Humans versus machines: Who will be employed in future?

It doesnt have to be a situation where there are fewer jobs for humans in the future, says Ross Dawson

Are we heading towards a world where humans will have to compete with machines? Futurist Ross Dawson addressed this concern at the Australian Computer Society's YITCon event in Melbourne this week, and spoke about how to stay ahead of the game when it comes to jobs in the future.

Robots and artificial intelligence are getting better and better over time. So we have robot vacuum cleaners, we have robot dish washers [robots] being able to fold the laundry. Now this happens to be quite expensive machines... but we can have household robots do these kinds of tasks, said Dawson

Drivers are being challenged. Drivers may not exist. Mercedes just announced they have a semi-trailer, a big truck, which is going to drive around without a driver driving it.

More knowledge tasks are also being handed over to machines, he said. He used the example of IBMs Watson supercomputer assisting doctors by looking through hundreds of thousands of documents and data to come up with a suggested diagnosis to complex diseases such as cancer.

There is the risk that in 'outsourcing' to machines over time humans lose certain capabilities and will be unable to do some tasks manually if they ever need to in the future, Dawson said.

However, it doesnt have to be a situation where its humans versus machines and there are fewer jobs for people. He said jobs for humans are not necessarily being reduced, just changed, and its more about working together with machines to increase humans' capabilities.

A computer first managed to beat a chess grandmaster in 1997, Dawson said. Thats a long time ago and computers have come a long way since then; yet, the best computers at chess can still be beaten by humans and computers working together. The best chess in the world is played by humans and computers working together, the futurist said.

Again, doctors together with technology can be better [themselves] with the robots, the artificial intelligence.

Dawson said that the days where young people could just pass school to get a low-to-medium-skilled job and live comfortably for the rest of their lives are disappearing. With machines capable of doing many basic to complex tasks, it forces people to gain deeper expertise, become smarter in order to get work.

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Humans versus machines: Who will be employed in future?