Your #Career : The Future Of Jobs- 5 Options Everyone Must Consider…There’s a Robotic Apocalypse Coming – Everyone Seems quite Certain about This. The Real & Present Danger Appears to Be about Jobs.

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“The replacement of full-time jobs has happened very slowly, in most cases,” he tells me. “For example – before the invention of the ATM, there were around half a million bank tellers in the US. Today, we have about half a million bank tellers.

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There’s a Robotic Apocalypse coming – everyone seems quite certain about this. I’m not talking about a Matrix or Terminator scenario where the human race is enslaved by AI, although some very smart people are concerned that this could happen. The real and present danger appears to be about jobs.

At first it seemed that it was mainly manual jobs which were under threat, when production lines workers were expected to be replaced wholesale with robots and machines. But in recent years huge advances in fields such as machine learning and automation have made it apparent that white collar and professional workers are equally under threat.

 

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So how should someone go about ensuring their own career prospects are not exterminated by this incoming robot army? Well, two people whose opinions I respect very much have a few suggestions. Tom Davenport and Julia Kirby’s ‘Only Humans Need Apply – Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines’ outlines a survival strategy based on aligning one’s skills within the new workforce paradigms that big data, artificial intelligence(AI) and smart machines are likely to create.

The book suggests five strategies – stepping up, stepping aside, stepping in, stepping narrowly, and stepping forward. These, suggest Davenport and Kirby, are the different ways a candidate can ensure they remain competitive against AI and smart machines in the job market.

“These are the five key roles or classes of roles that people can play, with regards to smart machines,” Davenport tells me, “and two of them – stepping aside and stepping narrowly – don’t even really involve working that closely with smart machines.”

Stepping Aside is fairly self-explanatory – it simply means leaving the machines to do what they do best, and picking a career requiring mainly skills such as creativity or empathy.

Stepping Narrowly involves developing a speciality, in a field where there is little demand or no business case for implementing automation (a local tour guide, or a wine expert specializing in a particular region, being possibilities here).

Stepping Up means taking oversight of and responsibility for the work carried out by computers and AI – essentially becoming their boss, and considering the big picture strategy of implementing technology across an organization.

Stepping In means to become involved with the work being carried out by machines, to fine-tune and provide human oversight in areas where it is still needed. Real world examples here could be an accountant trained to spot errors caused by an automated system, or an ad buyer who can spot when a brand could be damaged by a particular placement, for reasons a robot might not comprehend.

Lastly, Stepping Forward is to work on developing the next generation of robotic and AI-driven technology. Robots can solve problems for us, but we still need to tell them what problems need solving. It still takes a human to understand that automation will be of benefit to a particular area of business, and a human to put together a strategy for automating that section.

Davenport is happy to admit that he and his co-author’s take on the robopocalypse is, if not more optimistic, then slightly less pessimistic, than many fellow commentators.

“The replacement of full-time jobs has happened very slowly, in most cases,” he tells me. “For example – before the invention of the ATM, there were around half a million bank tellers in the US. Today, we have about half a million bank tellers.

“So people are pretty good about finding other things to do when key tasks like dispensing cash and so on get taken over by machines. So my argument is that there will be some job losses but they will be marginal rather than dramatic, and the people who are good at working with machines will probably do fairly well at least for a while.”

And this ability to work in partnership with emerging smart technology is absolutely key to the book’s message. The robots may not be here to take your job and leave you destitute, but you’d better be sure you take notice of them.

Co-author, senior editor at Harvard University Press Julia Kirby, tells me “We’re largely looking at this from the standpoint of the worker as we feel that they should be preparing for a changed workplace.

“They are going to have all of these machines working side by side with them, and it isn’t necessarily going to be done for them … we’re saying, look, you need to make some decisions and take some action at an individual level, rather than just leaving it to your employer or, God forbid, society, to sort all this out.”

Ultimately the book’s message is a hopeful one. By pursuing augmentation over automation, industry will free up human power to do what we are best at – innovate and create – while leaving robots and smart machines to crunch numbers and keep everything ticking along behind the scenes.

Kirby also envisages something of a “two tier” system of services emerging, where a low end, mundane level of service will be provided by computers, with human endeavor reserved for higher profile assignments. An example would be media coverage of a tennis tournament, where the early rounds would be covered by an automatic report generating system, with a human journalist assigned to covering the finals and semi finals.

It is a refreshing take on the much discussed topic of what the long term social consequences of widespread integration of AI and automation into our workplace will be. Most importantly, it is highly refreshing to see someone tackling the issue through the medium of a practical guide, rather than simple doom-mongering. Yes, some people will find themselves unemployed in the near future because their employers will work out it is cheaper and more effective to use a smart machine than to pay their salary, pension and healthcare. If you want to minimize the risk of being one of them, it could be a good idea to take a look at the book.

Bernard Marr is a best-selling author & keynote speaker. His new book: ‘Big Data in Practice: How 45 Successful Companies Used Big Data Analytics to Deliver Extraordinary Results‘

 

Forbes.com | June 9, 2016 | Bernard Marr