The robots are coming, and they're going to get your job, the question is; can you do anything about it?
It does not take a genius observer to see that technology is playing a bigger and bigger part of our lives. The average teenager has seen changes in their lifetimes that their parents would have had to wait decades for.
With these advances come the promise of complete automation. A world run by the robots, for the humans, a world where human intervention has been eradicated.
The vision of automation brings with it the fear of unemployment.
There are a multitude of tasks that are better suited for machines than humans. The problem is, that within an advanced economic model, these tasks are ones that we already pay people to carry out.
If machines take these jobs, what will happen to the humans already doing them?
The key to surviving in this not-too-distant future, is to protect yourself against these changes. In other words, you have to learn how to future proof yourself.
However without the aid of a crystal ball to see into this mechanised future; how exactly do you do that?
First, let us carry out a small thought experiment, and then look at the lessons learned from the exercise.
A Tale Of Two Lives
Let us imagine that we know two people, one called Sally and one called John. They both live in the same city and though they have different jobs, they have similar lives.
Sally
Sally is a nurse working in her local hospital, even though she is overworked and underpaid, she enjoys her job. The satisfying feeling of helping people in need, is far greater than any financial reward.
One of Sally's duties is to perform observations on patients that have been admitted to the hospital.
Some of these patients have had major operations, others have had accidents and are just in for a day or so.
Every four hours she does her rounds, her duties include taking the blood pressure and temperature of her patients, as well as monitoring other vital signs and administering medication.
Sally has been a nurse for around ten years, and in that time she has seen a lot of changes. Particularly surrounding the amount of technology she has to use.
At first the extra training required to operate the new machinery was extensive. However Sally notices that the amount of technological know-how she needs to use the machines is falling.
Often she is just pressing on/off buttons, and the machine does the rest. Sally doesn't even have to write down her observations anymore, as the machines simply upload the results to a central server.
Quite rightly, Sally identifies that her job will become obsolete at some point in the future.
Sally realises she has to retrain; however she is incredibly busy at work and sometimes works up to 80 hours in the week, leaving little time for much else.
So before too long, Sally decides to take action. The first thing she does is she cuts all TV out of her life. This frees up around 20 hours a week. She fills that time by learning how to write machine code.
Then she signs up with a nursing agency and leaves the hospital. This means that she can still do the job she loves, but crucially she is earning more per hour and working around 25 hours a week less.
The extra time she has created for herself, is filled with education and discovery.
After a couple of years Sally is good enough at coding to write her own programs. She uses her skills and experiences to right a new medical program for an observation machine.
A few years later, the amount of human nurses in her country have dwindled to just a few hundred. The agency she works for has transformed into a software company. They now provide medical software modules for the same hospitals they used to provide nurses for.
Sally is able to fit right in, she sells the company her software product and then consults them on how best to sell and implement it into the hospital infrastructure.
Sally is happy . . .
John
John is an underground train driver, he works half the hours that Sally does for about three times the salary. His union has seen to it that he works seven days on, and then eight days off.
John has plenty of free time and most of that time is being paid for by his bosses. John is very happy with his job and sees no reason to change.
The train that John drives, does in fact drive itself; he is there to open and close the doors of the train. Also in the extremely unlikely event of computer failure, John is able to drive the train himself.
In the five years that John has been a driver, this has never happened. As far as he is concerned, John has a job for life. His union is strong, and the public's mistrust of driverless transport is such that he feels his position is 100% safe.
Over the next few years driverless cars begin to take hold in the city. At first John does not see this as any threat to his job.
Soon though, the amount of driverless cars on the roads takes over the number of human driven vehicles. This fact increases public trust in autonomous vehicles.
John sees the writing on the wall too late, there is a mass culling of personnel. John's union tries to counteract this by ordering its drivers to go out on strike.
Unfortunately though, this just exacerbates the problem, because the trains carry on running without them. Within two years of the first lay offs, there isn't a single tube driver left.
Some drivers manage to get jobs as ticket inspectors; however those positions are rare. John leaves the train company, he has no other skills or qualifications so is forced to take up various menial jobs.
John never learns, he goes from job to job, each one eventually ends up being done by machines. However he never retrains, he simply gets angry and moves on.
John is very bitter.
Step 1 Sailing The Winds Of Change
OK so perhaps I went overboard in Sally's case, but the point is, Sally was amenable to change, whilst John was not.
Maybe Sally started learning about yoga or physiotherapy. The point isn't what she did. The point was she recognised that her job was under threat from automation, and retrained in a career that wasn't.
John on the other hand simply refused to change, he had ample opportunity, however his present comfort, blinded him to the future truth.
Therein lies the point, it is up to us to recognise these things, and it is up to us to change.
Change will happen with or without you, it will happen whether you're happy about it or not. The ones among us that realise that, will always be happy in the new world, while the ones that don't . . .
So how do we sail these winds of change? It is not always obvious. The trick is to start small and work your way up, in order to be more like Sally we have to first concentrate on the details.
For instance, are you the kind of person who gets annoyed when a website you're used to using suddenly changes its look?
Or perhaps it irks you when your favourite store changes its layout? Or maybe you have a product you buy on a regular basis, and one day the design or taste changes, and it sends you into fits of rage?
Well, you need to start letting go; instead embrace change. Tell yourself each day that changes happen and you cannot control them, however you can control your reactions to them.
Step 2 Educate Yourself
Back when I was growing up, if you wanted to learn about something you went to the library. Sometimes you accessed the knowledge in books you weren't even allowed to take out.
The thought of learning a bankable skill outside of the established walls of mainstream education was preposterous to most people.
Nowadays there are a plethora of learning tools available for reasonable prices online. From Code Academy to Udemy, and everything in between, if you want to learn something, it's out there.
Of course there are many things you cannot learn online, but that in itself is a little clue. The chances are, if you can learn how to do it online, then that skill is just that bit further away from being replicated by machines.
Step 3 Diversify
The average 25 year old in 1970 had had one job, today that same 25 year old, has had eleven jobs.
It used to be said that it is better to be a master of one trade, than a jack of all. However that statement is getting less and less relevant in today's society.
Perhaps it still matters in areas of extreme specialisation. So if you're a scientist, it is probably still prudent for you to specialise in one particular area.
For the rest of us, it is best we avoid specialisation, whilst at the same time, being wary of spreading ourselves too thinly.
Step 4 Future Thought
Thinking is the hardest work there is; that's why so few of us do it. Henry Ford
Future thinking is at once the most difficult, and the most rewarding thing you can do when trying to future proof yourself.
There was no such thing as a photographer before the invention of the camera. Nobody knew what Search Engine Optimisation was in 1997, now people get paid to do it.
With new innovations come new opportunities, by putting aside a little time each day to think about what possible new opportunities will arise, will give you an advantage over people who are not thinking like that.
Start with your own industry, look at where the robots are coming there, and then base your thinking around that.
Then of course, go further afield, immerse yourself in the changing zeitgeist and the opportunities will start to reveal themselves to you.
ARE YOU IN AN INDUSTRY THAT IS UNDER THREAT FROM AUTOMATION? HAVE YOU STARTED TO THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU WILL DO INSTEAD? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!