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The Future of Work: Technology Will Kill Your Job. Here’s How
Automation is transforming society at a high rate, making cities sleeker and smarter, and changing the way we work and live. Are humans destined to disappear from the workforce? Are we heading towards a jobless future?
There was a time when the word “robot” or “artificial intelligence” led us to an automatically visualization of a dystopian future landscape inside our heads. A science-fiction portrait full of dazzling flying spaceships filled with weird-looking subjects in bright metallic suits guided by tricky software commands. All worthy of an episode of Star Trek. Well, not anymore, the robot-A.I. machinery is here to stay. From the impressive — and creepy — new A.I. assistant at the last Google I/O keynote making hair salon appointments over the phone, to the robot army depicted in a viral video packing groceries in swarms. Artificial intelligence and robotics are making their way into our lives and jobs whether we want them to or not. The question is, what is next? Are we going to continue the discourse against machines or are we at the beginning of a new era of coexistence between humans and computers?
Technology has not only become more powerful, but also more tangible, so much so that the debate around automation in the workplace has staggeringly regained prominence in the past few months. By some estimates, around 800 million jobs will be taken away by 2030. That means 0 to 30 percent of the hours worked daily in the entire world will end up being automated. Jobs and work as we know them are in danger, the exponential technology curve — blame Moore’s law — grows faster every year and according to a study at least 47% of jobs might be under threat of automation. How far are we from these waves of job obsolescence?
Throughout history, the issue of job displacement has ignited concern, rage and chaos. The sentiment towards technological advances is not new, the outcome of a society where jobs have been wiped out by machine entities still elicits fear, mainly because it has happened before several times in history. From 1940 to 2010 an estimated of eight million farmer workers and seven million factory workers went out of…
