Robots at Work: Jobs That Will Disappear in Several Years

Robots come from science fiction to real life - and soon will compete with you for job opportunities. The bad news is that this cannot be prevented, but the good one is that you can prepare for it. According to Ray Kurzweil, the famous futurologist, the technical director in the field of machine learning in Google, the technical singularity will come in 2045: humanity will merge with the artificial intelligence and the world will become a giant computer. Whom will these changes affect first?

In the next 10-20 years, we will evidence the rapid growth and development of drone cars. Tesla makes a lot of mistakes, but can already keep to the lane, drive on the route, pull up at the crossroads. The time when drones will fully replace people is not far off - people may soon be completely prohibited to drive. In the financial and the service sectors, routine operations are passed over to robots, and people solve only difficult and complex tasks.

Production is growing more and more automated: industrial robots already exist, but they are expensive and intended only for certain operations. Cheap trainable robots will change the industry, and many people in China, Bangladesh, and similar countries will lose their jobs. What professions will be the first to disappear and how will it change the society?

The profession of the driver will be the first one to disappear. When drones become a mass phenomenon, there will be no need for a man at the wheel, and new cars will have no steering wheel anyway.

In addition, Tesla argues that there are fewer fatal crashes in the autopilot mode than when a person drives, and when a critical mass of behavioral algorithms for different situations accumulates, autonomous cars will be able to make decisions better than people. The main risk of accidents will be the human factor - and people will have to be removed from this scheme.

Probably, the drivers will go on strike. It's enough to remember the appearance of Uber and other aggregators. But automated services are growing and evolving, and traditional taxi services are disappearing.

Probably, all non-intellectual work - such as sewing production, for example, - will fall on robots. Such work is easy to program: a thread, a needle, a cloth, a pattern are all that is needed, so if the robot is cheaper than the work of a seamstress from Bangladesh, many people in developing countries will lose their jobs. They will have to learn new professions.

But there are not enough jobs for everyone in the new economy. How can those people earn money, if they are left out? Cheap robots will reduce the cost of products. The profits of the factories will grow, and taxes will grow relatively. In some advanced countries, people already receive an unconditional basic income or allowance, which allows them to live without working.

Researchers from Microsoft and Cambridge University are working on an automated programming platform. A kind of recursion: the created algorithm will independently learn on other algorithms and generate new ones.

But the platform will be able to develop programs only for tasks already solved by people manually. Artificial intelligence is not capable of creating a fundamentally new algorithm, and won’t be capable at least in the near future.

But AI allows automating routine tasks in the banking and service industries.

Banks were among the first to replace a person with automated solutions. Traditional banks are going digital. Operators will not be needed anymore soon: banks will not have offices. If the task cannot be solved on the site or in the application, the employees of the remote call center will be involved.

The automation began to penetrate into the services as well. There are applications for reserving a table in a restaurant, making the administrator’s work easier. You can book rooms in hotels on Booking.com automatically, releasing the managers of their duties. But robots are gradually taking on more and more of their tasks. Automated cafes, hotels and fitness clubs... Even Starbucks places stand-alone kiosks without a barista, a cashier, and a manager.

The fitness market also moves towards automation. According to the research of ClubIntel, in 2016 online payments were a promising and constantly growing trend. With the help of a mobile application, customers of fitness clubs can temporarily suspend the card, register for classes, learn about the cancellation of a class, and buy a personal training.

In any case, it's senseless to be afraid of progress - someone, of course, will lose the job as a result of automation, but the quality of service will increase and new professions will appear. The routine work will be taken over by the machines, and people, as Jack Ma said recently, can be human.