I Lost My Job To A Robot!

A computer software developed by a startup at MIT can build better predictive models than the majority of human researchers according to news released on October 20, 2015. This is just one of the many developments in the recent months that show how Artificial Intelligence is slowly taking our jobs. 

At the Dusseldorf airport, robotic valet parking is now reality. You step out of your car. You press a button on a touch screen. And then a machine lifts your car off the ground, moving all three tons of it into a kind of aerial parking bay. Built by a German company called Serva Transport, the system saves you time. It saves garage space, thanks to those carefully arranged parking spots. And it’s a sign of so many things to come.

Later this year, automated taxi pods will start running on the streets of England's Milton Keynes, offering rides around the town. The UK government is updating the highway code to take account of driverless cars.

Meanwhile, the first robot-only factory is being built in China's Dongguan factory city. The factory, owned by Sehnzhen Evenwin Precision Technology, aims to reduce the current workforce of 1,800 by 90%, according to Chen Zingui, chairman of the board. But Chinese ambitions for a robot workforce go much further. Since September last year, a total of 505 factories across Dongguan have invested 4.2bn yuan (£430m) in robots, aiming to replace more than 30,000 workers, according to the Dongguan Economy and Information Technology Bureau.

A robot at the ALoft hotel in San Francisco delivers towels and toothpaste and other stuff. At Vanguard Plastics in Connecticut, a machine called Baxter is manufacturing goods in ways machines never could in the past. The likes of Google and Amazon are pushing even further into this area with everything from warehouse drones to self-driving cars.

Boston Consulting Group predicts that by 2025, up to a quarter of jobs will be replaced by either smart software or robots, while a study from Oxford University has suggested that 35% of existing UK jobs are at risk of automation in the next 20 years.

Artificial Intelligence is not going to show up one day and steal your job. Instead, it is a gradual process which is already on its way today. As the capability of artificial intelligence improves, it will expand into more areas and functions. This may not necessarily take away jobs from humans as researchers also expect job opportunities to be created by Artificial intelligence in the highly skilled areas to support the new technology. But for many who rely on jobs like the ones described above, it is time to retrain and adapt to the changing job market.