What technology’s strengths and limitations reveal about surviving in The Automation Age
There are things that technology is really good at. There are also some things it’s really bad at. Its strengths are leading us into a period of the Information Age that relies on incrementally advanced automation. Automation is a precursor to advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI). Both are inevitable. However, rumors about the birth of AI are greatly exaggerated. Automation technology, however, is already here. Self-driving cars are close to rivaling human performance. Robot cashiers are just a couple decades away. Despite its flaws, voice assistant technology is a good replacement for standard calendar and reminder apps.
Common Patterns
Technology is really good at doing things that are mundane, repeatable, and have a consistent pattern. This has led to tremendous gains in productivity and overall quality of life in the past few decades. It also means we are getting into a period when automation has led to a relatively slow re-uptake in manufacturing jobs until recently.
This means hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people will need to re-skill in the next couple of decades. Outside of restaurants, however, most of the services industry will be unaffected by automation. Technology enhanced services, especially, will actually see significant growth as consumers look to blend the best of technological automation combined with human guidance.
This means two skill sets will become especially irreplaceable: the first being the technology part and the second being the services part. Great technology will create the right foundation for a service economy and give organizations a competitive advantage to deliver greater value at a lower cost.
This doesn’t mean jobs will go away. On the contrary, there will be more jobs than ever before, but the nature of work will definitely shift. Paradoxically, it will become both hyper-local and distributed at the same time. Services will require hyper-local presence of communication and yet the enhancement of services through technology can occur anywhere with internet access.
Guidelines for Re-Skilling
People skills will continue to play an important role as technology leads to greater organizational transparency (email groups, team chat, etc.). Technology skills will also continue to grow higher in demand. The power of technology will continue to give greater productivity gains to the people who have an understanding of how to harness it. These will be the most valuable of workers.
Unfortunately, if history is any measure, workers unable to re-skill in the next decade could face significant headwinds during future recessions (which are also inevitable) because now employers will be cutting their less skilled workforce in the hope of replacing them with automation technology for a lower cost. This could broaden the digital divide and also lead to increasing but temporary economic inequality. Paradoxically, despite relatively high economic equality, social mobility will continue to prosper. It will all depend on how well the individual is able to adapt to learning new skills to survive and thrive in a workforce of increasing automation.
