‘Fewer Jobs that a Robot Can’t Do Better’ WTF

“There will be fewer jobs that a robot can’t do better… a universal income will be necessary… the harder challenge than is, how will people have meaning?” ~Elon Musk #WorldGovSummit. The pinup boy of building the next best thing, he made it big with PayPal, then put his money into Tesla (the must have green with envy electric car), built SpaceX to get us all to the moon and beyond whenever we need to go and completed it all with Solar City to re-invent electric power.

But let’s head back to this comment he made at World Government Summit. Musk argued that ‘the way to deal with advancing artificial intelligence is to merge with machines—or risk being made redundant.’ Wait? Merge with machines? Musk commented that “some kind of high-bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps us achieve symbiosis between human and machine intelligence.”

So soon we’ll be all lining up at the Apple Store to get an iFace connection which fantastically comes with a free subscription to Apple Music. But what about Beats?

In all seriousness, there is some reality to this scary concept. In an article in the FT recently about a Chinese manufacturer of sinks, by transforming to robots, have so far accomplished the standard of ‘nine robots now do the job of 140 full-time workers’ and they are only a few years into this change process.

US research firm Frey and Osborne project that the next wave of computer progress will continue to shred human work where it already has: manufacturing, administrative support, retail, and transportation. Most remaining factory jobs are “likely to diminish over the next decades,” they write. Cashiers, counter clerks, and telemarketers are similarly endangered.

As you can see in the chart, the chance of automation of these roles is nicely at 100%. So if you’re putting kids through school or looking to guide yourself into the right careers, skip these areas as a robot will do them all.

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