- Sunday, January 03, 2021
With the emergence of AI and increased automation, a lot of jobs will be lost. This has already started many years ago and it will only accelerate. Here’s the important thing I need you to realize, the majority of professions will not actually disappear. Number of jobs will diminish.
The vast majority of your tasks will be automated and less people will be required to develop the same output. So, professions will not necessarily disappear, it’s just their job description will reduce and as a result one person with AI slash automation will be able to do the work of 1,000 people.
Let’s say you’re an accountant. You may still need to do tasks related to client relationships, and management accounting, but you may no longer need to do financial accounting, book keeping, and reporting.
AI and automation will take care of that for you. The real danger for the majority of us is the over competition. In a world where millions of people compete for just a couple hundred roles, how will you differentiate yourself?
It’ll be an extremely competitive environment. Some industries have already been hit very hard by this. You don’t hear much about it on the news but the majority of financial traders have lost their jobs over the past 5 years to AI. It’s mostly the algorithms of major investment banks daily trade in stock markets nowadays. Humans in those organizations mostly no longer trade.
Now, I need you to look at your own profession and analyze your own job in terms of the tasks you handle. Then try to make a prediction and understand which of your tasks can be automated. Whatever you think can be automated, I guarantee you that it will be automated. Just a matter of time. And those skills that you think can’t be automated, bank on them very hard now.
Make no mistake, they will be automated too but probably in a very distant future which you don’t have to worry about it for now. You have to develop all the relevant skills you can around those tasks, get every certificate you can, accumulate experiences that are hard to get, because when the transition starts, you already want to be the most qualified candidate for that new era.
90% of the traders in the world lost their jobs within as little as 5 years. 10% surviving have shifted to brokerage services because their tasks had already included certain brokerage related tasks even before the transition. So, they banked on their brokerage skills.
Now here’s the interesting thing. Because this transition wasn’t overnight, it was difficult for people to comprehend what was happening. It’s the boiling frog syndrome.
If you don’t know what it means, if you put a frog in a boiling water, it’ll immediately jump out. It’ll react. But you can boil a frog by slowly increasing the water temperature and the frog won’t jump out of the pot. In a way of speaking, traders never really realized what was happening to them until it was too late.
Now, yes, new professions will be created too. But at the moment we don’t know what they will be. We didn’t know 100 years ago that throwing a ball to a basket was a multimillion dollar skill.
So, new skills will emerge for sure. But we don’t know what they will be, their supply and demand dynamics, entry barriers, we don’t know. Should you study AI or automation? I don’t know. It sounds logical but what if AI itself becomes the best software developer and doesn’t need any human input and it could do the work of 10 million software developers on its own in one day.
We don’t know. Make no mistake, this transition is inevitable. As long as we live in Capitalism, it will continue. The drive for profit maximization will continue the need for automation and Artificial Intelligence AI.
I am not here to discuss capitalism. That’s not the point of this article. I am just merely warning you, because the day of taking action is today. Before that transition starts for your own profession. The financial traders who saw this trend, very quickly moved to deal making or brokerage services, the ones who couldn’t see the transition, ended up not just unemployed but also unemployable.
Joydeep Deb is a Senior Digital Marketer and Project Manager with strong experience in Digital Marketing, Lead Generation, Online Brand Management, Marketing Campaigns, Project Management, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), PPC, eMail Marketing, Web Analytics, Web Technologies, Web Design and Development.
With an MBA in Marketing. IIM Calcutta Alumini. Lives in Bangalore, Karnataka - India.