“Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.”- Peter H. Diamandis, Founder of Singularity University

There is A Lot of Talk about technology taking away jobs. The interesting thing about predictions is you don’t know whether you are right or wrong until it is too late.

This is what is being predicted based on what has been:

Photo Credit: University of Nottingham

In the words of the Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab- “The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”

We are today moving away from monetization towards demonetization, away from centralization towards decentralization.

For example, smartphones are going to be practically distributed for free. Autonomous driverless cars are going to become 10 times cheaper. The first instinct is to ask, “But How?”

Well the more important question is- “Why?”

For example- If I don’t own a smartphone, businesses cannot sell any application to me. How will they collect my data? A very big part of our future economy is based on data collection and analytics.

This is the amount of data consumed and shared by the world in just 60 Seconds!

Photo Credit: @itsguruco

photo Credit: The Tapscott Group

The argument no longer is about whether or not AI and Automation will take jobs away. It has now advertantly progressed to which professions need to revamp their skill set and what is the possible timeline.

So, what is the future of our work? Technology is seeing exponential growth. Irrespective of our experience and current skill set, machines are eventually going to take our current jobs. All the companies, organizations, institutions that function today are based on what John Hagel calls ‘The Model of Scalable Efficiency.’ Scalable efficiency is the priority of the past where we have standardized specified tasks and tightly integrated processes around it. But here is a fun observation- Machines can do this much more efficiently than humans. They can perform standardized specific tasks with extreme precision and with almost negligible failure rate.

Most routine tasks will be taken away from us. Hence, in the course of time, most of what we do today, will be done by machines. Here are some of industries affected today:

Transportation, Logistics, Police, Snipers, Construction, Pizza Delivery, Cooking and so much more.

Emily Howell is an algorithm that plays music (You should check her out on Spotify!). WaveNet, of Google DeepMind, generates audio. This means next Emily Howell will be able to sing soon enough. If there is any doubt about how real she can sound, check out to Google Assistant. Dexter is a robot who learns from you and duplicates your action. Clifford Chance in London, Baker Hofstadter in US deployed their respective AI Lawyers in Corporate law.

The question here is to introspect in our respective job profiles and truly introspect- “How many repetitive tasks are there in your world?” Or as mentioned earlier, “What percentage of your job profile requires scalable efficiency?”

Because anything that is routine and/or repetitive, a machine can, in theory, do it better, faster, cheaper and without any medical risks and leaves.

Change is coming and accelerating. So, what will people do with their time once AI will take over their current jobs?

Today it is about your career and what you do. What is that response going to be 10 years from now?

What are we going to do? What is the answer?

Watch out for my observations and learning in my next write-up! J