The end of humans

If anything represents the new new thing in our technological age, it's the arena of artificial intelligence. From the factory floor to the glittering glass office of law firms, smart machine are doing job, after job, after job.

The conversation about jobs going offshore is so yesterday. Today it’s robots and algorithms that are the threats.

Manufacturing is only the beginning. Service sector jobs, clerical jobs, accounting, paralegal, are all starting to be done by machines. Drones will soon do deliveries and driving, perhaps the largest bastion of blue collar jobs, will, within 10 years, be replaced by the autonomous vehicles.

So what’s left for humans? As machines start to program themselves, as we’ve seen with autonomous cars, as more and more higher level functions are done by machines, what’s a human to do?

That the subject of Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, a new book by Julia Kirby.

My conversation with Julia Kirby:

The Industries of the Future

Just for fun, pull out or get a copy of the originally published version of the best seller What Color Is Your Parachute. Originally published in 1970, virtually no job that it listed that even touches technology, is even close to the same today. Remember that came out 46 years ago, just as the boomers were going into the workforce.

Today’s changes, human, technological and social, are happening at a geometrically much faster pace. Imagine then what the workplace will look like 46 years from now.

Children entering school today will work in a world that has almost no relationship to today's world. The jobs, the skills, the workplace and the products will be vastly different.

Given this, how do we plan? How to we teach our kids, shape public policy and prepare for a fourth industrial revolution that will happen, even if we do nothing to get ahead of it.

Alec Ross, one of America’s leading experts on innovation, served as Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He’s the author of The Industries of the Future.

My conversation with Alex Ross: