Future of employment

There’s been a lot of uproar about unemployment rates. US unemployment recently climbed up to 10%, Spain has soared up to 23%, et cetera. But we ain’t seen nothing yet.

During the industrial revolution at the end of 19th century, machines have taken significant portion of low-skilled jobs and forced millions of workers into unemployment. And they’ll do it again.

I’ve recently taken an online introduction to AI course. It was a lot of fun, and reminded me how fast and in how different areas have computers – or smart programs, rather – been taking over humans in their abilities. In chess, computers won against humans in 1997. You may have noticed there haven’t been many publicized chess matches between computers and humans recently - I’ll leave it up to you to guess why.

Drivers will be among the first to go. It started with driverless trains, and will shortly continue with self-driving cars. The computer never falls asleep behind the wheel, is able and willing to work 24 hours a day, and is overall far more reliable than your average lorry driver. Truck drivers, wave bye-bye to your jobs.

Next in line are the translators. Have you noticed how much google translate has improved lately? I remember it being near unusable just a couple years ago. These days, not only has it started following grammar rules and increased its accuracy, it can also translate between almost any two languages. Human translators are expensive, make mistakes, and their translations are terribly inconsistent. Translators of prose and poetry should stay unaffected, but legal, technical, and computer game translators will either end up assisting the computer, or will have to find a new line of work.

In related news, armies of expensive lawyers are replaced by cheaper software.

If your job consists mainly of talking to people, you’re pretty safe. Does your job require significant creativity? You should be mostly safe for the time being – computers are notoriously bad at creativity despite repeated attempts by very smart people. However, if your job looks like something that could be potentially replaced by a computer some time in the future, it will be replaced within 20 years – please take a thorough look and reconsider your career path.

For the time being, as long as human civilization thrives, I feel reasonably safe about my job prospects: there will always be need for people who can talk to computers. But I’d also like to capitalize on my conviction that the employment crisis is nowhere near its end. How can I do that?