It used to seem ridiculous. “One day robots will do your job!”
Yeah, okay. And we’ll all be living on the moon flying around on hover-boards.
Now though, the idea of a robot or ‘intelligent machine’ taking over your role at work in the near future seems much more believable.
In 10 years, experts predict that half a million jobs on Australia will be taken over by machines.
And according to data and IT specialists, 65% of jobs that people will be doing in 10 to 20 years haven’t actually been invented yet.
They say that if your job is a ‘process based’ job, a computer will be able to do it.
So what can we do to ensure that our kids have long and fruitful careers?
Harvard professor Howard Gardner explains in his book, Five Minds For The future, that people need to stay up to date or even ahead of new technology. They need to be able to use their mind in new ways, almost like a computer, by being sharp, focused and able to ‘drill down to the essence of a subject’. But in order to remain relevant, they also need to use their mind in a creative way, as only humans can do.
It all sounds a bit intense and wishy-washy, but essentially, he is saying that our kids need to be good problem solvers and have great ideas to survive in the technology age.
There is extensive research to back his theories up. ‘The Pew Research report’ found that, “robotics and artificial intelligence will permeate wide segments of daily life by 2025, with huge implications for a range of industries such as health care, transport and logistics, customer service, and home maintenance.”
Jobs that are based around ideas, ethics, communication, creativity and social interaction will always be done by us humans. Human qualities will be more important than ever and the ability to embrace change and think outside the box will be essential qualities in a young adult entering the workforce.
It’s unlikely that we will go to a robot to fix our knee problems, or have parent-teacher night meetings with a computer.
But jobs such as posties, machine operators, switchboard operators, farm workers, data entry workers and word processing typists will be on the chopping block in the not so distant future.
Our kids will a part of a very exciting new world when it comes to their career path. But it will also be a time of upheaval for many people as they are replaced in their jobs by a faster, cheaper machine.
So when you ask little Sally what she wants to be when she grows up and she says “I want to work in the data entry sector”, perhaps gently steer her in another direction.
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