Automation is slowly becoming the new big thing in business and some people are worried they will be out of a job in a few years time. Is that possible?
Well, yes. It is, but it doesn’t mean that it will happen. Gartner estimates that in just three years time, 20% of business content for the media will be written by robots. Intelligent algorithms already generate articles about the stock exchanges, the weather and other trivial news items. Would this mean that some journalists will be out of a job in just three years time? Probably no.
Editors have already said, that they look forward to the day where most of the trivial articles will be written by robots. This will free up the time of the journalists to work on bigger and more complex projects and investigations, creating better content. It will also ease the stress on them. So it should be very beneficial.
The thing is, no one really knows for sure. This is something that hasn’t happened before and it could very well go either way. It could help people with their jobs, but it could very well kick them on the unemployment list.
The general consensus amongst analysts is that yes, low-skilled jobs will be overtaken by robots while higher skilled positions will continue to be needed, at the very least to maintain the robots, the software and all of the other business aspects of a company.
Still, some are not that easily convinced. The Bank of England’s top economist, Andrew Haldane, says jobs at risk from automation total about 80 million in the U.S. and about 15 million in the U.S., ComputerWeekly reports. Automation is not a new thing to the business world and it has been around for centuries. Until now, people were able to move up the ladder by improving their skills, Haldane says. But now the time comes when even high skills may not be able to outdo or even match a sophisticated robot or artificial intelligence. The smarter machines become, “the greater the likelihood that the space remaining for uniquely human skills could shrink further,” said Haldane.
“If the option of skilling up is no longer available, this increases the risk of large-scale unemployment or under-employment,” said Haldane. Moreover, the wages for those occupying skilled positions will “explode,” and increase the wage gap, he warns. So there should be some governing policy adopted by governments where it is provided at least some wage for workers that are out of a job because of automation. Such talks though are yet to materialize.
Some think it won’t be so scary. “The job gains and losses will even out over the long run,” wrote Darrell West, the director of governance studies at Brookings Institution. “There needs to be ways for people to live fulfilling lives even if society needs relatively few workers,” wrote West. “We need to think about ways to address these issues before we have a permanent underclass of unemployed individuals.”
But this is a long way. So for now, you should indeed work on improving your skills and get certified in order to be at the top of the line when the real hunger for skilled workers comes. Coursedot is just the place to do so.