Robots are taking our jobs right now!

I spoke at a meetup in Melbourne for HR professionals thinking about the impact of digital and technology on how we will work in future.

I’m sure you imagine the future like the image above. A lot like today, but cool electric cars buzzing us around, robots doing all the stuff we don’t want to and life is easy. I’m sure we all imagine it’s far, far away from now.

But it’s not.

The robots are here right now and they’re taking away jobs fast. My job isn’t safe and neither is yours .

Autonomous Trucks

Autonomous trucks are actively being tested as we speak to reduce the costs of transport across the USA. This will affect one of the few middle-class jobs still available without a college degree and impact 3.5 million truckers. The impact is massive. The hidden impact is the ecosystem surrounding and supporting these workers. Think about the service stations, restaurants in small towns, motels, hotels, and everything that a human truck driver consumes every day.

Truckers? Gone.
Probably within 3 to 5 years.

Drones

What about drones? Contrary to popular belief, these are not only magic flying selfie sticks! Farmers are huge early adopters of this technology. From locating and counting livestock, crop spraying to soil monitoring and seed-planting, drones are being used in smart ways to replace labour.

Planters, crop-dusters, people selling and servicing the crop-duster planes, labourers. Gone.

3D Printers

We can now print full scale houses using 3D Printing. When all you need is concrete and a portable 3d printer and a few people to do fixtures and fittings, what happens to construction workers and the ecosystem around them?

Construction workers? Gone.

AI

Artificial intelligence startups and research is hot right now, as is the amount of money pouring into them. The easy targets are the jobs of financial traders and personal assistants. clara.ai and x.ai are good examples of why you need to reskill right now if you’re a personal assistant.

Traders. Personal assistants. Gone

IBM Watson is currently ingesting all the worlds medical information to help with medical diagnoses. Watson has already surpassed the accuracy of humans in diagnosing lung cancer (90% vs 50% for humans)

Radiologists. Gone
Doctors. Soon.

Sex Robots

Porn has formed a huge part of the Beta to VHS to CD-Rom to Internet to HD Streaming revolution over the last few decades. Combining realistic robots with natural language processing and virtual reality, sex robots are going to be thing very soon.

Sex workers. Pimps. Brothels. Gone

Hyper speed travel with the Hyperloop

After hearing Dirk Ahlborn from Hyperloop Transportation Technologies speak at a Rocketspace event in San Francisco, I’m convinced this technology will be part of our lives in the next ten years. What happens to the price of real estate and office space when we can live 100km away and be at work in ten minutes? What happens to the existing road and rail infrastructure, and the ecosystem that supports them, including all the jobs?

Real estate agents. Train, bus, tram and taxi drivers. Gone

Robots

Pepper the Robot is an excellent example of an interactive robot that can replace shop assistants, waiters, flight attendants and booking agents right now. Aged care is another good example of robot workers in the home.

Aged care workers, shop assistants, flight attendants, booking agents. Gone

Programmers

Nodelab and many others are working on projects to replace the holy grail of jobs, the engineers themselves.

Engineers. Gone.

Delivery Robots

Dominos in Australia is trailing pizza delivery robots right now.

Delivery drivers. Gig economy food delivery. Gone.

Predictable physical work is most at risk

This paints a beak picture of the near future, but which types of jobs are at risk? According to McKinsey, predictable physical work is most at risk. This ranges from data collection to repeatable physical tasks, which now include driving and doctoring! As technology advances, ‘predictable’ allows machines to perform more and more complex tasks.

The impact on the job ecosystem

When we think of jobs at risk, it’s normally in isolation. The problem is jobs don’t exist in isolation. When you start thinking about the interdependencies it gets really scary.

A trucker loses their job, which impacts: all the people that do roadside food, accomodation, everyone maintaining these businesses, service stations, truck cabins where humans used to sit, steer and sleep. Think this through for all the jobs above and the compound effect is massive.

Are you and you family, children, co-workers and staff safe?

My job didn’t exist 4 years ago and I believe your job, and the jobs of everyone you know won’t exist within 5 years.

I urge you to start thinking about:

• How can you design your future job?
• How do you educate and prepare your children for this future?
• Understand how your job relates to any jobs at risk
• Learn how to manage a workforce that is 50% technology. How do you manage an autonomous fleet of cars, drones, robots, ai’s and humans?
• Get used to working from anywhere.
• What can we do about the inevitable social friction that will arise. Look how the taxi industry has reacted around the world to Uber. Instead of innovating, they are striking and legislating.
• How can we create a universal basic income to prepare for robots taking our jobs?
• How can you invest in robots or technology so you own the fleet of robots to secure a future income for yourself?

The scary part is that everything you’ve read is happening right now. I’ll introduce two more innovation examples in my next post.

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