You’re Going To Lose Your Job, Sorry.

The year is 2025, and you’re about to lose your job.

AI has been a buzzword for the last few years and businesses all over the world, including ones like mine, have been hopping on the bandwagon to teach our evermore self-aware technological cousin how to do your job, and how to do mine. But hey, look on the bright side: we’ll have more time to spend with our families and friends. I’m not sure what we’ll talk about; our purchases are automatic. AI takes care of those. We don’t need to contact businesses about problems with products or services; AI’s got that one too. Hell, I don’t even need to have a physical conversation with my kids; they learn faster and quicker logging onto their computer and learning from — you guessed it — another AI engine. I’ve not even had to write this blog, I uttered the subject matter and an AI engine just spat out a perfectly structured (and apparently self-confident) article.

It’s a parallel universe that seems to be the rage at the moment and, as the turkey voting for Christmas, I wanted to put my stake in the ground and explain why I think that, in all likelihood, our jobs are safe (at least for the most part). To put a lens on it, my background in AI comes from a customer care perspective. I’ve been building bots to help add an element of augmented intelligence so that when you contact a business, a bot answers part of the query for you. I’ve heard the concern that it’s a step in the wrong direction but I’m not so sure, and here’s why:

First and foremost, we don’t want an AI takeover.

We like human interactions because we’re, well… Human. What we want, and the reason bots are considered the panacea to the world’s woes, is information faster. Attention spans are shortening, and, as we’re more connected and the shrinking globe is making geographic splits almost moot, we’re pining for a quicker, more connected stream of information. We don’t want to wait in queues, we certainly don’t want to wait 24 hours for a response; in fact, we don’t really want to wait 24 hours for anything. Apparently, we now have shorter attention spans than a goldfish (8 seconds, which means this article should take you around 34 attempts to finish, kudos if you’ve come this far in one go). But ‘the battle for the living room’ with Amazon Echo and Google Home is a prime example of how AI helps: it’s not replacing the person, it’s just a quicker way of gathering information. In customer care, bots serve as a purpose to help get the information needed before a query is handed to a human. Sure, there’s elements that used to be handled by a person that aren’t now, but then we also used to send telegrams to one another.

I would guess, and I hope that I’m right, that it’s about to stop being such a one-way street. Right now, as I write this, businesses have bots that serve us. I’d predict in the next ten years, we’ll have our own. Imagine it, we have bots that query other bots, bots that query other people. We could even have customer to customer bots. But it will be a choice, and it’ll be a choice that isn’t designed to remove human interaction, it only serves the purpose of us getting, and giving information faster than ever before.

Secondly, at least for the next generation or two, it would be somewhat of an economic disaster.

Let me explain: as we move towards a world dominated by AI, economic-prediction-types reckon we’ll be a labour force that support and maintain machines and software. As the supply/demand gap of technical expertise isn’t exactly in its healthiest position right now, the kids of today (and the kids of the generation after) are unlikely to be technically minded enough to support this rate of change we’re predicting (at least en masse). The education system is simply not as agile as the digital world. Until that happens and ICT (or computer science as it’s now known) adopts the mantra that they need to be teaching kids about .NET as their second language (ahead of French and Spanish), the economy will die a death.

AI shouldn’t worry you.

Yes, some jobs will be lost. I parked at Manchester Piccadilly this morning and, as I entered the car park, I was issued my ticket automatically. I got a self-serve coffee, and I got my ticket from a machine. In fact, it horrifies me to realise I’ve only just spoken to a human today (ironically, to proof this piece) and I’ve been up for 6 hours. Not so long ago, they’d have been human interactions, and I’d have opened my mouth before now. Alas, times change and it’s important to remember the reason this is all happening and the reason it won’t get out of hand. It changes because we want it to, and unless we make the decision that our kids educations are better off in the hands of AI and actual, physical conversations were so 2017, we’ll be fine.

Let us know what you think.

The original post can be found on LinkedIn.