How will Automation affect your Job?

With rapid advances and adoption of robotics, artificial intelligent machines and automation technologies in our every day life, everyone is now talking about how 'robots and automation are going to take people's jobs'. On the other hand technology fanatics are trying their level best to allay fears of job loss with the promise of reskilling the labor force. In most parts of the world such as the UK, South Africa, such technology is said to be far off. Furthermore, labor movements tend to oppose any industrial revolution that threatens jobs of their membership. An article published by the Financial Time suggests that technology is the hampering factor to full Rail Transport automation, but I'm less convinced. With the roll out of Google car, and other fully automated transportation systems with much larger complexities, I am more inclined to agree with sentiment of Damon Lavrinc in Wired, that the labor movements have a lot to do with it. It South Africa, the manufacturing, mining, transport and production industries occupy a very large share of the labor force employers, with a very hing level of crippling industrial action against retrenchments of any form. This question of 'automation' vs 'jobs' is even more real in the South African context. The reality is that the mining industry is already shedding jobs and investing large sums of money on mining robots, driverless LHD vehicles as well as rail transportation. Production companies already employ very low numbers of personnel and large amounts of automation machines to run their day-to-day production tasks.

It is suggested in an article published by the IEEE, that mostly the manual labor; mining, transport, production etc, as well data processing and analytics and diagnostic jobs such as: accounting, para-legal, medicine etc. will be the worst affected by automation and that, the safest jobs are the the 'Science, Engineering and Technology' type of jobs, which is true. The article further suggests, that automation does not necessarily mean job losses. However, it will require reskilling people and re-deployment. This sounds like a grand idea, if we ignore the time, money, employee age and willingness of employers to practically implement this. My feeling is that, the practicalities are not that obvious. Either way, the wheels of automation are turning, and we have to find solutions to the looming era of 'man vs machine'. Institutions of higher learning also need to start thinking about, the future relevance and sustainability of their offerings given the automation threat. In this way we can gradually produce 'automation-ready' graduates as we slowly phase out the older generation. This will allow the current workforce to fully utilize their hard earned experience and avoiding a collision course with the labor movement.

It is undisputable that automation is the future, for better productivity, safety, cost efficiency, environmental friendliness and many other reasons. It is up to policy makers, to realize now, this inevitable shift and start to put together strategies that will ensure a smoother transition, that does not render millions in the labor force completely obsolete and jobless. Failure to do this, will leave us with no option but reactive governance, when the labor movement collides with automation. Questions are how will automation affect your job and those of your children in the future? do you need to start advising your children to make 'automation-savvy' career choices? I will leave it here!