The Robots Are Coming! summary

Imagine it’s the near future. You’re a corporation with an army of industrial robots cranking out your products around the clock, eliminating most of your manufacturing labor costs in the process. But you still have one pesky little problem: getting those products into the hands of your customers.

Well, that’s where the robots come in again. The transportation industry is about to be revolutionized by autonomous vehicles. You’ve probably heard about the self-driving cars being test driven on the highways of California – but autonomous trucks are also in the works, with lots of money being poured into their development. Otto is one of the companies leading the way, and it was recently bought by Uber for $700 million.

Unless you’ve been living off-grid for the past decade, you’ve probably made a number of purchases from online retailers, such as Amazon. Of course, millions of other people have been doing the same thing.

As a result, brick-and-mortar stores have been dropping like flies. In the United States, just in the first few months of 2017, Radio Shack closed 552 stores; JCPenney, 138; Macy’s, 68 – and the list goes on and on.

Factory, retail, restaurant and transportation workers – these are all low jobs on the socio-economic ladder. High-end jobs will be safe from the threat of automation, right? Well, some might be safer, but many of them will also be in peril. Others will be significantly transformed.

As a general rule of thumb, the more routinized a job is, the more likely it is to be automated. In other words, the more your job involves doing repetitive actions, the more likely a robot or a computer is to start doing it for you in the coming years. That’s why many lower-end jobs are going to be eliminated; a machine can flip burgers just as well as a human. But the same holds true for many higher-end jobs.

Nowadays, when you need to do your banking, it’s possible to go for years without ever having to visit a physical branch of your bank. You can update your information and carry out transfers online, and you can deposit and withdraw money from an ATM.

Now, remember the meaning of the acronym ATM: Automated Teller Machine. The tasks that are performed by an ATM used to be the exclusive job of human tellers. Those tellers still exist, of course, but in lower numbers today than in yesteryear, thanks to ATMs.

Have you ever felt sick and Googled your symptoms? Then, like millions of people, you’ve already experienced one of the ways in which automation will transform the future of healthcare.

Before online search engines and virtual assistants like Alexa, you probably would have seen your doctor about your symptoms. Now you can find information about their causes and remedies by simply typing a few words into your search bar or saying, “hey, Alexa, how do I perform CPR?”

With so many innovative medical technologies already here and even more on the horizon, healthcare is going to be just as revolutionized by automation as the other industries we’ve looked at. Up to 80 percent of the work currently done by human doctors could soon be performed by automated systems.

But that doesn’t mean that 80 percent of doctors are about to be put out of work. As with the legal profession, it just means that more routine tasks – like doing check-ups and conducting tests – are going to be automated. That will free up doctors to do other, more interesting work.

As technology automates the more tedious routine tasks that people have to do in their current jobs, it will also free them up to do more interesting work in other fields besides healthcare. One of them is journalism.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, programs are already writing news stories – but they tend to be the type of stories that are rather boring for journalists to write. A vivid example of this comes from The Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and leading the charge toward automating certain aspects of journalism. In the 2016 US elections, the newspaper used an AI program called Heliograf to cover about 500 local races.

If there’s one thing you’ve learned from these blinks so far, it’s that automation is going to shake up many industries in the years ahead. Some new jobs will be created, but many others will be eliminated, and the old jobs that survive will be radically transformed.

With so much change going on in the economy, people will have to learn how to adapt – updating their skills for their evolving jobs or retraining for brand new careers or even industries, such as virtual reality programming (more on that in the next blink). And that means education is going to be more important than ever before.

Imagine you’re a present-day teacher and your students want to learn about astronomy. Well, you could talk to them about it, give them books, show them videos, provide them with a telescope or send them to Google, where they can probably learn much more about the subject than you know, thanks to Google’s search algorithms (another reason why your role as a knowledge-transmitter is already waning).

But imagine if you could blast off into outer space and take them on a cosmic field trip to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Well, you can’t do that for the foreseeable future, but soon you’ll be able to do the next best thing thanks to virtual reality, or VR.