Ai is coming for your job. Just jokes! No but seriously. There is a lot of speculation about what happens next but let’s try and break it down…
The world is a big bad place and every role is different. White collar is different to blue collar and all that. Initially driverless cars, taxis and trucks will become common place and that will take some time to play out. You might argue there are not enough drivers as it is. Innovators will spend big and begin to supplement there fleets with driverless vehicles. This will feed into the labour and automation model for a while anyway. Imagine a world where some more traditional transport providers operate completely human teams, others with a bit of both and then the fully automated options. Expect significant progress before 2030.
Other blue collar work such as construction and trades will be highly affected by the growth and development of the humanoid robot industry. These physical human skills require experience and dexterity. The robots are coming and the Ai models will need skill specific training to bring them up to speed. As above, traditional, hybrid, and fully Ai organisation models will apply. Due to the skill specific training and the humanoid robot roll out required, expect this to land sometime before 2035.
White collar organisations are where things get interesting. So much of our time is spent just communicating and being human on a day to day basis at work. When you think a bit further about organisational structure, you reach the conclusion that many roles simply exist to manage human interaction. You don’t need human managers to manage humans when there are no humans. It seems obvious doesn’t it. Goodbye HR department. Middle managers? Maybe not needed so much either. Organisations get flatter over time…
Initially, organisations will reduce numbers as human productivity increases with the help of Ai. Think about administrators and coders using Ai or supervising output. This is going to take some time to play out. Small to medium organisations tend to be very risk averse and slow to innovate. Management and governance is mature and wise. Apologies, but often slow to change and adapt. In other words, if a human can do the job then expect management to resist Ai disruption for a long as possible.
If entry level jobs are reducing what do these people do to find work? I suspect some will pivot into different roles created by the new economy. Some wont work at all, ultimately joining a new class of a more capable, jobless segment of society. Some will join the opportunity to establish new societies on Mars and the Moon. Ultimately, humans are crafty creatures. Perhaps they will redefine education and on the job training in a way that accelerates humans into more senior, productive organisational roles, supported by Ai and automation. Others will merge biology with Ai technology blurring the line between what is human and what is machine.
We live in a world where Ai, robots and humans will co-exist moving forward. It is likely that humans wont have to work the nine to five, five days a week, industrial lifestyle any more. It is more than likely, this schedule was useful for keeping people occupied rather than productive. As human labour deflates in value and humans are released to pursue other activities, expect a booming entertainment industry to emerge with population control managed via virtual reality.
The fundamental capitalist construct of doing more, knowing more, being more to get more, is coming to an end, in a world of increasing abundance. For the foreseeable future, intelligence and productivity will be driven by how smart you and your AI work as a team.
