Robots are getting smarter?!
We are too all familiar with those 20xx technology trends on Forbes, Gartner and New York Time... whether it's big data, virtual reality, driverless cars, Artificial Intelligence, it feels that they increasingly pointing to the same direction and destiny: machines are getting smarter and smarter, soon enough, machines will be able to replace us with most of the jobs we do! Martin Ford in his book The Rise of Robotics gives a rather detailed narrative of how intelligent robots/programs/machines will make a large fraction of the workforce especially knowledge workforce obsolete.
His book is well supported by research and academic studies most notably the findings by Oxford University researches that close to 50% of US jobs are susceptible to automation in the next two decades.
Read the research paper here
People are afraid of change!
For a long time even now for many, these trends, these jargons AI, Cloud are like high school sex, everybody is talking about it, but nobody actually did it. We talk about them to feel that we are current, but deep down we don't believe or we don't want to believe that they are relevant to us, our jobs and our lives. Fundamentally we fear change. My approach is to look at the inevitable future in two perspectives:
- really understand what is the inevitable future, in a conceptually level understand technologies and its applications
- What can I do about it to stay relevant in the future
This time the rise of robots or artificial intelligence or smart machines are different from the industrial revolution, different from machine arms replacing assembly line workers, and different from digitalization of our workplace.
The fundamental difference is this time the robots / machines or AI whatever you call them, they possess the ability to learn and evolve.
The base Algorithm programmed into these machines are adaptive just like humans, with the large amount of data (big data) feeding into it, it has the ability to re-program itself to get better at solving problems and whatever it's meant to do. For example machines can learn the emails you write, your social media response etc. - the style, the tone, the logic... and soon enough automatically write response email on your behalf.
What's the relevance to me?
There will be two direct consequence of this:
- some of our daily tasks and work will be automated. I'm talking about white-collar jobs. it's predicted that 90% of the news in the future will be written by machines.
- The structure of organizations and collaboration will be changed. the middle layer, middle managers, analysts, administrators, who adds value by processing, manipulating and presenting information may not continue to have value. An executive or manager with a bunch of software programs/workers will be sufficient in processing large amount of information, making decision, and producing goods and services.
This may come as phases. Workfusion is one of the kind. It analyses which tasks can be automated, which needs to be outsourced to contractors, it coordinates the work, escalates if not completed on time, and it's not finished yet, it learns as human contractors completes their tasks and soon enough it will be able to semi-automate then completely automate that part of jobs as well.
With white-collar jobs disappearing, the middle class will disappear too, leaving people who have capital, who are innovation and thought leaders will be going to the top, while the rest will remain or drop to the bottom. This is the inevitable future, and it might happen sooner than we can imagine, especially when this is by nature driven by Moor's law - computing power doubles every 18 month. It's been 27 years since Moor's law takes effect. So it's been doubling 27 times.
What does it look like?
so if you drive a car 5 miles per hour, a minute later you double your speed to 10 miles, a minute later you double your speed again to 20 miles, 5 minutes later you already driving the fastest car in the world. And in the 27th minute, you are drivign 6.7 billion miles per hour, and 5-6 minutes later you will be on Mars!
The big divide
This is the beginning or perhaps already middle (but I just woken up now hopefully not too late) of the big divide. Technology has made a lot of things a lot easier, a lot more accessible such as information and knowledge. We can be so consumed by technology, many people will spend more time on facebook, playing pokeman go, nothing wrong with that, but remember while you are doing that, the machines are learning more knowledge and getting better at what we are doing. There will also be a lot of people (far fewer) though, developing new insights, new knowledge, new capabilities everyday. Something that machines are very difficult to replace human completely is creativity, innovation and making complex judgment or prediction of the future.
The journey of developing those insights and capability will be long and dull at times, and there is no guarantee you will be on the upside, but sure enough if you are not persistently improving and developing the right capabilities you will be made irrelevant.
I will devote the rest of the series exploring and sharing these inevitable technologies in a level that's relevant to our personal and especially to our professional lives, and more importantly figure out how we can stay relevant.
我是BetteC, 白天我穿梭于新西兰和澳洲的大小城市, 为科技化信息化添砖加瓦, 晚上我跟大家一起思维升级. 如果你喜欢我的文章，请打赏请转发:)
