Technological Unemployment

And the Rise of Era of the Entrepreneur

There has been an increasing amount of debate and discussion over how smarter technology is leading to unemployment in various sectors. Remember, that we are just at the beginning of the information age, and can expect this to become a mainstream topic in the years to come. 

It's also become fashionable as competition for good jobs becomes fiercer to try to strike it out on one's own or in small teams to become an Entrepreneur or startup company. Just go on Instagram and check out hashtags like #entrepreneur or #hustle or #success, and you will find many of them revolves around motivational-speak that marks an increasing interest and turning towards the idea, challenge and DIY variety of being an Entrepreneur.

Imagine for a minute, this easy to understand scenario. You work in sales, you think you are good at your job, you make 30-60 outbound calls a day, do some social selling on LinkedIn and Twitter, conduct some Email marketing campaigns, do some lead generation on the side. What if there was a simple app Entrepreneurs could use in a few years time, that could do all this for them and perform better than you?

As a futurist, AI in the workplace is one of my favorite topics. We are no strangers to technological tools helping us out in enterprise, the importance of IT, the cloud, communications systems. Heck, most offices still use old-school Email. What if, I told you the next 10 years will see more disruption in the office than ever before, than in the previous 50 years combined? Would you be comfortable with that? Have you adapted to the mobile digital world. 

Technological unemployment, is well a whole different chimera, a real disruptor. It's coming via software, with apps that will do more for less. While each decade brings more automation, when machine learning reaches a critical point, what we'll start to see is a lot of our jobs become change, our old skill-sets become obsolete, some of us are liable to lose our jobs or be forced to change careers. I'm not really exaggerating. 

 Former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Harvard economics professor Lawrence Summers stated in 2014 that he no longer believed automation would always create new jobs and that "This isn’t some hypothetical future possibility. This is something that’s emerging before us right now." 

So if this comes to pass, and a lot of us are out of jobs, what will we do? We'll have the opportunity to create new ones. But they won't necessarily work in the conventional sense. Your labor won't be owned, salaried and your time divvied up 9 to 5. Working smarter will become so much more important than back in the blue collar era where "hard work" was the holy grail of career development. That's where AI comes in, and that's how many of us in what we do today, become obsolete or at-least this drastically changes how we do our jobs. Consider today, that in tomorrow's information and attention economy: 

AI-Powered Apps Will Be A Gold Rush For The Entrepreneur

It's an important realization to make, some of you will have made it 10 years ago, others won't for another 5 years. While boomers retire, Millennials will have a new kind of workplace to navigate and negotiate. What services and good can you provide, how can you make a living doing it? What hourly rate will you have to charge to make ends meet? How will your reputation and professional competency be managed digitally and how will your financial transactions take place?

Specialized enterprise utility apps will have embedded AI, what this means is these narrowly focused “brains” will be optimized to perform specialized tasks within a narrow domain, AI-powered apps will not just be interfaces and intelligent personal agents, they will be "doers". Think of an entire marketing automation platform on a desktop, compressed into a mobile app. Think of a self-management company with entire departments like accounting, sales and even marketing optimized technologically for "essential personal only". Imagine the rise of Entrepreneurs that this future reality suggests. 

Employees will manage apps and "doers" that do the "work" and are specialized to tasks. The concept of the office drone, will disappear.

The unskilled or vulnerable Labor Force

When your service labor force & manufacturers & customer service department disappears, what happens to them? If you are unemployed for over a year and give up looking for a job, after one year, you are not counted in the "employment rates" statistics you hear about. What do you imagine the true unemployment rates of some countries are considering how the numbers can be skewed?

Unemployment rate in member states of the European Union in June 2015 (seasonally adjusted)

For people under 25, these rates are dramatically higher. The youth unemployment rate problem in many countries is one of the more important and least talked about social problems today. Hang on a sec, I think we have a picture for you below: 

Youth unemployment rate in EU member states as of June 2015 (seasonally adjusted)

So let me reshape this, even before an era of Technological unemployment, it's clear the economy isn't working quite right, just to give you a snapshot of Europe as a microcosm for the world. To imagine, this is the place where migrants in Africa or Syria actually want to live. They want to go to Germany, what then?

Back to Technological Unemployment 

•  Changes in the workforce will result in a loss of jobs, most dramatic perhaps between 2020 - 2035. 
• The top 1% most $ economically prosperous will see the gap continue to rise between them and the rest. 
• The Middle class in many countries will suffer, if not be reduced in terms of the % of the whole. 
• This shift we will affect great masses of people who will struggle, which will create civil unrest/riots and possible confrontations with the "state". 
• Corporations will continue to exert a greater control over institutions, society, politics and government until some countries may become Technological Police States, rather than viable democracies where the average person's vote means anything at all. 

What We See Today

You may be asking where is the evidence of this so called disruptive technological unemployment, what does it arrive?

If we define AI-powered business applications as software in which the user experience is driven by AI. Today, today it takes the form of voice (Apple Siri), text-based interfaces (x.ai’s Amy) or intelligent notifications (Google Now). Not so impressive, even if Siri is hopefully a little smarter. But as machine learning evolves, these apps will become executers of tasks that humans do now, that they will be able to do better. 

They won't have lazy days, they won't get bored of their job and you won't have to pay them. Fair enough, 

At the 2014 Davos meeting, Thomas Friedman reported that the link between technology and unemployment seemed to have been the dominant theme of that years discussions. A survey at Davos 2014 found that 80% of 147 respondents agreed that technology was driving jobless growth

Ironically, startups will be the pioneers of the first major disruptor apps: 

Startup activity will accelerate rapidly over the next two years as entrepreneurs identify new business processes to automate. Kevin Kelly of Wired states it with spirit: “The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI.” 

In the future, software is pervasive in our environment, every device and object around us is connected to an Internet of Things (IoT), sensors are everywhere and there are apps for everything.  Most people will work and shop from home, and even our social life will be governed mostly by apps. Not just social media, but dating and friendship apps that incorporate predictive analytics and algorithms that ensure the best quality of experience. 

I'm currently technically, unemployed, but as a content marketing freelancer, consultant to startups and writer, I'm starting to realize how we'll have to adapt to technological unemployment. 

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Michael Spencer helps companies improve their content marketing, social media, viral marketing and user-generated content initiatives. He is especially interested in helping innovative startups with their digital marketing needs. 

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