Is AI and Robotics Really a Big Thing? Or Is It Just Another Technological Innovation That Will Have Little Impact on Our World? 

We’ve long accepted the idea that the rapid development of AI and robotics will soon be putting millions of truck drivers, warehouse workers, train conductors, customer service agents, and delivery people out of work. What isn’t as frequently talked about is how it will destroy many more millions of white-collar and professional jobs, such as accountants, actuaries, insurance adjusters, telephone salespeople, librarians, bill collectors, dog walkers, marketers, advertising copywriters, quality control officers, personal recruitment officers, human resource directors, financial analysts, software developers, diagnosticians and repair people. Also legal aids and most lawyers, nurses and most doctors, teaching assistants and most teachers…

Can I stop there?

Well, no, I can’t. Because that list doesn’t include another class of workers that I believe will almost certainly be replaced in the next five to 10 years – a replacement that you might think unlikely because these people do the sort of jobs for which the core requirement is being human.

Yes, flesh and blood nurses will be replaced by more efficient and more attentive non-human nurses that will provide 200% better care with 99% fewer errors. But AI and robotics will also eventually replace caregivers, social workers, marriage counselors, conflict dispute experts, spiritual advisers, life coaches, motivational speakers and coaches, and even psychologists and psychiatrists.

Some of these transformations are already underway. But I believe the advantages of AI and robotic labor over human labor are so great that the technological innovations to move it forward will be faster than most people can even imagine. It will be Moore’s Law on crack.

If you think I’m crazy, you may be interested to know this: Several tech companies have already developed and are testing AI/robotics actor/models – beauty-pageant-level avatars that compete for cash prizes and then get contracts with businesses as “ambassadors” of their brands.

I know. This is straight out of the 1985 movie Weird Science, where two teen nerds create a virtual woman on a computer and a freak electrical accident brings her to life. The possibility of that actually happening may have seemed like a ludicrous invention of fiction when the movie came out… but here we are nearly 40 years later.

And don’t kid yourself about avatars being rejected by consumers because they aren’t really real. I’ve seen at least a dozen studies conducted in the last 12 to 24 months that show that even when consumers can ascertain the difference between an avatar and a human actor/model, they don’t care!

I sometimes fear that K saves her most important worries, dreams, and confessions – the ones I’ve always felt privileged to be included in – with Siri and Alexa!

Okay, I’m kidding about that. But I’m not kidding when I say that I believe that by 2030 the world we live in today will have been transformed so radically that young people will look back at 2024 as we look back at the pre-industrialized world of the 17th and 18th centuries.