Eat it robots! I’m here to stay
How will AI really affect your job?
This March a Japanese company, Fukoku, will fire 34 employees. These employees will be replaced with an artificial intelligent alternative that will will never eat, sleep or complain. But more importantly: Fukoku’s estimates indicate it will be 30% more productive.
Off course you think your job is complicated and no machine can do it!
Well, I’m sure the Fukoku workers must have thought the exact same thing at some point…
So how f*cked is your future?
Let me paint a picture for you:
On a beautiful autumn morning, an Artificial Intelligent Solution will come around and prove it’s capable of replacing you. Not too long after that, another AI will ping you with the message that you’ve been fired. The security AI escorts you to the front door, and a self-driving car will take you home. You hang up your coat, pour out a drink, only to be interrupted by a recruitment AI:
“There are -zero- new job openings available for you.”
After a while, earning the money to buy whatever those machines produce becomes near to impossible. People start to riot, companies have to build walls to keep the humanoids out, and governments have no idea how to intervene.
Absolute. Mayhem.
So let’s all agree to pick up a pitchfork and give those robots a piece of our mind while we still can afford pitchforks!
… I do hope you can all tell this is merely the ‘worst case — “we will all get killed by robots” — school of thought’
So how will AI REALLY affect your job?
Let’s rewind, from our made-up gloomy future to the actual past.
Our great-grandparents, they wrote letters. Their offspring, on the other hand, got a typewriter and typed. Or they hired a typist if they wanted to get things noted on paper even faster. Me right now, I’m typing this blog post in a cloud-based editor that corrects mistakes on the fly and can make suggestions. It’s not perfect yet, because I can still type silly things things things things and it hasn’t got the slightest clue.
These days, voice recognition can register input 300% faster than I ever could. My natural reaction? I’m grateful for the time and effort I’m saving.
There’s this report that shows 47% of our current jobs will “disappear” in the next 20 years.
And while this may sound worrying, research also reveals that for every job “lost” another one or two are created . And we’re not just talking about programming jobs to construct and sustain the artificial intelligence entities.
History shows us that, while several types of industry may vanish, new ones are always going to pop up:
- The manufacturing workforce grew from less than 12% in 1820 to 26% by 1920 despite automation.
- The numbers of cashiers have increased since the introduction of barcode scanners in the 1980s.
- When ATMs were introduced, the number of bank tellers tripled rather than going to zero.
- Regardless of the fact that internet sales now account for more than 7% of retail turnover, the number of people in sales jobs has grown since 2000.
*Eventhough The McKinsey Global Institute and Glassdoor research back me up here, my only disclaimer with the before-mentioned references is that the ‘automation’ was doing “the doing” back then, while now it will be doing “the thinking”.
What you can do now to stay ahead of the ‘AI security guard’
Screw this, I’m becoming a carpenter!— I hear you think.
But then again, there’s that 3D printer looming around the corner…
I don’t believe we ought to fear and run away from Artificial Intelligence. What I do believe, is that you should not ignore its existence and growing impact. Find a way to use AI to your benefit now or in the near future.
The key to differentiating yourself from “the robots” (and your peers) is first to accept that AI is here to assist you, not replace you.
It’s here to empower you, to leverage your strengths, and take over whatever you’d rather spend less time on. Don’t admit defeat just yet, you still have a couple of trump cards up your sleeve.
Both the insightful Josh Bersin and myself urge you to (re)focus on the following skills as they are distinctly human, and can outperform AI in the workplace:
- Empathy: Put yourself in someone else’s shoes when you do or say something. Good luck getting a computer to anticipate whether the other person would like it!
- Listening: Understand what your team members mean when they say something (that bothers them). Listen to how you can help them to get where to want get in life or professionally.
- Communication: Hold regular conversations with your colleagues to help them grow or grow yourself. Don’t assume things — that is exactly what AI would do.
- Prioritisation: Prioritise decisions in ways that benefit your company (purpose), and make others more successful (rather than just yourself)
As humans we intrinsically fear change, something we can all understand or relate to.
An important expression that helps me get through the feeling of ‘I have no clue what I’m doing’ is the realisation that “everyone is winging it” — Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Elon Musk — you name it — they’re all taking things as they come, and figuring it out along the way.
The people that “wing it” and learn to operate in changing environments or even change the environment itself, make this fear of change non-existent overtime.
So in all fairness, no one knows how things will pan out exactly for you. All I would say is:
Wing it, and Stay hungry!
One thing is for sure though:
AI. IS. HAPPENING.
