Automation will force us to realize that we are not defined by what we do.
Kai-Fu Lee – President of Google China
Cars are already computers on wheels. And in the next stage in the automotive journey, cars will be robots on wheels similar to Transformers. The future? Who knows? I saw a movie the other day about robots. The critical question in the movie: ‘Was the robot sentient or in other words, could it feel and think like a human’? Kinda like an advanced Turing robot. Nice idea!
So, you’re a knowledge worker. In 3 years, you’re going to have a Alexa or Sisi work box next to you. The box has access to all the problem solving and decision making data for your job from your company and similar data the world over. Critical questions are: ‘Can robots solve problems and make smart decisions like us’? A few years ago, smart machines were only able to make simple calculations and decisions based on programmed instructions. If an opportunity was presented that was outside of these instructions, then the machine really could not make a decision or solve a problem:
“… robots can perform only limited reasoning due to the fact that their computations are carefully specified. Everything a robot does is spelled out with simple instructions, and the scope of the robot’s reasoning is entirely contained in its program. Furthermore, a robot’s perception of its environment through its sensors is quite limited. Tasks that humans take for granted – for example, answering the question, ‘Have I been here before?’ – are extremely difficult for robots … it is work for a machine to differentiate between features that belong to a scene it has already observed and features of a new scene that happens to contain some of the same objects.”[i]
Work Lesson Earned: So, here’s the conundrum. The above quote is only 3 years old. Several points in the above quote are no longer true. Robots have cognitive capabilities and smarts than even AI experts had not anticipated. With additional computing power and neural network smarts, the machines can gather data and make predictions based on pattern recognition. Robots are already making some careers obsolete. So, is your career vulnerable?
[i] ‘Becoming Robotics Revolution’, Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2016.