The truth is, that automation capabilities across all industries has been developing for a very long time, but only now do we start to see the major impact of such complete automation.
From the use of horses to help plough fields, to tractors and finally to the robo-crop that automatically removes weeds on fields. Take any industry and you can find examples since the first industrial revolution to this one, of automation slowly becoming more powerful, more complete and more transformative.
What is different this time, is that we can see real possibilities of complete and total automation, and even with tasks and jobs that we might have thought would be impossible to automate only a few years ago. This is driven by the power of the algorithm and specifically machine learning capabilities that have significantly advanced over the last five years.
We are at the start of a huge transformation across every industry, as they say, “no job is too big or too small”.
You can find online a relative list of jobs and how quickly they are to fully automated – what this shows is the diversity of capabilities of automation.
We should not be scared of this, it is just the next step in our evolution. We should embrace it and help figure out what this means for humankind – the potential this automation could give to us is beyond our wildness dreams.
Personally, I am looking forward to having my work augmented with smart automated machines that allow me to free up some of my time to focus on more interesting challenges. My hope is that many of us are able to embrace the changes in the same way.
Lets see what 2017 has to offer on the automation journey.