As automation becomes more and more prevalent, it’s easy to see why so many people are becoming worried that they’ll be replaced by robots. Driverless cars are making their way onto the roadways, and many in the transportation industry are worried that they’re going to be put out of work.
The biggest problem for transport industry workers is that with this new technology, the benefits far outweigh the harms if we’re looking simply at scale. In the public sector, tens of thousands of lives could be saved every year from preventable car crashes if automated cars were on the road — not to mention a large reduction in the number of those left injured and disabled by the same. Automated drones will likely eventually replace many ground-based modes of transportation, bettering the environment significantly. On top of that, automation means that drivers won’t show up to work drunk or tired and that the decision-making and reaction skills of even the most competent human drivers will be significantly challenged. Compounding the problem for human workers, robots don’t require a salary.
Not Just a Car Problem
The problems that the transportation industry are now facing will soon be mirrored in industries across the world. In fact, it’s not that far out there to think that the transformation of the automotive industry will begin a spiral that affects every industry tangential to it. For example, everybody knows the value of a good auto body shop because accidents are so common in our world — but what happens when those shops lose business because robot cars negate accidents? What happens to the $200 billion/year auto insurance industry when people begin to realize that the chances of getting in an accident on the road with automated vehicles are nearly non-existent?
The point is this: automation will come to affect your industry at some point if it already hasn’t. The IT job market is already feeling the change due to many firms’ recent deployment of AI-powered personnel management systems. In this case and many others, the only thing that those in the jobs market can do is simply make sure that they are prepared. Human beings are not going to be phased out of the jobs market due to automation. This is because even though they might not have the reaction times or analytical skills of machines, people have real-world experience and intuition and can adapt and change beyond the parameters of a limited data set. This is something we’re uniquely good at and that automated robots are going to take a long time to catch up on.
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Flex Your Brain Muscles
Rote and mechanical activities are what machines are great at. The reality of current computing power and output doesn’t exist to cheaply deploy multiple super-thinking robots, so the good news is that employees simply have to be smarter than their mechanical counterparts. Improving an employee’s skill set so that they can relegate rote work to automated processes will keep them viable in the modern workplace. As such, human beings have to flex their brains more and learn to wrangle their machine counterparts if they truly plan on succeeding in the world of work.
Get Excited for Challenging Change
It might not sound natural at first, but getting excited about change and tackling it head-on is one of the only healthy ways to approach automation, because the fact is, automation is already happening. It’s changing the way that our world works and will only continue to disrupt it as time goes on. There probably will be winners and losers — but the good news is that they’ll be defined by how they approach this challenge. There is no magical solution that will present itself, no easy way out or blanket answer; each of these disruptive cases will have to be approached from an angle unique to its industry and will require no lack of intelligence and innovation to resolve.
Fortunately, for now, machines don’t have the ability to creatively innovate. That skill is still uniquely human, which is why we should be all the more proud to flex it — not to mention: it’s probably the only thing that will save you your job in the future.
