When I got home from work the other day, Patti, my wife, was still smiling about a text she received that day. When she got out of a meeting and checked her phone for text messages and e-mails, this text jumped out at her, “Jeeves needs your immediate attention. His right front wheel is stuck.”
I’m sure you are wondering who “Jeeves” is, right? If you are older you might remember that “Jeeves” was a butler or gentleman’s gentleman in author P. G. Wodehouse’s stories from the early 1900s.
In our house we have no butler. Jeeves is really what Patti named our Roomba, which is an i-Robot vacuum cleaner blessed with artificial intelligence (AI). It, or should I say “he”, vacuums the whole house and sends Patti text messages as he works. He has mapped the whole house, goes under couches, beds, and dressers, and does a very good job removing pet fur from furniture legs and other places, which makes him invaluable in our house. He even returns to his charging station when his power is running low.
Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Jobs. Everywhere we turn we see artificial intelligence and automation changing the job market. And, despite what you hear from some politicians, 88% of the job losses since 2000 are due to automation, not China.
Roomba Vacuum Cleaner by i-Robot
And it isn’t just in the low wage job segments. Here are a few examples of how computers and automation are changing a few job market segments.
- Commercial airline pilots now only touch airplane controls three to five minutes per flight. During the rest of the flight they monitor data, as do people and computers on the ground. Some argue that in the future only nervous passengers will need “pilots.”
- In a very thoughtful article in The Economist we learn how oncologists are discovering that Deep Learning technology is 50% better at detecting cancerous tumors in scans that doctors and also have a zero false-negative rate compared to 7% for doctors. Many other pieces of sophisticated diagnostic equipment are being tested that will further relegate the doctor to being the one who communicates the issues with the patient, and we know how well some doctors communicate!
- Journalists are needed less and less. Fortune Magazine reported that Automated Insights now uses software to write earnings reports and sports stories. AP now uses software to generate 3,000 earnings reports per quarter at a cost of $8 per report as compared to only 300 per quarter before automation at a much higher cost.
- Ken Grady has written extensively in Seytlines, a SeyfarthLean publication, about how computer software is beginning to have a huge impact on law firms and the skill sets lawyers will need to be successful in the future. In one of his most recent posts Why Lawyers Do Not Fear Computers: The Lump of Lawyers Fallacy Grady interestingly notes that while most lawyers mistakenly discount the impact computers will have within their practices, they also are ignoring the Black Swan out there – legal software that can be used by the client INSTEAD of hiring a lawyer at all.
- As I have written before, driver-less cars in the near future will begin to replace taxi cab drivers and Uber drivers. Also at risk, though, are truck-drivers. The Dutch government recently did a driver-less truck test and you might have seen that Uber recently bought Otto, a company working on auto-drive trucks and founded by former Google AI specialists, for $680 million.
- Bricklayers will also be impacted. According to an article in The Guardian called Robots will destroy our jobs – and we’re not ready for it a company called Fastbrick Robotics has a robot named Hadrian X that lays 1,000 bricks an hour, which is about what two skilled masons can do in a little over a day.
Most experts agree that even though these professions will be impacted significantly, other job opportunities emerge. And to take advantage of the opportunities one will likely fall into one of these three groups:
- Those at the highest skill level like scientists and engineers who design and build complex things.
- Those at the lower skill level who can build and fix products designed and built by the higher skilled people.
- Most jobs in the middle will be greatly reduced or eliminated. However, there will be a need for people in the middle – people who possess communication and people skills. People who can tell stories that connect people. People who can collaborate with others. People who can translate what the computers are doing so that others understand.
And people who can listen and empathize with others. That was one thing Jeeves could do that Roomba cannot.
