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].
