Hello, and welcome to the future job of the year 2043: what job will you do? If you do one, I say. How will the day unfold? To "draw" (also and not only) the work we will do in 20 years, last week Springwise published a report called "Future 2043". You can download it on their site (after free registration).
Work, relaxation or unemployment?
Already today, robots are faster, more precise and more organized than humans in many applications. In the coming years we will see them become increasingly popular in sectors such as catering, construction and even (to a limited extent) in surgery.
And in 2043? Everyone on the loose? Not necessarily. It's true, machines will take care of jobs that are repetitive and monotonous for men today, but they will be born other jobs as well. Can a machine create, advertise, sell, deliver, feed, clean, repair itself?
So what will your future job look like?
To get an idea of future work, the report identifies three innovations (already existing) that act as a paradigm to show us the opportunities that will unfold twenty years from now.
Retrain, "understand" the skills that will be needed
To grasp all the new skills in advance, the Israeli startup Retrain.ai has developed an AI-powered platform that identifies the skills a company needs to meet future industry needs.
After an initial screening to see which "arsenal" of skills is already present in a company's employees, the platform indicates which areas can be strengthened. It suggests how to "move" employees to enhance their qualities, or how to train them. In other words, it updates a company's knowledge by changing employees' tasks on the go.
A staff of robot waiters for table service
In one of the British branches of "Bella Italia", a restaurant chain, a waiter robot called (guess what?) made its debut BellaBot. Developed by Pudu Robotics, this contraption serves and entertains customers complete with “facial” expressions and large expressive eyes. It will be of great use for locations with few staff, allowing you to better manage workloads and some dispersive activities.
Which? For example, driving diners to their table, or delivering meals to multiple tables in a single trip, or returning dirty dishes to the kitchen. What's left? The human factor, contact with customers, the special lens through which a culinary proposal is interpreted. In summary: the best.
Financial services managed by “digital employees”
The fintech boom is already an example of how a "conservative" industry can be overturned (not always for the better) by the digital revolution. Today, many of the financial services applications for AI focus on back-end processes: investment decisions, fraud detection, and trend analysis.
In the coming years, the revolution will affect future work also in the front-end: an example? Soul Machines, which aims to (re)create a relationship of trust between banks and customers, using digital channels. The solution? Deploy an army of “digital employees“, human-like interfaces that can serve customers in a perceived more empathetic way.
In conclusion: automation and artificial intelligence will reshuffle the cards of work in ways that are difficult to imagine, but it is certain that (in person or remotely) workers in the next twenty years will have a lot of digital company.