term being used now called 'Singularity.' That is when the robot becomes indistinguishable from the human. With 'on-line' communication, you may not always be aware that you are dealing with a machine.
In the flesh, you are because there is no second glance needed, the robot humanoid is still that and you an tell the difference even if it has cyberskin.
A computer may be able to do a lot of things but it doesn't have much intelligence. It relies on programmed conditional logic to operate. Much as we do but we work in different ways, through acquired learning. The computer mainly learns through downloaded information and some can learn through real scenario learning.
Future robot humanoids will have peer to peer communication by data
The average 4 year old child has better tactile recognition and response than many computerised units. This will come to a computerised human but only through a lot of development work in sensory telemetric data recognition and analysis capability.
What I am saying is that if it encounters a Bird's egg, it will be able to define it as such and handle it with the appropriate care and restraint, rather than crush it. In this case, the 4 year old can carefully handle the egg from the outset.
This gives us the situation of the machine having to build massive potential data banks of data based on the sensory information gained from everyday objects that we know of from acquired learning. But I am meandering a bit here....
The future skills humans will need are the skills that robots cannot do at present, such as plumbing or wiring in a house where systems may need renewal or installation where there is no template 'plan' to work from. Situations where the human works out the strategy based on previous experience.
Another future proof way is to be as Mike Rowe says, 'Be interested in other people's crap' and also to follow your ability not your passion. By all means have hobbies and if these offer a genuine and possible progression into a career then do so if that is viable. But many people think they are just 'good enough' and the reality is they aren't.
What do other people not want to do? According to Ebay, in the UK there are on average up to £4000 value of items that people have and do not use, if you can sell that sort of thing for profit, that's an example of being interested in other people's crap, or selling your crap to other people
That said, there are due to the demographic vacuum left by generations of childless people in the UK an avenue where services will be needed and few to fill them. With an aging population, the burden on the young in time will be immense.
Future proof yourself before you become the future!
The enduring impact could be even more profound. The pandemic looks set to accelerate digital transformation and the resulting need for organisation-wide upskilling, having highlighted the importance of digital customer engagement and employee collaboration. With more people wanting to work remotely even after the emergency subsides, new types of management skills and future skills will be required. Read more: white paper: skills and jobs of the future.
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