A Japanese insurance company recently replaced 34 members of staff with a software; “IBM Watson Explorer”. By switching to the software, they are saving over $1.1 million every year.
Over the years, people have assumed the robots will only replace manual labour, but we can see now that even knowledge workers are not immune to the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) software. In the near future as much as 30% of jobs has been projected to be lost to AI, and humans will have to go find something else to hold on to.
My headache is that so many young people in Nigeria are reading and working hard towards a career that AI machines will render obsolete shortly.
I strongly believe that industries such as healthcare, financial and education will be heavily affected by these changes, imagine a future in which human doctors are obsolete? It is no longer impossible. Banking apps will become so sophisticated that humans are no longer needed at banks.
Right now, more than 80% of banking staffs are merely doing data entry in the banking halls. The AI can takeover those jobs in an heartbeat.
A lot of jobs will disappear and new ones will appear. There will always be something to do.
I predict that full time jobs will disappear and the era of project professionals will arise. All manual labour will be handled by machines.
Start factoring in the rise of AI machines into your future plans, it will change everything.
REFLECTION
How will AI systems change my career path? How can I take advantage of that system to boost my work?
ACTION
Which part of my industry is AI-proof, which tasks cannot be easily replicated by machines in the near future?
FURTHER READING
- Japanese white-collar workers are already being replaced by artificial intelligence^
- Getting ready for the future of work
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Watching The World
- Nigerian Internet users decline to 92.4m in November 2016.
- Samsung expects a big profit, despite the Note 7 disaster
- Nigerian Army bans Soldiers from using Social Media while on duty. (We only need to keep up with them for a few more years, until AI Soldiers are ready to be deployed…. )
