Humans Vs Machines

Over thousands of years, humans have always tried to produce tools to reduce physical work so as to focus more on intellectual ideas.  Over a period of time, we have advanced at such an enormous rate that whatever little physical work that is done by humans has been made exponentially easier.  

When we think of automation, we imagine large complicated pieces of machinery that can mechanically carry out a narrow set of jobs with absolute precision.  Something  like this.

After achieving satisfactory success in creating mechanical muscles we have now shifted our focus to mechanical brains.  At the current rate of growth, machines are all set to take up a large proportion of jobs in which we imagined humans were indispensable.  Let's consider a few of the several cases where machines are expected to replace humans in near future:

Self-Driving cars are not a thing of the future. They are here.  And they are here, now.  California is ready to let driverless cars run on it's roads from the next year.  These cars need not be necessarily for human transportation.  They can be anywhere from miniature sized automobiles for working in warehouses to gigantic sized automobiles for working in pit mines.  An estimated 70 million people work in the transport industry worldwide.  It wouldn't be long before these so called ' futuristic gadgets ' make 70 million people jobless.

White collar jobs are no safe havens either.  Several software bots are under design which could possibly replace semi-skilled workers who are in the lower rungs of the software industry.  The stock market, which once required heavy human intervention, is now managed solely by bots.  With machines running on artificial intelligence just around the corner, bots can teach themselves how to do a task with just a goal and no knowledge of how to do it.  

You might now be thinking: Professional jobs are safe. That's where you are wrong.  For instance, doctor bots have been designed that can perform with greater efficiency than any human can imagine of. Human doctors need a lot of time to learn stuff from personal experience.  Doctor bots can learn not only from their experiences, but also from the experiences of all other doctor bots around the world.  Law work such as discovery, where a tremendous quantity of data has to be analyzed to figure out discrepancies, can be performed by bots with greater speed, accuracy and cost effectiveness.  Doctors and lawyers cannot be done away with, but with machines doing all the hard work, their need will be certainly reduced.

Emily Howell's first album

If you are still unfazed because you're a creative person planning to thrive through art, you better start worrying.  Emily Howell, a computer program, can create infinite music, literally free of cost.  Also, art contributes a very miniscule portion to the general economy. We surely cannot have poetry and paintings based economies.

This is not about the perils of automation.  Automation is inevitable. All humans will not plunge into unemployment, but it is going to happen fast enough and on a scale large enough to create chaos if we are unprepared.  And yeah, we are unprepared.