Future of work, how the robot economy begins

We are on the cusp of something unprecedented and it's been getting more press of late; because in the history of the world, ten or twenty years is not just imminent; it's our immediate future as a civilization.

It isn't just the birth of #RobocarEconomy we are witnessing, it's the beginning of the robot economy of automation. Read on.

How Urgent an Issue is Automation?

A lot has been made of the rise of robots; is our job safe from automation, deep learning and new iterations of machine intelligence? This is something young people and every professional on the planet needs to think about.

Autonomous vehicles could add as much as $7 trillion to the global economy by 2050. The automation economy itself is of incalculable value.

Autonomous vehicles are a metaphor for the future; what if your job was self-driving? There's a lot of buzz of automation occurring in transportation, retail, finance and business administration that may disrupt millions of American jobs.

Innovators Anticipate Big Monetization Opportunities

This is it; Amazon could be the top company in a winner-takes-all end-game of capitalism. This is a reality where Elon Musk wants his employees to be "hardcore", and Wal-Mart workers are telling their executives that they can't pay the bills.

We're just at the very immature beginning of the robot economy, but it has now officially started.

 Global accounting and consulting company PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) that projects 38% of American jobs could be at risk of replacement by automation within the next 15 or so years.

It's not just cashiers and truck drivers that it will impact; blue collar and white collar jobs and entire professions are equally vulnerable.

Automation will not discriminate, men and women, management and people in admin, customer service and sales; automation is likely to touch all companies in some way.

While the masses may feel a big crunch in the workplace in the coming years, these conditions will catapult a few companies forward.

Artificial Intelligence will Reshape Industries in the Blink of an Eye

Driverless cars are expected to save as many as 600,000 lives by 2045. The race to autonomous vehicles (AVs) actually creates more jobs for the auto industry as they negotiate the future of their business.

The robot economy creates new jobs; but a "big crunch" is coming where even coders won't be safe. We'll reach a point where the jobs disrupted far outpaces the jobs created by new exciting industries and fields.

Experts disagree as to how fast this will all occur. Predictions are vague and so all encompassing they barely seem true or objective. Could it be, could this really happen? Whispers of the robots are coming, feel like the transhumanistic conquests of people who live in the San Francisco bubble, and other Silicon valley tycoon types.

However, as of the mid to late 2020s, this will hit reality and with each year until then it will seem less like science-fiction and more like a blue collar admission.

It could stifle the global economy; it will displace workers. Even a UBI that proposes to give an unconditional $1,000 dollars a month doesn't really return things to normal. Robots themselves will give new life to the Internet of Things.

After growing at a compound rate of 17 per cent a year, the robot market will be worth $135bn by 2019, according to IDC, a tech research firm

When the automation economy arrives and comes to pass, it will be a new normal. There are early signs this is already under way and how this transforms the economy is a disruptive inevitability.

“We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another.” — Klaus Schwab, Chief Executive of the World Economic Forum

Transforming industries will simply be the norm. In with the new, and out with the old, quite literally.

Robots scale; from a few million today to hundreds of millions in the late 2030s. Artificial intelligence scales through the cloud; increasing at exponential rates in cut-throat businesses where a failure to adapt means certain bankruptcy.

More connected devices ultimately means more mature data sets; more opportunities for machine intelligence to learn how to learn and perform tasks better than humans.

First the robot economy adds convenience and augments our jobs, only making some of our tasks replaced; then they become so much better at all the tasks we do; our professional skills become outdated very quickly. Now imagine this occur across industries, at the same time.

By 2035, a certain percentage of surgeries might be performed by AI and robots. Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci robotic surgical system is a great example of how this might occur. This is an example of skill-augmentation; nobody was displaced while it helped in over half a million surgeries; that's in 2016.

How Soon does the Automation Economy Go Mainstream?

The World Economic Forum (WEF) projects a loss of 7.1 million jobs to robots in the world's 15 leading countries, including the U.S., by 2020

That's just three years away. The key period appears to be 2025-2035; this is when the automation economy truly begins to transform our cities, our economy and shows exponential increases in technology's impact on the workforce. First wave iterations of automation reach maturity during this period.

This is also when companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Alibaba and Tencent have scaled where we will know who the true leaders of the 4th Industrial revolution will be.

Artificial Intelligence vs. Humanity

As of 2017, as noted by McKinsey&Company, humans are still better than robots in a wide spectrum of tasks and orientations. Moreover those listed were:

• Spotting new patterns
• Logical reasoning
• Creativity
• Coordination between multiple agents
• Natural language understanding
• Identifying social and emotional states
• Responding to social and emotional states
• Displaying social and emotional states
• Moving around diverse environments.

What Happens to Civil Unrest in the Big Crunch of the Workforce?

In our lifetime and when our kids become adults; we'll live in a world where AI and robots are better than us in all of the above.

Can you imagine such a world and how the workplace of the future might have changed?

It will be increasingly a world where humans adapt to AI and robots and AI become more human. Automation is just the first stage in how human beings merge and augment themselves with technology.

There are important economic, business, corporate and social issues that this will force us to solve.

 Forrester estimates that cognitive technologies, including robots, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and automation, will replace 16% of U.S. jobs by 2025.

Displacement Accelerates Past Job Creation

Bottom line; jobs will be displaced faster than new ones are created. Skills acquisition is slower than the rate of change at the beginning of the 4th Industrial revolution.

The automation economy can be said to have begun when we reach a point where jobs are shed faster than new ones that are being created.

US Department of Labor has collected a wealth of data on the future of jobs, these are the 30 fastest growing jobs in the US from 2014 – 2024.

Here's the catch, it's unclear how many of those jobs will still exist in 2035? #WorkInProgress #FutureRunDown #Automation #FutureOfWork

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Do you believe your job will be safe from automation? Are these studies accurate depictions of a potential disrupted workforce, or is the media exaggerating the claims?