How to take back your job from robots
It’s simple — become their boss.
Before reading this article, please make sure that you have a well-fitted tin foil hat to wear. The rise of the machines is truly upon us, and studies are substantiating this. Forbes has some predicting what they call a “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, and they break the AI systems behind it into categories of “cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things, and The Internet of Systems.”
It’s daunting, even frightening, to think that some day a robot could take over your job. It’s clear now we were naive to cherish WALL-E and R2-D2. Statisticians predict that robots will replace more than 5 million jobs by 2020. Approximately ⅔ of those jobs are “concentrated in the Office and Administration job family.”
So what does that mean for us?
A few years ago, The Guardian published Robots can take over some of our jobs. But some things only humans can do. The conclusion: it’s inevitable that robots will take over the vast majority of the workforce. But it goes without saying that change will lead to new opportunities, and the article recognizes that human minds still have an advantage in areas such as effective “oversight and decision-making capacity.” We’re the ultimate robot managers.
It seems like it’s in our best interest to learn how to manage these technologies in advance of the big revolution. New tech has been, for the most part, fantastic at bringing more value to consumers, and we think anyone who has never purchased a taxi medallion would agree with that.
Our expectations have shifted. We want access to goods and services at unprecedented speeds, and technology is both the cause and solution.
At Routific, the problem we are solving can’t be done efficiently without technology. A relatively common problem might look like this: a husband and wife run a busy food delivery business that delivers perishables to roughly 60 customers each day, five days a week. Take a moment to think about what’s involved if they work on optimizing the logistics without technology (people did it without robot help for ages).
First, they’ll need to take time out of their core operation to work on this, likely every day. They’ll need to use a map, and when they plot on that map they’ll need to calculate the distance using the ol’ legend and scale — with a ruler. They’ll need to evaluate each stop, including where the drivers start and finish. Then they’ll need to determine, for each driver, who’s assigned which stop, meanwhile keeping tabs on what time each customer expects their delivery. There’s lots more we’d need to dissect here but the tl;dr is that logistics is hard, and there’s some real beauty in passing these menial tasks over to the robots.
Our surveys have shown that route planners and logistics managers will spend up to 3 hours each day planning delivery routes, often using pen and paper. We pass this job off to software we call Routific, which shaves that 15 hours of weekly work into a few minutes using an algorithm.
Software like this exists across practically every industry now, and part of the hype about tech is that it’s clear there’s so many more tools like this to discover. We’re constantly learning to replace ourselves with something that can do our job better than we can.
Robot management is going to be a nice future for many of us. Robots don’t talk back, they work long hours, and they don’t get frustrated with menial tasks.
Stay tuned for a new blog series that will introduce you to some amazing individuals who have learned to embrace technology. They’ve brought their businesses to new heights, all because they stepped up and showed the robots who’s boss.
(Special thanks to Dale Williams for co-writing this blog with me.)
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