Artificial Intelligence is a fairly new technology to hit the workplace and the use of it is quickly growing, which may seem exciting but some experts are worrying that AI is going to take all our jobs. However, others have reassured the worried that whilst many jobs will be destroyed by technical advances, many more will be created, to make sure that AI is doing the right job.
Whatever side you may take on this, one thing is for certain, changes are going to be made to the way we work, how big this shift may be, no-one can be 100% sure, yet a report from Oxford University predicts that nearly half of all jobs (47% to be exact) will be lost in the next 25 years.
But don’t panic quite yet if you’re thinking about whether your children or future children will be able to find a job in this everchanging world. Dave and Helen Edwards have conducted research to figure out how to ‘future-proof’ children’s employability. They took a clever approach in rather than trying to guess which skills will be in demand in a decade or two, they analysed which job categories seem less likely to be taken over by machines, i.e. what are the human skills that a robot will never be able to master?
They’re findings found that there are many jobs that won’t benefit from the use of robots or machines, for example jobs in which employees work closely with other people, for example psychologists and social workers. The Edwards wrote in their report ‘Where the job requires people to deal with lots of unpredictable things and messiness-unpredictable people, unknown environments, highly complex and evolving situations, ambiguous data-people will stay ahead of robots’.
Therefore, perhaps we need to make sure we are all ready to cope with the real world, rather than being in a world of virtual reality or just staring at computer screens all day. How do you do that exactly? The Edwards’s offer a counterintuitive answer — unplug your kids.
While learning tech skills is certainly valuable, if you really want to future-proof your kid’s employment prospects, you need to make sure they spend plenty of time away from their gadgets and interact with the messy and unpredictable real world.
“We need to remove the digital filter and experience the people and physical world around us,” they insist. “As AI pervades more of our physical world experience, AI determines how we interact and learn, offering us less experience in the physical world. That thereby reduces our skills in dealing with, say, quirky individuals or novel engineering challenges or rapidly evolving biological systems for which there are no data for an AI to use. Virtual experiences have their limit. At some point, things need to happen in the physical world, with in-person interaction. These are the skills that an AI won’t be able to beat us at,” they conclude.