How To Keep Your Job In The Fast-Rising New Age Of Automation
The advent of technology has brought with it a lot of promise: increased efficiency, higher productivity, competitive advantage, and more revenue generation for firms, organizations, and businesses today. AI, Robotics, and Machine Learning have come to stay, and a lot of organizations are tapping into its many benefits.
The current theme is if you are a business owner, be it a CEO, Managing Director, or an Entrepreneur, who wants to scale and gain a greater percentage of the market share in your industry, then you have to introduce technology into your processes and systems.
While the advancement in AI and Machine Learning comes with a lot of benefits to organizations and business owners, there have also been fears that technology would make a lot of jobs redundant while creating new ones, which means that a lot of people could lose their jobs as a result.
This suggests bad news for Africa in particular, given concentration in types of low-skill jobs that might be easy to automate, rising working-age populations, and already far too few good jobs to occupy the existing population. Traditionally, blue-collar routine jobs are more susceptible to automation, but with the emergence of greatly improved computing power, artificial intelligence, and robotics, a much larger scope of occupations are at risk.
Routine jobs would make up two-thirds of jobs that would be lost as a result of AI and technology. Jobs that require repetitive tasks such as cleaning jobs, security, factory work, receptionists, phone operators, cashiers, bank tellers, and clerks, etc, would be easily displaced by AI as robots can easily perform such duties, unlike jobs that are not so transactional.
The World Economic Forum predicted that 41% of all work activities in South Africa are susceptible to automation, as are 44% in Ethiopia, 46% in Nigeria, and 52% in Kenya; this is likely moderated by comparatively low labor costs and offset by new job creation. Despite this longer window of opportunity, the region’s capacity to adapt to further job disruption is a concern, although there are important nuances at the country level.
Whilst these fears are true and valid, the introduction of AI and technology isn’t disadvantageous. A study from the Boston Consulting Group found that in Africa alone, online marketplaces that rely on AI could create 3 million jobs by 2025, particularly in the consumer goods, mobility, and travel/hospitality sectors, while dramatically expanding access to goods and services, especially in the hinterlands. That is just the tip of the iceberg, according to another report by the International Finance Corporation. In Africa and the Middle East, AI could improve electricity services by making power grids more efficient. It could allow schools to harness virtual reality and other e-learning technology, bolstering the state of education. And it could buttress medical care by helping doctors diagnose diseases and monitor patients with chronic conditions, like diabetes. In Rwanda, AI technology even powers drones that have been used to deliver medical supplies to isolated communities.
In Agriculture, farmers in Cameroon have been using AI-based smartphone apps to save their plants stricken by diseases. Developed by local start-up Agrix Tech, the app allows farmers to upload photos of their ailing fruit. In about 10 seconds, it will diagnose the malady and suggest a course of treatment, reading it aloud in the local patois should a farmer so desire – and given the high illiteracy rates in the area, many do.
In the manufacturing sector, AI would help enhance redeployment, upskilling, and productivity through technology rather than pure substitution. In Finance, AI can guide users in preparing their tax returns although it would still require human input and judgment to help complete the task.
The concept behind technology and AI is to augment human activity and not to replace it completely. Take autonomous driving trucks for instance. Even the most advanced autonomous trucking technologies that have been developed by startups like TuSimple and Plus in the United States, where not developed with full autonomy in mind. The trucks still need human drivers accompanying them on deliveries and occasionally taking the wheels or managing the controls. If anything, this has made truck driving more attractive to the younger generation in an industry where the median age of drivers has been 50 years of age.
How Does One Ensure That Their Job is Enhanced Rather Than Replaced By AI?
1. Have a consistent strategy for career enhancement, notably increasing your learning in relevant areas for the future.
2. Improve your cognitive skills
3. Develop soft skills that are simply impossible for AI to adopt, such as compassion, reading social cues, or making a sale. These skills are beyond the reach of AI. They require adaptability, common sense, and creativity, skills that are currently beyond the scope of modern programming.
4. Understanding nuances and complexities will be out of the reach of AI for a few years to come.
5. Extreme specialization in niche services can further protect a person’s employment opportunities. Data analysts are still expected to help companies make sense and derive insights from the tonnes of data generated by AI.
While individuals and businesses fight to remain relevant in the age of automation, governments must also play a role in ensuring citizens’ employment. One of the ways government can help to do this is by augmenting education programs to increase competency-based education that can teach individuals skills that can be completed at any stage in an employee’s career.
Governments can emphasize the positives of automation by creating an environment where businesses and entrepreneurship can flourish and where citizens can create new jobs and opportunities.
Though the impact of AI both in the workplace and society seem unfair, messy, and an uneven process to many, the remedy to disruption is not to slow down progress but to help institutions, organizations and businesses keep up, so that entrepreneurs, managers, and workers alike can succeed.
This article is very relevant for today and the future. Thanks to the writers
ReplyDelete