The future with regards to technology is moving at an incredibly fast pace. Massive tech companies are pumping billions of dollars into projects to become the first to crack any number of upcoming future technologies. Such as Artificial Intelligence, Gene editing, Autonomous vehicles and the list goes on.
Sadly these huge advances in technology come at a price and that price is humans jobs.
The automation of human activity in society is already well underway with self service checkouts, robots making cars and running entire factories themselves. Amazons warehouse's are run by autonomous robots who whizz around and bring shelves full of products to human workers who then pack them for delivery (in a box which has been pre pricked by a computer programme). Surly it won't be long before they have robots that also pack the products as well and don't forget Amazon is already experimenting with drones to make home deliveries.
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Tesla, Uber and Google to name a few are already making huge steps in the race to make the worlds first fully autonomous self driving cars which requires zero human interaction.
Dubai has recently introduced autonomous drones that can transport humans anywhere up to 23 minutes away.
Then theres Artificial Intelligence. Google's AlphaGo has already proved it can beat humans when it comes to playing the extremely complex game Go.
"AlphaGo is the first computer program to defeat a professional human Go player, the first program to defeat a Go world champion, and arguably the strongest Go player in history"
Quote from Googles DeepMind page.
So what has AI winning a game of GO got to do with my job you ask? Well in Japan an Insurance firm recently made 34 employees redundant and replaced them with IBM's Watson Explorer AI as it deemed the AI was more cost effective as it made less errors than humans and could carry out the work at much faster speeds.
Machine learning has already proved it can beat human doctors at diagnosing heart attacks and it's skills are only going to improve.
It seems that robotics is not advancing as fast as AI therefore the brains are in place but there are no bodies for them to control. Honda's Asimo is one of worlds most advanced robots but I can't see it working on a construction site anytime soon.
That doesn't mean construction workers are safe from technology though as 3D printers are now capable of printing an entire house in 24 hours. The inventor Nikita Chen-yun-tai has plans on using this technology on Mars.
I like to see the positives instead of the negatives and with a little luck, if automation takes over 90% of human jobs there will be a system in place which means we won't have to worry about loosing our jobs, as the current system would simply collapse if 10% of the world made autonomous products and the other 90% had no jobs and therefore no money to pay for such luxury.
Here's to spending our days being driven to a beach by a self driving car, with an Asimo butler serving us drinks, an AI doctor checking we are ok and a hot pizza on the way in a drone.
We can dream :)
