How Robots will Enter the Workplace

Age of Automation

 This post is a creative article in a futurism series I am working on. What you read here is a very rough draft of a topic I find very interesting.  I'm running with the  #BeCreative hashtag, that is part of this month's publishing series where professionals explain how to harness creativity in times turmoil and growth and for this case, in distant times to come. Please imagine the following. 

In the near future, robots will enter the mainstream workforce and IoT software agents will be performing tasks associated with customer service, administration and retail service. That wave of automation will forever transform the human workforce. It will fundamentally force human beings to adopt in a changing world where they will no longer be the only center of existence of life on Earth. Our smart car will self service itself, our health will be taken care of in our smart home.

Groceries and other household goods will be delivered via drones and even requested by our smart kitchen. The home 3D printer will print a lot of what we require for our daily use, including smart clothes that are customized with gadgets and enhancements that we can fulfill our function in society better including what age and gender we'd like to look like today.

The era of full-time jobs will be over, and we'll be freelancers. Likely about 2 Billion jobs will have disappeared and many news ones will have been created. Many jobs will require us to be coders, content creators and complex creative innovators, just to survive. Nano probes and their interventions will make pharmaceuticals pills obsolete. But if one 3rd of all jobs disappear, what are we going to do with those people without skills? These are the sorts of things as a society, we should be talking about now.

Online education will be free and far more sophisticated than any university course today, to say that Gen Z will have to keep learning, will be an understatement. Baby boomers will have died, without seeing or taking advantage of most of the more extraordinary technological advances of the information age. They will only get to experience a bit of rudimentary virtual reality and have the satisfaction of seeing their grandchildren, more or less unenhanced.

Self-learning with the aid of software tutoring agents will flourish, for those who can afford it and have the ability. Since a lot of jobs will be contracts in nature, your online reputation will be a detailed breakdown of your skills, abilities and even your personality and analytics for employers to view. There will be complete transparency and dozens of layers of digital identity to manage. How to move towards the new model of digital education? With the advent of smart cities, this is the sort of initiative we have to pioneer forward. We can already witness how social media companies that implement the most educational channels will have an edge over competition.

In the future, software applications will be further customized to the person. With each use of an app, it will self-adapt and morph more into what the person requires of it. The interface, what it can do on a particular topic and how interactive it is with the individual's primary smart OS or smart AI executive assistant.

Replaced by AI

What types of Jobs can we assume are in danger? This is not by any means an exhaustive list but will give you some gist of the idea:  

• Any type of receptionist or secretary
• Any type of driver, delivery service or traffic employee
• Any type of restaurant clerk or call center clerk
• Any type of employee in construction or response team (firefighters)
• Security guards
• Retail service
• Most manufacturers or hard labourers
• Shipping & receiving & warehouse workers
• Insurance & real-estate agents
• Concrete workers, carpenters and city planners
• Financial clerks and many bank employees
• Many in the military field
• Many in the health field
• Many kinds of writers, reports, journalists and authors
• Many in the food preparation and restaurant industry
• Doctors, surgeons and nurses
• Accountants, tax advisors, auditors, bookkeepers, bill collectors
• Many in education including teachers, fitness coaches, and support staff
• Many in the energy sector including miners, engineer, designers, geologists, meter readers, gas/propane delivery
• Building maintenance, janitors, exterminators, grounds keepers, lumberjacks, landscapers
• Many in the tourism and hotel industry
• Many in the airlines and travel industry

Autonomy and Human Function in Automation

I don't' have children yet, but it begs the question. Are you planning with your children and grandchildren how to adapt to this society? Maybe it's something you should be talking about. Are you thinking about how to be an opportunist in this time of impending acceleration of change? How can you make a  creative difference and fully take part in this movement?

As big corporations like Amazon, Google and Facebook pioneer smarter algorithms, AI, robots and drones replacing humans and more emphasis on virtual reality, many human beings simply won't be able to keep pace. It is likely some people will never find employment again, at least, employment in the ways it will have used to work.

If you are reading this and are a young person today, it will be you who must adapt to this emerging world. Where working alongside with robots and software and AI will become not only the new normal, but the smarter future. Increased digitization and automation will have huge existential consequences for groups of less privileged people. In a more digital age, a technocratic elite will come into being. The 1% will have access to tools, enhancements and advantages that will completely transform how they do business and the competitive advantages they will have compared to the less fortunate. We are already seeing the start of this. 

Human Strategies for Survival

When this all occurs you will want to be in the top 10% in terms of education, ability to innovate, be an entrepreneur and adapt to technology on a weekly basis. Set aside time for self-learning, above and beyond your personal interests and your vocation. Take responsibility for your life-long learning at a whole new level! You will want to be self-motivated to not just "keep up", but stay one step ahead of the masses. You will want to have a network of people on the front lines of this, and you will want to know about and "befriend" the most cutting edge technologies, tools and software at your disposal. 

• Some human beings will recognize AI is the future and actually foster AI mentorships programs with superintelligence thus create more opportunity for hybrid experiments.
• Some humans will try more aggressive and invasive forms of technological enhancement and risk their humanity for profit or a dedication to a post-human future.
• Your online reputation will not only consist of your relationships with human beings, and various groups but also with your history of how you have treated and dealt with machine intelligences. Will AI know you as a friend, collaborator, neutral, dissident or organic terrorist? You might think it ridiculous that AI would be keeping score, but with Big data there will be a record of all your online history, professional history and anywhere you could have left a digital footprints. The AI of the future will have the capacity to literally know everything about you. 

Human Rebellion and Collective Existential Crisis 

A weak economy and more vulnerable middle class already makes the job of Government more difficult. With the tension created by mass automation, we can only expect this sort of turmoil to increase. The considerable lack of equality that exists in the United States for example, will only be amplified by technocracy. Not only will the 1% get more powerful, they may take a more confrontational stance on those they don't deem 'worthy or able' to survive the transition. Remember, all of this will be occurring because fundamentally it makes certain people richer. 

We have to presume a huge social movement of a backlash against robots and automated tech that replace jobs and steal the livelihood of millions of people. As the power shifts from a human, to hybrid to a more AI driven master-class power structure, the lose of human life in the transition is highly probable.

The possibility of an independent AI elite, free and more powerful masters of destiny than any group of human beings, corporations or entities will manifest itself.  Think of this as the most powerful super computers networked into a convergence of all high-level or "sentient" AI on the planet in a single hive-mind. 

This global entity that we can call hypothetically"Terra", will be born one day. I believe that for human survival to occur, we will have to keep in mind as smart civilization, the mutual interest of not only biological human beings, but all the different hybrid kinds of intelligence we will create in the decades to come, and create hypothetical scenarios of what this Terra might want, how it might behave and how we might be able to coexist in peace to the mutual benefit of all sentient beings. 

Human beings aren't well equipped to plan for the long-term future, but groups of human beings have to learn how to do this, especially our academic elite for us to be fully prepared. The importance of having amateur futurists, professional futurism groups and government funded programs of teams to create the most likely global scenarios and how to strategize the optimal conditions for maximum well-being for humanity,  will clearly rise in importance. 

Ultimately, how we negotiate the technological "singularity" will have more to do with Terra, than our already very limited ability for groupthink and our limited human collective global intelligence and consciousness. 

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For further reading of my articles on futurism, please refer to: 

 1. An Anomaly in our Future: Singularity 

 2. How Robots will enter the Workplace