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Bematists, Knocker Ups, Pin Setters and Video Rental Associates all shared common fate – their jobs vanished – Your job will likely go away too.
Jobs evolve. You may just be underestimating the pace of change and its impact on YOUR job. We hold unrealistic examples like the ubiquity of autonomous vehicles or robots doing our jobs as comfort that this will not happen (to us) in our lifetime.
Enter Chat GPT in Nov 2022.
100M users in the first 90 days.
Introducing the next job disruption revolution – the human machine frontier.
The shift to digital employees has caught us flat footed.
According to a world economic forum study in 2022
• Humans did 66% of the work,
• machines did 34%.
By 2027 that shifts to Humans 57% and Machines 43%. My view is the first 34% took 50 years. The next 25% will happen by 2030. The realtime rise of chatbots and AI-driven basic service solutions is reducing the need for human representatives in many roles across all industries NOW!
The slow evolution of job change, at least in hindsight, is easier to see. Like a slow moving train, early technology advances in the 1970s, 80’s and 90’s replaced jobs/people manually running things: Telephone Operators, Typesetters, Film Projectionists and Typists/word processing. How silly did it look in the recent episode of Taylor Sheraton’s “1923” where the bank of women switchboard operators were moving wire jacks from one port to another. This was just 100 years ago.
Outsourcing began in the 70’s/80’s as companies shifted their manufacturing to lower-cost regions: India, China, and Eastern Europe and then in the 90’s tapped skilled labor to fill call center and IT/software jobs. ~50% labor cost reduction drove the incentives/speed of change (lost US jobs).
In the 2000-2020 Telco, software and web solutions fueled self-service and changed work again: Travel Agents -moved online and jobs for taxi drivers as Uber took hold, and more complex MFG/Software Jobs lost in the US.
The pandemic (2020+) forced change again. WFH changed central services, real estate and purchase patterns – driving entire industries to shift online: in person Sales people displaced by pervasive online shopping. And mid-level Managers – oversight changed as WFH roles dominating. Many of the pandemic habits have reshaped the future of work.
Today with AI advancing – we see sight lines (early realities) with workers scrambling: telemarketers, customer service, translators, early creative impact with copywriters, design services, photography, video editing and even entry level software development as real “early examples” of jobs being lost.
The important thing is what’s coming. And how we respond!
Footnote:
In ancient Greece, bematists measured their steps to calculate distances between points.
Bowling Pinsetters removed and replaced pins between each bowler’s turn.
Knocker ups woke people up with loud noises before electronic alarm clocks.
Video Rental Associates rented VHS/DVD tapes/discs to customers in physical stores.
