Rise of the Machines: Robots are after our jobs - Part 3

No More 'White Collar' Popping???

I remember watching a video of Jacques Fresco, founder of the Venus Project discussing how computer technology would free humans to pursue 'the higher things'. I assume he meant we would focus on intellectually stimulating and challenging forms of work like scientific research, re-organization of a Utopian society, fine arts and advanced engineering. 

Sadly Jacques was wrong. With advances in AI that were once on the bleeding edge of technology having gone mainstream - computers will do and have started doing 'the higher things'.

This means careers that were once lucrative for highly trained humans can now be done by computers. First through complex software applications that augmented white collar work but now with advanced AI engines that have learned from human experts and experience and can now autonomously perform the same work much faster, more accurately.

No where has this been more true than in the insanely complex world of Financial Services.

Goldman Sachs have famously [notoriously] replaced 600 highly paid traders with 200 developers whose job it is to build and maintain high frequency trading software. Across the industry between 45%-80% (depending on who you ask) of stock is traded by such intelligent high frequency AI traders that can push through trades much faster than humans can and even exploit potential gains in milliseconds.  Human traders simply cannot compete. Thanks to Machine Learning algorithms they deploy, AI traders can get better and better at understanding market reaction to events and hence tailor their activity to make smarter moves.

Another technology aiding the the robot charge on white collar jobs is the advancements made in the field of data processing. We live in a world where we generate millions of Tera-bytes of data of all kinds everyday. The field Big Data has made processing these unfathomably large data sets in and using them to make business decisions. It is simply impossible for humans to analyze data sets that are so overwhelming enormous, yet big data engines are doing it in real time and generating predictive analytics that are being used to make business (and even governance, social and economic) decisions. Basically Analysts of all types are being put out of the job. 

An example of this is how data on the on-line behavior of consumers - every link clicked, website visited, search term entered - is being used by advertisers to predict what products and services they might be interested in by way of Big Data predictive analytics and Machine Learning. Traditional human marketers would have to do long tedious and often 'semi-accurate' market research, pilot studies and crowd sourcing to reach the same result. 

Traditional human product marketers, business analysts, market researchers etc across a range of industries are being replaced by Big Data predictive analytics. 

The field of medical diagnostics and treatment are also under exploration. IBM's 'artificial doctor' named Watson is being trialled in diagnostics and is proving at least as accurate as human doctors and often better at picking up diagnosis that human doctors missed.

IBM are also working on an AI lawyer named Ross. In fact he it is being trailed by a few law firms. While Ross may start out doing the more tedious tasks in lawyering like research and contract review (thanks to Big Data and Natural Language Processing), he it will undoubtedly be trailed and move on to the more complex tasks of client advisory, jury selection and even outcome prediction (remember computers already do predictive analytics well). 

These are a few of the tens of examples I came across. Perhaps you have some that you think we should discuss - post a comment, I'd like to hear from you.

With everything we have discussed in the last few posts, this should not be the end of work for human beings. Work is so fundamental to our sense of purpose and our society is organised around labour for money -  no work = no money, no money = destitution.

Now before you think everything is doom and gloom - lets take a step back. Work has also evolved over the millennia that we have been on earth. So although we a have not faced such a radical change to our society like this before we can be sure that given the right mindset we can adapt to change.

My next blog post will look at just that!!!!!!! :)