Technology is taking our jobs

18

October

2018

5/5 (1)

As the global population is rising, the demand for products and services is also increasing. Especially in fast growing economies, like China.  For example, the demand for clothing is expected to rise due to the migration into the middle class and they are starting to see their clothing as an expression of themselves (Keller et al, 2014). 75% of sales in the luxury goods segment will come from Chinese customers by 2020 (Keller et al, 2014).

This example is just to give you an idea of how much we need to start producing to keep up with the rising demand. In the past years machines have been taking over jobs in all kinds of industries. Automation and robotics took over jobs in production lines, chatbots started to do the work of customer service employees and 3d printing started to take over the assembly lines. Ofcourse these innovations help greatly in terms of speed, efficiency and accuracy. Furthermore they also create jobs in different sectors like IT, but according to Rotman (2013), these technologies are destroying jobs faster than creating them, which contributes to inequality and stagnating growth in the median income.

This can be illustrated in the following graph, displaying productivity and employment. the lines have been closely together in the years between the second world war and 2000, afterwards the gap has been becoming larger by the year, this is also called ‘The great decoupling’ (Rotman, 2013).

 

Screenshot 2018-10-18 at 11.48.14 AM

Jack Ma, Alibaba’s CEO also said in a video that people should be taught things that differentiate us from machines, like music, sports and art. This to make sure that humans remain different from machines and are irreplaceable by any machine. This is because in the past 200 years, humanity has been learning things that are knowledge based, instead of the soft parts mentioned by Jack Ma. We simply cannot teach our kids to compete with machines, because they are smarter, every time.

 

Sources:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/succeeding-in-tomorrows-global-fashion-market

Please rate this

AI you are welcome to steal my job!

26

September

2017

5/5 (3)

Almost a century ago, in 1930, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes made a prediction that technology would make us so productive that a major problem we will face will be “how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest will have won for him, wisely and agreeably and well?” (Keynes, 1933).

Nowadays, with the rise of new technologies, machines, and artificial intelligences, many people are starting to thing that he was right and that AI-powered robots are going to steal their jobs. But is that really true? Will AI really make us all unemployed?

 

Of course it is certainly true that the always-improving technologies will render several human jobs redundant and unnecessary. For instance, the United Kingdoms have announced that, by the end of the year, they would release a “fleet of driverless lories” to be trialled on the UK’s motorways (Swinford and Krol, 2017). Autonomous car technology has already successfully being tested in other European countries, and we can expect it to render many jobs (e.g. truck and taxi drivers) irrelevant in the future. Similarly, robots and AI have a non-negligible impact on many other industries, especially in production processes.

 

However, even if automation will undoubtedly steal away many of our jobs, it is not really a problem. In fact, it has already happened before. As Kurzeil, director of engineering at Google Ray, said during his interview with Fortune, around 1900, most people worked in farms and factories, but most of these jobs don’t exist anymore nowadays (Lev-ram, 2017). Nevertheless, most people are still employed, because for each job eliminated, new ones were created. The same is likely to happen in our technological era; it is just too soon to see what the career landscape will look like in 5 or 10 years, which can be quite unsettling.

 

So does that mean that there is no need to worry about the future, and that everyone will still be able to easily find a job? I believe not. Indeed, as technology evolves and reshape or take over human tasks, the knowledge needed to perform these modified or completely new jobs change as well. The question is, will people have the necessary to perform these new tasks? Whereas us Bimmers are lucky enough to learn about subjects relevant for the future (e.g. Machine learning, Big data), I don’t believe that it is the case for all students, and even less for currently employed people.

I will finish by asking you what you think we could do to address this skill gap? What could we do to ensure that current employees have an easier transition from one occupation to another? Let me in the comments!

 

References:

  • Keynes, J. M. (1933). Economic possibilities for our grandchildren (1930). Essays in persuasion, 358-73.
  • Lev-Ram, M. (2017). Futurist Ray Kurzweil Isn’t Worried About Technology Stealing Your Job. [online] Fortune.com. Available at: http://fortune.com/2017/09/24/futurist-ray-kurzweil-job-automation-loss/ [Accessed 26 Sep. 2017].
  • Swartz, J. (2017). Businesses say they just can’t find the right tech workers. [online] USA TODAY. Available at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/03/28/tech-skills-gap-huge-graduates-survey-says/99587888/ [Accessed 26 Sep. 2017].
  • Swinford, S. and Krol, C. (2017). Fleets of ‘driverless’ lorries will be trialled on Britain’s motorways from next year, Government announces. [online] The Telegraph. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/24/fleets-driverless-lorries-will-trialled-britains-motorways-next/ [Accessed 26 Sep. 2017].

 

Please rate this