Rise of the Machines: Robots are after our jobs - Part 1

I was getting my drivers license renewed a few weeks back and the process was such a pain. I had to go to five different counters and deal with rude, arrogant and disinterested officers.

I couldn't understand their arrogance. They are not particularly highly paid workers doing complex tasks.  Oh no, they are middle income workers at best doing mundane, mind numbingly simple tasks like collecting cash and giving a receipt, checking that a form was filled in correctly, taking an applicants portrait etc. In fact a computer could do absolutely everything that those of officers were doing and do them faster, more efficiently and at a lower cost.

This got me thinking - how long before a computer system takes over their jobs completely (they already use computers to aid their work). In fact in my opinion these workers were 'dead men walking' -  in other countries the process of drivers license renewal is almost completely automated. Here their jobs could be gone in a couple of years.

What I've described above is a crisis facing humanity today - technology can and will take our jobs. Not because we[humans] are lazy or unwilling to adapt to change but simply because computers[robots] can do our jobs faster, more precisely, more accurately, more efficiently and even at a lower overall costs.

A wind of change is coming and everyone needs to be thinking hard about how the digital species we have created is going to replace us in the workforce - what will it mean for our economies when millions are put out of work, what will we do when there is no more work open to humans?

Scary as this all sounds, lets try and understand this new era.

Computers [robots] are the latest development in millenia of automation and innovation by the human race. We made the wheel, the lever, the pulley . . . and we just kept going from there. Better tools augmented our life of hard physical labour. As we refined them, those tools became machines that massively multiplied our productivity and freed us from the drudgery and tyranny of physical labour.

Freed to a life of 'intellectual' labour we also built tools to aid our mental effort. Those tools evolved to the modern computer, a device that is such an integral part of our professional and social lives that we cannot imagine either without them.

However just as machines took over manual labour from humans during the industrial revolution so now in the information age computers have gotten so smart that they can and do do most tasks better than us. They no longer need to augment our mental productivity -  they can replace us all together!


So who is at risk of losing their jobs first? How will computers move to take over other jobs? What can we do about all this?

All these are questions we'e explore in my next blog post.

Please comment and share this with friends -  lets get a conversation going!