Is your job safe?
With technology advancing each day, we now have drones, self-driving cars, and artificial intelligence. Many are questioning if robots will end up taking our jobs. The short answer is some will be replaced, but not all. Research leader Gartner predicts that AI will create 2.3 million jobs while eliminating 1.8 million.
Technology has already been used for years to assist us with monotonous or dangerous jobs.
An ATM is essentially a machine that counts money, yet there are more bank tellers now than ever before. The repetitive task of counting each bill has been made easier with the help of technology. ATMs also lowered the cost of opening branches. This allows banks to open more branches and hire more employees. Even though some jobs will be replaced, the industry may be entering a more fulfilling era of employment.
With the help of newer technological advances, we can focus on more fulfilling parts of our jobs.
This allows us to specialize in what we personally excel at. A century ago most of us would have been farming, which surprisingly now only makes up about 2% of the workforce. With the help of robots in agriculture, we can now focus on getting jobs that revolve more around our interests and skill set instead of focusing on survival.
In the upcoming future, we should see many new opportunities that AI will have created for us. “In the current era of business process improvement, AI systems are not replacing us; they are amplifying our skills and collaborating with us to achieve performance gains that have previously not been possible,” write Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson in their new book, Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI.
Creating a culture of continuous learning is how we will get to a new economy that gives more people an opportunity to prosper. Technology will continue to make our lives easier, from GPS systems and timers on coffee pots to the jobs we work every day.