Is your job safe or will AI & Robots take over?

We all love the sci-fi idea of robots and them taking over the world! It’s fun, far-fetched and …a little unnerving now that it is becoming a reality!

Reading some technical articles yesterday, I found the common themes are that yes, actually, robots will be taking over many of the jobs we know today, the jobs PEOPLE hold today! Not just one article form one source, but several - all with the same focus of strategies we need to develop now to counteract this. 

Now, as a person-focussed service provider this is more than a little worrying! I also see the trends that people don’t have enough self-esteem and confidence that holds them back from exploring their potential and their options in careers and business. I also see that people don’t actually use the various techniques and tools they could access to develop their options and their minds and skills; I do, because I love to learn - find out new information, explore ideas and perceptions - understand how people think and feel.  It's who I am.

But others maybe not that interested in knowing more about themselves and their options, and this will leave us cold as the human race if we rely on robots and automation even more than we do right now!  

We WILL lose our minds - "Use it or lose it", a belief that dementia treatments highlight;

We WILL lose our opportunities to grow, learn, develop new ideas and 'self-actualise' i.e. the idea that we strive to 'find our Self' through exploring options and opportunities, through trying and achieving, learning from mistakes and mentally growing - developing more and more neuron connections that build our minds and out futures!

The focus will be then, on how we work human alongside robots - robots doing a lot of the routine work (…that take up the majority of people in employment now perhaps?!) and could lead to a technocractic elite that lead the world!  

So, like 1984 was once a futuristic story - AI and the space films now ARE becoming our reality now!  Not true? If you read the book, watched the film or at least know the story, Big Brother is watching you was the key point - and here it is with Facebook reading your phone and hearing your calls; Microsoft know your every move and interest with Windows 10; there are CCTV cameras everywhere, some you don’t even notice on the street or cafes, some you do like the roads and motorways! Even Instagram, is it, that can pinpoint your whereabouts every second and SHARE it with whoever wants to know; not to mention the spyware you can put onto anyones phone if you have hold of it for a few minutes - without them even knowing they are being monitored!  

I don’t know about you but I find it quite frightening the power 'they' (the they always in films, and unfaced, unnamed group of people 'in control') have over me and my life!  I can't even choose what to see on my Facebook anymore, it's chosen for me and thrust under my nose!I can't choose how to display my emails that I could only a couple of years ago! 

I am the generation that has 'grown up with technology' - we have evolved together, side by side!  My children are part of the technology and control today, they know no different. I remember it 'coming in' to being, I remember the first machines taking over my jobs, the first time I found the godsend (Freudian slip there?!) that was Word processing as my typing was never easy to complete without that mistake on the last line of my page! Arrgghhh!

I have literally grown up with it - from TVs, through phone to mobiles, to machines that type from speech I only heard of when I was a young secretary in my first roles!  It's here.  I could, if I chose, do that daily on my phone or computer to dial, find, even write what I need! We have already lost the ability to think for ourselves because the till does it for the shop assistant, the books that talk so we don’t need to read (oh but we do! We should!) and the calculator that adds and subtracts more than just numbers for us!

I think it's a sad loss, and will get worse. I love to develop my mind, explore my options, find new ways to achieve things, and try new tools! It's fun, exciting, stimulating - interesting!

What happens when we don’t need to think? When most people don’t thin, just do the very basics? Well, then, that is when robots WILL take over the world - because we let them. And just a few tech-savvy people will have the power they crave - and there won't be Bond, James Bond or Spiderman to save us, will there?  We're handing it over to them already…

Further Reading:

• Scifi eye - Jon Wallace article  on the 'human implant' - his novel might come true!
• Stuart Nathan on PARC in The Engineer
• Viewpoint: The Engineer April 2017 - Prof Noel Sharkey & Dr Aimee van Wynsberghe