Are we comfortable with knowing that our genetic components are being collected, monitored and examined around the clock? What will health insurance look like when the companies have access to your biological data and even your DNA profile? Is society willing to trade all of their personal interests, shopping statistics, conversations and browsing history so marketing agencies can sell us customized stuff we most likely do not have a need for?

Major platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and a plethora of other social-media companies already do this with their customer data.

Are we slowly seeing the ramifications of putting technology at the forefront of our endeavors and trading our hard-earned privacy for comfort and convenience?

What about the individual, or family, that works a manual-labor job just to provide an income for their loved ones? According to recent statistics that broke down the intricate details of the blue-collar force within the United States, nearly two-thirds of the population qualifies as “working class.”

When we look at these numbers and try to extract what the future holds, something becomes alarmingly clear: these people will suffer going into the future.

An interesting piece released by the University of Oxford dove into this topic to understand just how many jobs were at risk of being rendered irrelevant with the implementation of robots and intelligent AI design.

According to their research, upwards of 47% of the job market will feel the pressure from outside technology that could remove their hold within their respective marketplaces.

Creating a piece of machinery that can work twenty-four seven, lift thousands of pounds and move twice as fast as a human is revolutionary, but it also means that millions of people will inevitably suffer.

As the ancient Greeks so elegantly phrased it, “our glory walks hand-in-hand with our doom.” 

While it is true that there are many things that Artificial intelligence is not yet capable of (and some that it may never be capable of), the truth is that there are very few professions that will be left unscathed by the growing reach of the new wave of intelligent technology. We are already beginning to see the first ripples of  the tidal wave of change that is set to sweep across almost every industry we have.

It turns out that intelligent algorithms are well suited to the financial industry and have been put to work  making trades within the financial market and outperforming humans. Major news outlets are already reporting that financial giants, such as Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, use machine learning as a means to get ahead of trades in a fraction of the time of their competition.

Speed, specifically when applied to the cut-throat world of trading stocks, bonds and currencies, places you in an advantageous position compared to human-operated firms. This speed has essentially changed the way many organisations look at trading. It was discovered that machines that are able to buy and sell stocks at speeds that were not previously possible, are able to generate their owners millions of dollars as the small profits are skimmed off of multiple trades.

The downside of all this, as will be the pattern, is that those individuals whose livelihood was made in the markets, are slowly being replaced by machine counterparts.

The neural network was able to outperform the professionals in the research, missing fewer melanomas. It will not be long before these professionals will find themselves using these technologies more and more – patients will demand it.

Tests like this seem to be happening all over the medical world and all with similar results and the changes are not limited to just this sector. Artificial intelligence is set to revolutionize almost every industry, all at different speeds and levels of disruption. Whichever way we look, we see technology making its first ripples of change throughout our industries:

Healthcare, agriculture, customer service, retail, manufacturing, logistics, professional services – there doesn’t seem to be many areas that will be unaffected. How much of this change will benefit individuals in their roles by increasing productivity and effectiveness and how much of it will result in automation and redundancy, is anyone’s guess. 

Instead, readers should be aware of their strengths and pursue a level of sophistication within their profession that cannot be outsourced to a robot or algorithmic repetition. In a general sense, be so good that they can’t replace you.

For instance, areas of social work that pertain to a patient’s feelings, emotional intelligence, psychiatric history and behavioral patterns will flourish in the robotic realm.

In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that job creation within social careers will propel over 16% in the next decade with promising availability and competitive pay.

The underlying component that all of these career paths share is, without a doubt, the element of “humanness” required to perform the tasks at hand. Robots and software cannot replicate the intuition and touch that a human can provide.

For those of you that wish to remain relevant in the future, focus on being profoundly human and becoming talented within your field of expertise.

Although the AI forecast may sound like a doomsday prediction, technology is created by humans just like you and I. When we acknowledge this aspect, we realise that we are not all doomed to an end-of-all-jobs dystopian future  – rather we have the power and responsibility to make our technological future a utopian one.

Remember that while we have built artificial intelligence that is able to beat our greatest champions at our most intellectually challenging games like chess and Go, technology is still struggling to master some of the most basic skills we humans learn as children.

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