Artificial intelligence will take your job away. Here is what you need to know

The ongoing technological disruption in all phases of life has been accelerated by the Covid 19 pandemic. The pandemic has completely disrupted the traditional workplace system. Prior to the pandemic, people all over the globe did not believe in the efficiency or the scalability of working from home. The pandemic forced us all to creatively adapt to new ways of working and connecting with each other through technology – business meetings on zoom calls, birthday and wedding celebrations over skype/WhatsApp video calling, etc. With rapid technological changes in every part of our lives; an important question comes to the fore. In the coming decades, will automation take my job away? Will it render thousands of future graduates jobless in an economy that does not need them anymore.

Industries that are most likely to be disrupted by artificial intelligence:

The industrial revolution of the 18th century rendered most blue-collar workers of mines and factories obsolete. Replaced by large scale assembly lines that functioned and worked at a faster and more accurate pace than their human counterparts. The fourth industrial revolution is also known as the technological revolution will not spare either the blue or white-collar workers from the obsoleteness of automation.

The World Economic Forum, predicts that 65 percent of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new jobs that don’t exist today.

Traditional white-collar jobs that were looked upon as safe and stable career options by the middle class are very much susceptible to automation. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has known to be outperforming humans in jobs that require precision, processing of large numbers of data, repetitive tasks, and pattern recognition. Such jobs in the near future are most likely to be taken over by artificial intelligence.

Algorithms are changing a number of office administrative support work, particularly in legal and financial services. For example, Paralegal work, accounting, and back-office transaction processing. According to a report by Deloitte, more than 100,000 jobs in the legal sector have a high chance of being automated in the next 20 years. Collecting and processing data are two other categories of activities that can be done better and faster by AI.

Jobs that do not require a high level of human intelligence and are low in social human interactive skills can be easily performed at a faster rate by robots. For example, global fast-food conglomerates such as McDonald’s and Burger King are already using self-service kiosks through which customers can place their orders and receive their food through a tap on the screen. In the coming years, this will be further automated by the use of robots to batch cook large numbers of standard fast food. Jobs such as telemarketers and bank clerks may involve interactive tasks that do not need a high degree of social intelligence, leaving them exposed to automation.

Are there any jobs that are safe from Artificial Intelligence?

No human job can ever be safe from automation because AI and robotics in the future will continue to adapt and optimize at a faster rate than humans can keep up. In light of the sweeping technological changes taking place, schools and colleges are painfully outdated because technology changes at a faster rate than textbooks are written and printed.

However, jobs that require human creativity, empathy, negotiation, and management of people are safe from automation in the near future. For example, professions such as midwives & nursing, occupational therapists, teaching, business management, etc cannot be taken over by artificial intelligence as they require human touch to be performed at a high level.