The signs are there. Creeping up on you little by little. I go into a McDonald’s in China and one in Canada and there are self-service kiosks for ordering. I go to my grocery store and there is self-service checkout. Human’s in service businesses are being eliminated at a rapid rate.
There are Tesla, Uber, and Google showing off self-driving cars. There are Amazon’s automated warehouses and their self-delivering drones. Since transportation is such a huge area this is getting major headlines but there is so much more going on. There are thousands upon thousands of Artifical Intelligence and automation companies and experiments happening all across the world. From nanotech identification of cancer cells to AI within marketing.
Okay…so I get it. What does this mean? It means a major transition. AI will be the largest societal change since electricity and industrialization.
I’m currently trying to research what will this really mean for the majority of unskilled labor jobs? (Janitors, parking lot attendants, fast food workers, line operators, construction laborers, are some examples). There are arguments though, that with all the technological changes that have happened recently, more jobs have been created than have been eliminated. The question is whether that will continue in this next major shift.
Some of this transition has already happened over the last 20-30 years. Think of coal miners. Machines, not globalization, displaced the coal miners (which in this case really was more healthy for a lot of people).
This change for sure is bigger than me and you and thousands of us combined. Let’s work together to keep up with what we know and share knowledge here.
Photo Credit: Steve Jurvetson (Tesla Factory)
Notice … no humans.