IEEE Future Directions
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As shown in the figure, taken from the WEF 2018 Future of Jobs report infographic, several jobs are expected to decline over the coming few years affecting some 73 million people in the world (affecting means people losing their jobs). The good news is that 133 million people will find a job in areas that are expected to expand (jobs created). Hence the balance is good, however, it is not a given that those people losing their jobs would be able to take advantage of new jobs openings.
What is notable is that automation is affecting white collars (9 out of 10 of the sectors decreasing employment are “white collars). Indeed, even in my limited visibility most of the industry CEO’s I spoke to in this last year told me that the rightsizing (that’s how they call the elimination of redundant positions/jobs) in the factory plan has already been done and they do not expect further shrinking in that area).
On the other side, most of jobs creation is in areas connected to data and their analyses (including artificial intelligence, analytics, machine learning…).
What is also very interesting in the WEF Report is the shift in desirable skills expected over the coming 4 years, an amazing shift considering the relatively short time span. Taking a look at those declining is particularly interesting because it shows how automation is replacing humans’ skills:
- Manual dexterity, endurance and precision. Well, nothing surprising here. Robots have acquired, thanks to tech evolution, greater dexterity and can now compete with, and in many areas beat, humans. Even in fields like health care robots have become the only way for certain type of surgery.
- Memory, verbal, auditory and spatial abilities. This is a bit surprising, since we have always considered these skills as very “human”. Yet, we re using every day our smartphone as a memory prosthetics, and computers have become a growing part of our life as we interact with call centres. Artificial intelligence, computer vision have reach the point of becoming better than human at image recognition. Police in several countries has started to use artificial image recognition to find suspects. Companies will be using soft-ware rather than brain-ware to get these kind of skills. Besides, the information space has become so huge that is exceeding human grasping capabilities. Digital twins will becoming more and more important for companies and by the end of the next decade they may be used as proxy of humans, raising big ethical and “ownership” issues (would the company I am working for become owner, or at least have exploitation right on my digital twin. Would a copy of my digital twin remain with that company once I decide to move on to another job? How can I claim “my digital twin”?). These are issues that have been addressed in the Symbiotic Autonomous Systems Initiative and that will be discussed at the workshop on the Rise of Symbiotic Autonomous Systems in San Diego, October 30th.
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