Nathan Leigh - Exponential Disruption

The transition last time round

In the past most people used to work on farms and actually experienced large amounts of leisure time Leisure Time - Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure.

Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year. until eventually agriculture machines disrupted the farmers so many workers had to relocate into city slums to find work in factories - “With the advent of industrialization, however, everything changed. The new enclosure laws—which required that all grazing grounds be fenced in at the owner's expense—had left many poor farmers bankrupt and unemployed, and machines capable of huge outputs made small hand weavers redundant. As a result, there were many people who were forced to work at the new factories. This required them to move to towns and cities so that they could be close to their new jobs. It also meant that they made less money for working longer hours. Add to this the higher living expenses due to urbanization, and one can easily see that many families' resources would be extremely stretched. As a result, women and children were sent out to work, making up 75% of early workers"

The conditions and wages for factory workers were terrible for a long time, Child Workers Wages during the industrial transistion- As Mr Mokyr notes, “life did not improve all that much between 1750 and 1850.” For 60 years, from 1770 to 1830, growth in British wages, adjusted for inflation, was imperceptible because productivity growth was restricted to a few industries.

Not until the late 19th century, when the gains had spread across the whole economy, did wages at last perform in line with productivity. it took years for the government to get involved and enforce a law banning children under 9 from working in textile mills and for children aged 13-18 to not to work more than 69 hours a week. It then took a further 34 years Factory Laws - 1833 - A law bans children under 9 from working in textile mills. Children aged 13 to 18 are not to work more than 69 hours a week.
1842 - A law bans children under 10 and women from working underground in mines
1844 - A law bans all children under 8 from working
1847 - A law says women and children can only work 10 hours a day in textile factories.
1867 - A law says women and children can only work 10 hours a day in all factories. (A factory is defined as a place where more than 50 people work
1875 - A law bans boys from climbing up chimneys to clean them to put in place a new law that says children can only work 10 hours a day. According to David F. Noble the Luddites did not destroy machines because of technophobia, but because of necessity. They had to choose between starvation, violence against the capitalists, or property destruction. The last choice was the most moderate way to protest against unemployment and the lack of compassion of the factory owners.

The transition from agriculture to manufacturing gave us much more prosperity in the long run but was terrible for many people experiencing the transition. The government, as evident in the past in England, has shown it is slow to react to suffering during a great transition and may struggle to prepare Jon Perry - Change always brings with it risk and opportunity. The rapid emergence of a growing number of technologies that can replace human “work” presents both risks and opportunities. The real possibility of widespread and chronic technological unemployment could result in unacceptable individual and societal instability and adversity.

But those same technologies also have the potential to enrich our lives and to free us from the drudgery and danger of manual, boring labor and to enjoy a higher quality of life. To make this happen, our laws, policies, assumptions and social contract must evolve as quickly as our technologies will. There is thus an urgent need to identify, evaluate and implement policies that can help manage and smooth our transition into the new technological era or even anticipate the technology changes and effects in this new computer driven exponential digital age, Vivek Wadhwa- How are policy makers going to grapple with entire industries’ disruptions in periods that are shorter than election cycles? The industrial age lasted a century, and its consequent changes have happened over generations. Now we have startups in Silicon Valley shaking up bedrock industries such as cable and broadcasting, hotels, and transportation. The writing is clearly on the wall about what lies ahead.

Yet even the most brilliant economists—and futurists—don’t know what to do about it. We won’t be able to retrain the majority of the workforce fast enough to take the new jobs in emerging industries. During the industrial revolution, it was the younger generations who were trained—not the older workers. Regardless, at best we have another 10 to 15 years in which there is a role for humans. The only certainty is that much change lies ahead that no one really knows how to prepare for. where the pace of change is going to be so fast, our linear minds will struggle to comprehend compared to previous change.

Technology is globally advancing at a pace we have never experienced before in human history, many vulnerable people can end up unnecessarily suffering in a fast and chaotic changing work environment if no adequate safety nets or solutions are in place for a person to adapt and retrain their skills. So even if enough new jobs are created it is irrelevant if the transition for people displaced is not governed well, so this upcoming rise of the robots premise must not be dismissed as luddite Vivek Wadhwa- The technology elite who are leading this revolution will reassure you that there is nothing to worry about because we will create new jobs just as we did in previous centuries when the economy transitioned from agrarian to industrial to knowledge-based. Tech mogul Marc Andreessen has called the notion of a jobless future a “Luddite fallacy,” referring to past fears that machines would take human jobs away. Those fears turned out to be unfounded because we created newer and better jobs and were much better off.

True, we are living better lives. But what is missing from these arguments is the timeframe over which the transitions occurred. The industrial revolution unfolded over centuries. Today’s technology revolutions are happening within years. We will surely create a few intellectually-challenging jobs, but we won’t be able to retrain the workers who lose today’s jobs. They will experience the same unemployment and despair that their forefathers did. It is they who we need to worry about. thinking, but valid concern for a society which is about to find many of its major occupations quickly and continuously disrupted Navigating the Transition to a Better World - Navigating the tension between these negative and positive perspectives on the growing displacement of human labor by technology requires a calculated and delicate effort to manage this critical period of transformation.

If handled poorly, the widespread displacement of workers by technology could result in rapidly expanding economic divergence between rich and poor, economic poverty and social unrest for growing numbers of dislocated workers, backlashes against technology and social institutions, and economic and social decline. If properly managed, the use of technology to replace mundane, lackluster, repetitive, dangerous or strenuous labor, could free us to live more enjoyable, meaningful and leisurely lives. by technological change.
"We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth." - Ray Kurzweil

Retail Transformation

This chart below of the occupations Federico Pistono- Take a good look at the table above. Now answer this: how many occupations were created in the last 50 years? The 34 occupations listed above make up 45.58% of the US Workforce. How many new jobs were introduced because of the advances in technology? The answer is only one: computer and software engineers. This profession barely makes it into the list at all. In fact, if we were to exclude the bottom two, we would still have 44.12% of the economy represented, and not a single type job was created in the last 50 to 60 years.

The reality is that the new jobs created by technology employ a very small fraction of people, and even those jobs tend to disappear soon after they are created. Think of the jobs created in the IT industry in the 1980s, and how many of them survive to this day in 2012. If you were a programmer back then, or a system administrator, and you did not study and learn the latest developments, it would be very hard to find a job for you today. How many occupations were created because of the introduction of a new technology, only to disappear because an even newer technology came along? with the largest employment in 2012, It forms the main reason for concern about mass disruption in this rather lengthy article.

As the chart shows cashiers and retail salespeople were the 2 most common occupations in the entire economy in 2012. This is a low skilled role and often seen as a possible entry level role for people with no work experience. This occupation will be dramatically changed over the next 20 years. To explain why I will use an example of arbitrary general retail shop today that currently employs 10 people and their roles, I will show the changes that technology will have on this shop as an indicator for the whole of retail.

SHOP A
1 manager - supervises staff and finances
1 delivery driver - bringing new stock to the store
4 Checkout staff - serve customers
4 shop floor staff - stack shelves, clean and help customers

Technology will disrupt these roles in the coming years. We have already seen the rise in self checkout machines in grocery shops and it's set to even more as they enter general retail, substantially reducing the need for as many checkout staff. Soon shops won’t even have to buy as many costly self checkout machines or hire cashiers as using Apple and Google pay are about to enter the market. In the future a person will be able to walk into a shop, grab an item, scan it with their Apple watch and walk out the store with it, eliminating queuing time and offering maximum for the customer. The 4 checkout staff in our general shop could be reduced in half to 2, one person managing the self checkout machines and 1 on the till, the 2 spare staff could go onto the shop floor but if the shop was managing fine with 4 people why would it need 6?

Retail workers have a median age of 38 in 2011, the average age of fast-food workers is 29, with more than 26% are parents raising children. Retail and fast food are not jobs which only employ teenagers as many falsely believe. They are not stepping stone jobs that people do until they find something else. These are the most popular jobs in the country, vast amounts of people and families rely on these jobs. If there is even a small percentage of jobs cut this can cause a big disruption effect for many people.

Transport and Food Service Industry

Lets leave the retail example for one moment and look at another popular employment just mentioned, the food service, which also looks to be disrupted by technology. The self service model from above can be applied to places that too.
By using computer tablets at tables, the report found, restaurant owners can reduce the labor time of servers by 30 to 40 percent. For example, the report found that using tabletop tablets at an average mid-scale, casual dining restaurant chain, could double the maximum number of tables that a server could handle at a time from four to eight. This means the number of servers would drop from seven per shift to only five per shift — saving $30,500 in payroll costs.

Fast food staff will be out a job the second driving cars become available. The general public may be slow to adopt but businesses and startups will utilise them instantly as they will see the potential to out-compete rivals and increase profits by being able to deliver items and people safely at much lower costs. As of CES 2015, predictions for an on-sale self-driving car are on the order of two to five years away, or 2017 to 2020. We can now be fairly certain that these occupations will experience job disruptions over the next 20 years, as companies will be very quick to adopt these cost saving advantages.

That is a lot of disruption in a short amount of time. But back to restaurants, even though they no longer need a driver they could see business opportunities increase and need for more cooks due to self driving cars as now it is financially cheaper for them to deliver meals to homes increasing the customer base. Yet a new advance in robotics is looking to make cooks obsolete soon, there is Momentum's burger robot which can make a burger in 10 seconds and there is even a robot on the horizon which can cook restaurant quality meals in peoples homes.
A startup which plans to release a robot with human like hands in 2018 for cooking meals. the company plans to build a digital library of 2,000 recipes before the kitchen is available to the wider public. Moley Robotics ambitiously aims to begin selling them as early as 2017. The robotic chef, complete with a purpose-built kitchen, including an oven, hob, dishwasher and sink, will cost £10,000 (around $15,000). Moley is working on improving the cooking robot’s functions and expanding its capabilities.

At such a low price, restaurant, fast food and other food preparation cooks and establishments will surely see disruption due to personal chefs becoming cheaper than a minimum wage worker. Even creative chefs looks like they could even be disrupted by IBM's Watson. Maybe some people will be able to afford them in their homes if they are not spending a large expense on owning a car, they may want to own a personal chef instead. Who wouldn't want a robot Gordon Ramsey in your one that swears less though I imagine...

Picture this not too implausible scenario, Uber combines these cooking robots with its fleet of self driving cars, delivering cooked restaurant style meals as it travels to you without the need for a cook or a driver. It can be cheaper, arrive faster and arrive when you demand. This better service could disrupt local business which work in food preparation and delivery and don't have the capital to invest in robots or self driving cars as fast as Uber. Obviously many people enjoy the restaurant experience so they will always have customers but some may suffer a reduction in custom as alternative food services pop up in competition. This could pose disruption to restaurants and all the staff they employ.
Larry Page - “You can’t wish away these things from happening, they are going to happen, You’re going to have some very amazing capabilities in the economy. When we have computers that can do more and more jobs, it’s going to change how we think about work. There’s no way around that. You can’t wish it away.”

Cheaper and Smarter Robots

Shop floor staff in our example will be disrupted by robots eventually because the potential for robotics to autonomously perform tasks usually performed by humans is growing. Many companies are researching and competing to build human like robot hands such as NASA which says its less than 15 years a way. While we have hand technology quickly advancing to and above human level we have general purpose compliant robots like Baxter , Sawyer , KUKA , YuMi , UR3 or Justin which are now coming onto the market which are safe around and even programmable by children.
If Baxter drops a screw while assembling something, it won’t continue on with the task. It will realize it’s dropped a screw, and pick up another before carrying on. If YuMi picks up a screw, but is holding it in the wrong direction it’s 3D sensing and 3D cameras in its hands will realize and reorient the screw. For simple assembly tasks, an unskilled person can train YuMi to do a task in 20 minutes.
Baxter has a base-price of $25,000 (£19,000), the equivalent of an average US production worker's annual salary. Baxter and Sawyer together can address many of the estimated 90 percent of manufacturing tasks that cannot be feasibly automated with traditional solutions today.

These are the first generation, they will get software and hardware and lower in price, they will get the improved robotic hands so they are even more dexterous and gain powerful AI capabilities. One algorithm enables a robot to operate a machine it has never seen before. Another new deep learning technique enables robot mastery of skills via Team KAIST recently managed to navigate DARPA's Robotics obstacle course in under 45 minutes by successfully completing eight natural disaster-related tasks including walking over rubble, driving a car, tripping circuit breakers, and turning valves, demonstrating roughly the competence of a two-year-old child. How long until the technological breakthrough and innovation is applied to other The driverless car completed the Darpa challenge 10 years ago as an indicator to how fast this technology can improve.

Computers have been following which roughly means they keep doubling in computational power every 2 years, they also get cheaper and smaller at a rapid pace. This increases in computational power and rise in available data is allowing Machine Learning algorithms such as Deep Learning to be more successful in powerful tools like and What robots learn can be added to a cloud and be used by other robots, creating a huge collective brain that continually improves and accumulates robotics knowledge. Once one robot has mastered a task this knowledge can be shared instantly to all other robots.
robotic prices

Scientists and engineers seem to be able to get around the limitations that threaten Moore's law by developing new technologies. There may come a wall, when 2-D silicon chips as we know them today can become no faster in terms of their clock speed, and transistors can get no smaller. At that point it is likely that 3-dimensional chip stacking will take off, or chips will change their substrate from silicon to graphene, or quantum computing will mature, or completely new silicon architectures will emerge. - Marshall Brain

The price in robots is dropping, this is why spending on robots worldwide is expected to jump from just over $15 billion in 2010 to about $67 billion by 2025. Robots presently perform only 10% of manufacturing tasks, but that is expected expected to rise to 25% by 2025 as robots become more affordable and able to perform more tasks. “Within five to 10 years, the business case for robots in most industries will be compelling, even for many small and midsized manufacturers. The total cost of owning and operating an advanced robotic spot welder has plunged 27% from an average of $182,000 in 2005 to $133,000 in 2014, the price is forecast to drop by a further 22% by 2025. As robots get cheaper and better they can be used to cutting down the future manufacturing costs substantially.

Robots are getting so cheap they are replacing Chinese workers. Chairman Terry Gou said Foxconn Technology Group will be able to replace 30% of its workers on the production lines with robots in five years’ time. Another company in China is planning to increase use of robots.
"It is pushing toward putting 1,000 robots in use in its first phase of the zero-labor project. It said the company has already put first 100 robots on the assembly line. "The 'zero-labor factory' does not mean we will not employ any humans, but what it means is that we will scale down the size of workers by up to 90 percent," said Chen Qixing, the company's board chairman. Guangdong authorities said in March that they will invest $152 billion to replace humans with robots within three years. The local government will push for application of robots in 1,950 companies across the province and plans to build two advanced industrial bases for robot production by the end of 2017."

Hotel staff already face disruption from new technology such as AirBnB, they could soon be set to face more disruption by robots, Japan will open the world's first hotel entirely operated by this summer. How long until waiter robots become available to bring food out to customers tables, pick up empty dishes of the table and wipe down and set the table? How long until Baxter's dexterity and vision AI allow it to perform haircuts and other complex tasks thought impossible. Looking at the shop example again now with this new information discussed of effects of exponentially increasing technology, compliant robots, improving hand dexterity, cheaper prices, and advancing AI leading to the ability to perform more tasks autonomously. The 4 Workers are still needed to stack the shelves, clean the store and help customers but each of these roles look like they could be done by robots within 20 years time. Amazon is working on getting various items from shelves using robots pickers for its fulfilment warehouses and a company called Fetch Robotics has robots which can travel to and pick items from a shelf and place it into baskets in warehouses. The compliant robots such as Baxter has been given wheels so is now capable of performing even more tasks that were once unique to humans.

Advanced robotics could generate a potential economic impact of between $1.9tn and $6.4tn (£1.3tn to £4.4tn) per year by 2025 according to the McKinsey Institute. All this including better sensor technology and more data to use will advance the potential of robots in the future to perform even more complex tasks we never thought they could, tasks which make even self driving cars look elementary in comparison. Without being too over ambitious we can imagine in the next 20 years that telling a more advanced version of Baxter to go face up the fruit, check if the cake aisle is stocked, check all the bananas for ripeness or milk is out of date, stack empty shelves with the items from the stockrooms, spot spills and broken items and clean them up and so on. The 4 staff that were performing shop floor tasks could be reduced by half due to robotics.
Jeremy Howard - "In the Industrial Revolution, we saw a step change in capability thanks to engines. The thing is, though, that after a while, things flattened out. There was social disruption, but once engines were used to generate power in all the situations, things really settled down. The Machine Learning Revolution is going to be very different, it never settles down. The better computers get at intellectual activities, the more they can build better computers to be better at intellectual capabilities, so this is going to be a kind of change that the world has actually never experienced before, so your previous understanding of what's possible is different."

Knowledge Work

Next lets looks at providing customer service with technology. As much of the muscle work has been replaced, the brain work required in the service sector is starting to be face a similar fate as technology catches up. Software has the potential to disrupt a wide range of office work. Improvements in AI is allowing more customer service workers, back office, clerical, secretarial and many types of support staff performing routine tasks or will be replaced with a digital workforce of software bots.
"Software bots are far cheaper and quicker than their physical robot cousins. White collar workers on the other hand are numerous, high skilled and expensive. This means from a business perspective the incentive to replace them with automation is even greater than for low skilled work and manual labour. Paper work, discovery, analysis, IT Work, Kenneth Brant, research director at Gartner - "It's worth remembering that IT cost is typically about four percent of annual revenue, whereas the labor costs that can be rationalized by smart machines are as high as 40 percent of revenue in some knowledge and service industries.

The supply side of the market — including IBM, GE, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon — is placing large bets on the success of smart machines, while the demand side includes high-profile first movers that will trigger an 'arms race' for acquiring and/or developing smart machines."" decision making and writing – all key features of white collar work and the professions – could end up under threat." - Chris Thompson

The capacity of machines to replicate aspects of human thought is set to most radically reshape the labour market. These advances mean that activities previously considered forever outside the scope of are increasingly being undertaken by computers. Cognitive computing systems such as IBM’s Watson get better over time as they build knowledge and learn a domain. Rather than being programmed to anticipate every possible answer or action needed to perform a function or set of tasks, cognitive computing systems are trained using AI algorithms to sense, predict, infer and, in some ways, think. Newer are currently being trained in customer service as a support representative. Individual consumers can interact with Watson in plain English to get personalized responses to questions and receive actionable insight with supporting evidence and confidence to help create the experiences customers expect. As just one of many examples, a bank might offer Watson directly to customers to help understand the types of savings accounts and facilitate the opening of the account that meets their requirements. Between 2010 and 2013, the cost of the servers that comprise Watson, IBM’s AI supercomputer, fell by at least 50%.
"One obvious area of shrinkage is the back office. A reason why small companies scale up into mid-size ones is the need to bring in a range of supporting functions—such as book-keepers, marketers and secretaries—and then middle managers to look after such functions Over the past decade technology has been steadily digitising these roles. In the next ten years much of this will either be automated or else simply handled by external specialists. One major back-office role that will shrink in many firms is the information technology (IT) function: 76% of executives think that it is either highly or somewhat likely to be handled by external partners in the coming decade." - Economist Intelligence Unit

A company called uses an Intelligent Voice Automation bot to handle calls. It has natural language ability to be conversational and dynamically generate personalised conversations. Firms such as L’Oréal and VetOnline already use NLP software for on their websites. Google's Neural Network Chatbot is able to discuss Philosophy and IT troubles.
"Automated intelligent assistants are already hard at work doing customer support, sales, marketing, retail, healthcare, utilities, education, and hospitality, the AIAs are designed to recognize real-world implementations that are the pinnacle of real-time natural language understanding, knowledge management, machine learning, and conversational technologies." - Speech Technology

Siri, Google Now and Cortana didn't even exist 5 years ago, how much smarter will these personal assistants be and in 7 years when a smartphone becomes as computationally as the human brain, what will they be capable of in 20 years? You may actually start to think there is an actual person in your phone.

Journalism has the potential to be disrupted with software that can write stories that are indistinguishable from humans, they are at work now writing many sport and financial stories, in 20 years they will be incredibly more advanced. Middle is on its way to becoming virtually due to more efficient and advanced algorithms generated by AI. Recruitment is already being and showing better results such as a more diverse workforce. All it could take is one huge company like Google or Facebook, who already wants data about people for advertisers so why not salary, work history, grade levels etc, to acquire one of the start ups or make their own system to disrupt the recruitment/HR process. They could create a powerful standardised application form, comprehensive online recruiting job/employee search system with their large user bases and use their advanced natural language understanding capabilities to read CV's and match jobs to people better, and cheaper, than a human could ever do.
Mihir Shukla is CEO of Automation Anywhere - "Take the example of invoice processing. In a week or two a software bot will learn how to process those invoices at your company and begin doing it by itself. In that sense it behaves like a robot, but is software. In the next 5-7 years we will have ten million of these in the market. So this is a huge wave, and it will transform the very basic definition of how we work and at what efficiency. It will transform what productivity means. Software is already defining the workforce today and that will certainly accelerate."

Disruptive Technologies

On its own, each technology has the capacity to change business activity. Taken together, they have the potential to radically reshape society, businesses, the workforce and the economy. These technologies are likely to significantly boost efficiency while eliminating many historic jobs. Big Data is allowing non-routine tasks to become programmable, when there is sufficient information available, machine learning can be applied, aiding the computerisation of more tasks. The Internet of Things is another key development has been the improvements in sensory technology, which make its use relatively cheap. In 2012, there were five billion devices connected to the internet, including computers, phones, music devices, vehicles and appliances. This will grow to 22 billion by 2020. This is a major source of information driving Big Data. Coupled with declining costs and expanding capabilities of robots, sensor technology will make entirely new opportunities to computerise and routinise work. The IoT is likely to have an application in, or be used by, every vertical segment in the economy. This will lead to digitisation of the physical world where then it becomes an exponential technology.
“General-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas.” - Cory Doctorow

Computers will make individuals far more productive than they currently are and significantly reduce the demand for these types of workers. This is not a new trend, but the pace of change is potentially considerably faster than in the past. Many people who work in the services performing routine knowledge work are set to be disrupted by powerful digital technologies and ubiquitous connectivity. All it takes is one company to use any of these knowledge automation technologies to gain a competitive edge and other companies will have to compete. “Every company is becoming, or already is a software company. Even if they don’t know it yet. We buy TVs online with Kogan. We bet online … we buy cars, property and insurance online … We can get a degree online now with Open Universities, and then go on to find a job with Seek. Each of these is disrupting billion dollar industries with software.” - Scott Farquhar

McKinsey Global Institute found that there were 230+ million knowledge workers in 2012 which accounts for 9% of the global workforce and 27% of global employment costs. They predict a $5–7 trillion potential economic impact by 2025 of automation of knowledge work. "Over the next 10 years, the work of 110 million to 140 million knowledge workers around the globe may be handled by cognitive robotic process automation systems. his shift to robotic process automation -- which digitizes labor through the use of advanced machine intelligence, engagement, analytics, big data, social media, mobile technologies and cloud computing -- will change the knowledge worker labor market as we know it." - KPMG's Cliff Justice.

"The world’s capital is flowing towards automation and away from investing in human labour simply because automation has a better ROI. This is the tipping point economically speaking and there is no return from it. In January, the Economist ran a big profile naming over a dozen jobs sure to be taken over by robots in the next 20 years, including telemarketers, accountants and retail workers. In other words, in any job involving forms processing, there’s less and less need for a human to be involved." Kamila Hankiewicz CEO at Amuse

Applying Robotic and Knowledge Automation to Retail

Returning back to our shop example and knowledge of software and its capabilities we can foresee that some customer service work could soon be performed without humans, in fact are already helping humans in shops. Using all this information about advancing technology in robotics and software and the fact they can do the jobs better and more cheaply than human beings, and that advantage doubles every two years, lets looks at our present shop today(A) and a future shop(B) in 20 years time.

A = 10 employees	B = 4 employees
1 manager	1 manager* Manager - With the manager not having to supervise as many employees they could be less needed and spread out to multiple stores, possibly remotely manage and oversee using cameras and voice over to employees, managers could even be displaced if advanced automated systems and software bots as described in Manna are built in the future. Many of the back office admin, finance and rota work automatically performed by software bots. Stock ordered using inernet of things, less need for manager to keep shop running manually.
1 delivery driver	0 delivery driver
4 Checkout staff	2 check out staff Cashiers - Customers ability to pay quicker using apps and machines to serve themselves as discussed above. Click and collect will increase too. It estimates a 20% per year growth rate in click-and-collect across all retailers. For retailers that sell online and also have physical shops, click-and-collect accounted for 4% of online sales in 2010. That figure jumped to 17.7% in 2014, he adds.
4 shop floor staff	1 shop floor staff Shop floor staff - To perform shop floor roles robots struggle with or interacting with customers who prefer human assistance. In an engineering / technology business sense means you do not have to replace the worker with technology. You simply have to make the worker more productive with technology, using less workers in total while increasing economic production.

The future modernised shop B is able to employ less people and serve many more compared to a brick and mortar store. B will be able to get increased profits from less wage expenditure. The robot capital may be expensive at first but should eventually pay off if the cost of employing a human is higher than a machine or software bot over time. This modernisation process is inevitable because company shareholders will look at ways to maximise profits and out compete rival businesses, any opportunity to get an advantage will be capitalised upon. Companies which don’t adapt and stay relevant and persevere with the old way will be left behind, just like Kodak or Blockbuster, no companys wants to make those same and remain stagnant and let other businesses pounce on the new models and technology and let other customers choose their better cheaper and more convenient services. Shops A’s will have to modernise or face becoming obsolete but without a shadow of a doubt the single biggest disruptor to either A or B will be the Fully Autonomous Online Shop C.

Shop C -

Shop A is doomed and even though Shop B has modernised it will face stiff competition from Shop C. In 20 years you will view an item from the comfort of your own home using Seconds after you order your item a Kiva robot will spring into action and bring the shelf to the to a robot picker which will grab the item and stock it into to be with you within the hour or an to be with you within 30 mins. 3D where you can buy product designs and print them at your own home cheaply and repeatedly is even more disruption to shop B. The high street will be at your front door, no travelling to shops, having to find the item, avoid people, queue, carry it back home and other inconveniences. Most goods are cheaper online, the only thing holding online shopping back today is the long wait for goods and inconvenient delivery times which looks to be eliminated soon. Brick and mortar will have stiff competition with this level of convenience and many shops B's which have already reduced staff will have to close, as the virtual shop becomes far superior to the physical.

Technology is disrupting the very nature of employment. For the shop B’s that do manage to compete with shop C many remaining workers may face disruption in employment conditions and lower incomes. Just like how Uber has turned taxi employees into independent contractors and refuses to treat them as “employees” so it doesn’t have to pay minimum wage, Obamacare health insurance, unemployment insurance, no guarantee of stability, worker’s compensation or pensions, this kind of employment could infect many other occupations as companies look to cut cost to compete with C. If a freelancing app is created for retail the staff that remain will face less employment benefits, less full time employment opportunities and more competition for their roles which could go to the lowest bidder, pushing down wages.

A 2013 report estimates that roughly a third of the US workforce, more than 40 million, consists of temps, part-timers, contractors, contingent workers, freelancers/independent workers and those who are under-employed or work without employer-sponsored health insurance, 401Ks or FLEX accounts” according to a report by the Harvard Business Review. By 2020, 40 percent of the US workforce will consist of freelancers according to a study by Intuit. Across Europe, the number of professional self-employed independent contractors has risen 45 per cent since 2004. Over the last four years, all new jobs the UK added to its workforce have been accounted for by self-employed people. A Government study in the UK predicts the the way we work will be vastly in 2030 and there will be an increase in agency staff or which transfer financial risks to employees. A study by Deloitte found Canadian organizations are reaching out to the “open talent economy.” 47% of Canadian respondents plan to increase their use of contingent, outsourced, contract or part-time workers in the next three to five years. 80% view workforce capability as an important trend—and 53% see it as a long-term priority for their organization."
"Traditional employment will no longer be the norm. replaced by contingent workers such as freelancers and part-time workers. The long-term trend of hiring contingent workers will continue to accelerate with more than 80% percent of large corporations planning to substantially increase their use of a flexible workforce."

A new report was carried out by Oxford Economics and reveals that replacing members of staff incurs for employers, £30,614($47,669) per employee. When a company has to make a decision between an upfront cost of a for new staff + wages or a $47K smart machine + electricity cost, which will make more financial sense? It is in the interest of every company to employ a minimum number of workers, pay them a minimum salary and have the highest productivity. We are looking at the possibility of vastly different models of employment and a reduced need for roles in popular occupations. The latter will impact many people as they find they can not compete with machines which will work 24/7, every day of the year with no breaks, holidays, sick days, lateness, distractions, tiredness, hangovers, complaints, strikes, wage rises, overtime pay, training or retraining, compensation, insurance, severance pay, contract negotiations, bonuses, maternity leave, law suits, require pensions and only demand a ‘salary' equal to the cost of energy. The machines will always follow procedure, be reliable, consistent, won't procrastinate, talk back or unionise, they behave rationally without emotion eliminating human error or bias, they won't commit occupational fraud or disclose proprietary information, they can be easily improved with new software updates, they require less floor space such as staff rooms, toilets or kitchen facilities and the machines get cheaper, smaller, smarter, more energy efficient and double in computer power every 2 years.

Low Skilled Workers

A by 2 researchers at Oxford found nearly half of U.S. jobs, and 70% of low-skill jobs, could be susceptible to computerization over the next two decades. The study found that occupations within the service industry are highly susceptible, 92% for retail salespeople, 97% for cashiers, 96% for general office clerks, 81% for fast food cooks, 96% for restaurant cooks, 87% for food preparation workers, 94% for wait staff and 77% for bartenders all being replaced by automation within 20 years. While the original study assumes that in the US 47% of all jobs are at risk, it is at 59% for Germany according to a calculation of the economists of the bank ING-Diba. The authors believe that the greater weight of industry is responsible for the difference in Germany.

Deloitte, the Big Four accountancy firm, and the University of Oxford found that 35% of existing UK jobs at high risk of replacement in next twenty years, and that lower-paid jobs over five times more likely to be replaced than higher-paid. Angus Knowles-Cutler, London senior partner at Deloitte, said: “Unless these changes coming in the next two decades are fully understood and anticipated by businesses, policy makers and educators, there will be a risk of avoidable unemployment and under-employment. A widening gap between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ is also a risk as lower skill jobs continue to disappear.”

The last time the labor-participation rate(62.6%) was as low as June 2015 was almost 40 years ago. Nobel prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz has a new NBER paper out that comes to a conclusion that the robots really are coming for your job. Some people this is already taking place with recent job statistics. Bill Gates - "Software substitution, whether it's for drivers or waiters or nurses … it's progressing, Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set. 20 years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower. I don’t think people have that in their mental model."

The original study indicates that 70% of low-skill positions have a high risk of being automated in 10 to 20 years, compared to 46% of mid-skill jobs and 8% of high-skill jobs, the best correlation today to avoiding unemployment currently is more education. With many more workers being displaced, the people without or just with high school qualifications will find it the hardest to compete for work and good wages. The entry-level wages for high school-educated men and women in 2011 were far their 1979 or 1973 levels. entry level wages

The apparent solution for the majority would be to go to college and gain better skills but this may not be possible or suitable for some people who find themselves displaced for many reasons, a big one would be if college and living expenses keep rising and less part time work is available for support them as they study. Another is adults who have families or mortgages to pay for will find it even more difficult. Without a college education, even though college educated people as a whole are not doing as as they used to, many people may find they have less economically viable skills that they can perform better than a machine and have so much more competition for the reduced amount of low skilled jobs available. Unless cheaper education solutions such as Mooc's start to be acknowledged by employers. Other solutions are discussions are discussed later on. The only current alternative would be to for free to gain skills but that is only possible if you have income support so excludes people from poor backgrounds whose family are unable to support them while they gain experience, further reducing social mobility.

Trade, Vocational and High Skilled Jobs

One solution to avoid the debt of college but still earn a reasonably wage is to go into the trades but this too looks suspectible to disruption. The Future of Employment study by the Oxford researchers found these trade jobs have an 80% or higher probability of computerisation within the next 20 years.
- Welders, Cutters, Solderers, Brazers.
- Land Scaping, Painting, Coating, and Decorating Workers.
- Electrical and Electronics Installers and Repairers.
- Construction Laborers, Roofers, Plasterers,Floor Sanders and Finishers, Carpet Installers.
- Cement Masons, Concrete Finishers, Stonemasons, Brickmasons and Blockmasons.
- Structural Iron and Steel Workers, Jewelers and Precious Stone and Metal Workers.
- Tailors, Dressmakers, Custom Sewers, Barbers, Butchers and Meat Cutters.
Carpenters, Glaziers and Home Appliance Repairers were also listed above 70%.

An analysis from the Committee of Economic Development of Australia warns more than five million jobs, almost 40% of jobs, could disappear in the next 10 to 15 years because of technological advancements, it found that technology is set to wipe out 60 per cent of rural jobs. Other large occupations such as Construction will face disruption. Houses, Apartments and Warehouses can be prefabricated using 3D printed off site then assembled on site, bridges can be 3D printed on site. They may have growing pains and bugs initially but refined over the 20 years, to have electronics and plumbing built in and better energy efficiency, faster build time and increased strength and durability than traditional building methods. There is also a robot bricklayer called Hadrian which currently can build a whole house in two days, human house builders have to work for four to six weeks to put a house together as a comparison. Imagine designing your actual house like you do on The Sims, the door, windows, floors, paint colours etc. then having a 3D printer print it overnight, transported to you by driverless trucks and have a Hadrian type robot assemble it the next day.

Many jobs and tasks that people think can't be automated or outsourced such as a plumber could be partially outsourced using technology eventually. Augmented reality could allow remote people to get together in the physical world, future tasks may not even need a physical expert on location. The possibilities of advancing augmented reality tech like Microsoft's Hololens could enable this. Many people already attempt to fix things themselves using information from the internet, e.g. If your shower is broken and you need it fixed then you can go online and look for information, you may find general help but may not get specific instructions or useful information, if you video call an expert to help the interaction is limited, they could say turn the valve but they can’t point or select to it, if a task requires 2 hands then its restrictive to point the camera and get advice at the same time and other communication restraints.

With augmented reality headset which is 3D scanning the shower pipes an expert can now annotate on things in your environment such as drawing a circle on what you need to focus on, what not to touch, which way to turn, etc allowing a more immersive experience when guiding someone through a process. The first Microsoft demo of the HoloLens actually had someone helping another person fixing a sink, so they have this type of application in mind during development.
Augmented Reality

If you are missing tools to fix the shower then a home 3D printer will allow you to print the correct size valve, pipe or spanner. 3D printed Valves

Image from SolidSmack
There are also other ways new technology could disrupt local expertise by allowing in the trades tasks. These models are obviously not possible for everything, especially in dangerous tasks, maybe the item just can't be fixed without a local professional but the inspection, consultation and diagnosing the fault and fix may go down in cost by outsourcing it to a remote person which may disrupt labour opportunities for the local person.
Erik Brynjolfsson - “I think that there are bigger technological changes likely in the next ten years than there were in the last ten years and we know that those were pretty disruptive for the economy.” Right now I don’t think we’re taking it seriously enough. “It’s not a matter of slowing down the technology, it’s a matter of speeding up our response to it.”

A out of skills is taking place. Highly skilled occupations look the least likely to face disruption but that dosent mean all are safe, some workers who have spent years gaining skills are at risk of their skills becoming There is a 94% probability of accountants, auditors, paralegals and legal assistants, all being replaced by automation within 20 years according to a study by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne. Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will dominate legal practice within 15 years, perhaps leading to the “structural collapse” of law firms, a report predicting the shape of the legal market has envisaged. A study by Gartner found one-third of highly skilled work by lawyers, traders and professors will instead be done by smart machines, or by less-skilled workers using computers by 2023.
"Most business and thought leaders underestimate the potential of smart machines to take over millions of middle-class jobs in the coming decades, Job destruction will happen at a faster pace, with machine-driven job elimination overwhelming the market's ability to create valuable new ones." - Kenneth Brant, research director at Gartner.

Finance is susceptible to large amounts of disruption by technology according to Today Watson, using its cognitive computing tools is used to create targeted cancer therapy based on you and your cancer’s genetics by using Big Data. They will your better than any human could, your will be like having a team of the worlds best medical experts in your pocket. Your phone will also become your
"Consider a world where patients are constantly being monitored by biosensors on their bodies and the data from those sensors is being assessed in real-time by machine-learning algorithms looking for anomalies, and diagnosis is performed by a Watson-like computer. Under these circumstances, the number of patients each physician can deal with will rise and thus there will be a need for fewer physicians per head of population than today." - Hugh Bradlow

In the distant future, 30+ years away imagine and sorting the minerals collected to allow robots and to convert it storage batteries, wind turbines and solar panels which are more effective at price per watt than coal, gas, oil, nuclear or other options eliminating need for workers in those industries, we already saw what happended to the fracking industries when the price of oil went down, what happens when price of energy goes down as a whole? There will be less need for energy grid companies if people are self sustainable. With abundant cheap energy agriculture can then be done with robots harvesting food at zero marginal cost. Lab grown means no need for livestock farmers, even milk could one day be created in labs. Plus if nuclear fusion is ever achieved we will see a huge disruption for human roles in energy, manufacturing, agriculture and mining industries in the future.

STEM Opportunities

Some economists, politicians and parents may still be thinking everything will be fine because more people will train to work in occupations such as computer scientist or electrical engineers, as increasing the use of robots will require more talented scientists and engineers to program, design, and maintain them. Some politicians go as far to want STEM only universities, but do we aspire for a which discourages people from studying humanities or the arts? Suppose we encouraged all the retail, food prep, transport, clerical workers, trade workers and so on who face disruption, into retraining into STEM;

1) Not every person has the ability to learn these difficult skills - almost half of US bachelor’s degree students who entered STEM fields between 2003 and 2009 had left these fields by spring 2009. In engineering, of every one hundred who start, only fifty-five make it to a degree. The subject with the highest drop out rate in the UK is Computer science.

2) Not every person has the desire or opportunities to study STEM subjects - the current trend is that women don’t want to study STEM subjects, only about a quarter of workers in STEM fields were women in 2011. Just 18% of computer and information sciences bachelor’s degree recipients were women in 2013. African-American and Latino workers also now represent 29 percent of the general workforce population, but just 16 percent of the advanced manufacturing workforce, 15 percent of the computing workforce and 12 percent of the engineering. workforce.

3) There is not enough STEM jobs for STEM graduates, the shortage of stem workers is a A 2014 study by the National Science Board found that of 19.5 million holders of degrees in STEM, only 5.4 million were working in those fields

The Center for Economic Policy and Research, tracing graduates from 2010 through 2014, discovered that 28 percent of engineers and 38 percent of computer scientists were either unemployed or holding jobs that did not need their training. "A compelling is now available, from many leading academic researchers and from respected research organizations, no one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelor's degrees or higher...All have concluded that U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings—the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more."

There aren't enough jobs available in STEM for everyone displaced to transition into. It only makes up about
5.5% of the U.S. workforce. STEM vacancies may not be able to grow quickly enough. The BLS projects that in the decade ending in 2022, the number of engineering jobs will have increased only by 8.6 percent, which falls short of the 10.6 percent rise expected for the workforce as a whole. Most striking are forecasts for the chemical, mechanical, and electrical specialties, long mainstays of the profession. Together, the three are estimated to grow by only 4.3 percent, well under half the expected growth in the workforce.

The transitions for the workforce from agriculture, to manufacturing, from manufatoring to service sectors took decades. The world can't go to STEM as a major sector in 20 years, even if it did somehow, far fewer skilled workers are needed to maintain automated industries that are displaced by that automation. Paradoxically pushing more people into STEM jobs could increase the rate of automation, and disruption, even more so.
Gerald Huff - “New high skilled jobs do not make up a high proportion of employment, 90% of US employees work in occupations that existed 100 years ago. Between 1993 and 2013, 23 million net jobs were created but only 1.3 million were in high tech industries and it remained just 6% of the workforce, the majority of job growth the U.S. is retail sales, which currently has about 200,000 openings. In the second spot is fast food workers, followed by cashiers and waiter and waitress jobs.

Even if the US somehow managed to create a large STEM sector then it will still face global competition, just like the manufacturing sector, soon STEM occupations will increasingly suffer from outsourcing. In fact more than 370,000 science and engineering jobs in the United States were lost in 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Electrical and electronic engineering has been heavily outsourced abroad, US employment in 2013 declined to about 300,000, down from about 385,000 in 2002. The same could happen to programming jobs, I think it would be arrogant to say it's never possible because US programmers are “superior” and other countries are are full of “low quality devs” which is what any debate into outsourcing software jobs turns into presently. What is evident is the suggested “superiority” will not be around for much longer, many countries have caught up and doing better educating their population, American high schoolers are dramatically trailing behind comparable countries — especially in Math.

"There is a global race for STEM skills and other countries are heavily investing and increasing the supply of STEM students, 41% of all degrees awarded by Chinese institutions in 2011 were in a STEM subject, almost twice the proportion of STEM degrees awarded in the UK and three times the rate in the US. China now stands behind only the United States in the number of science and technology journals published annually, and is expected to overtake the US in scientific output within few years, according to a recent study by the Royal Society. By 2020, China expects to have nearly 195 million community college and university graduates — compared with no more than 120 million in the United States. Accenture predicts that Brazil will increase its engineering graduates by 68% by 2015 and will produce more PhD engineers than the US by 2016." A relatively highly educated workforce has been a traditional source of advantage, however, the rapid rise in global education means this historic strength is being eroded, the increasing numbers of highly educated people in the world will inevitably increase the for the goods and services they produce. Global mobility will also play a significant role in hiring practices as employers look internationally to recruit talented workers. China, India and Brazil beginning to compete for talent and provide the skills sought by organisations at a competitive cost.

patents

Salaries for computer science in the US are high, the average starting salary for a computer graduate in the US is $66,800 compared to $33,807 in the UK. What happens when a US company can easily hire 2 UK developer or for the price of a US one? Some people can already work without being face to face or from home or thanks to improvements in technologies but most companies still need people to come into the office, this will change in the future, soon staff will be able to work as efficiently and collaboratively as they could if they were physically in the office. This global diffusion of job opportunities will be aided by the rise of virtual

Hyper connective technology is creating an on demand workforce where companies or people can get global access to independent free agent expertise for a year, month or project. Websites and online talent-sourcing platforms are proliferating. In some cases, registered workers bid for simple work, such as a few hours of writing merchandising copy for websites. Other platforms offer the services of high-skill professionals or entire teams for projects such as software development. Digital disruption will continue redefining what goods and services need to be produced locally and what can be outsourced to other countries, is levelling the playing field in which professionals operate. When a company in the US can easily tap into labour pools in India, Brazil, it will increase competition and surplus of people willing to do STEM jobs and lower scarcity of workers with those skills. The FT reports more and more people work for virtual platforms instead of companies; work is auctioned to pools of remote contractors.
Thomas Friedman on the Globalization of Higher Education - "In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over."

In 2030 the global labour market will be highly competitive with virtualisation of the workforce, literally. This video of real time graphics rendering combined with a virtual reality headset makes it very likely that virtual immersive environments will be possible in the future. 3D scanning tech which companies are working on such as Google's Project Tango and Faceshift which live captures facial expressions to computer generated characters, will make it possible to add your 3D self into this realistic virtual world and be able to interact and communicate with others and have it feel truly immersive. It’s likely facebook will add their expertise on the social side too with Oculus, making conversations and interactions feel natural. Analysts at PiperJaffray recently said it expects virtual reality to be the megatrend of the next 30 years, with Oculus leading the charge. They compared the market to the mobile phone industry of 15 years ago.
"The future of this technology is going to be “pretty wild, our mission is to give people the power to experience anything, even if you don’t have the ability to travel somewhere, or to be with someone in person, or even if something is physically impossible to build in our analog world,” - Mark Zuckerberg

In the future when you have ubiquitous and even more advanced next generation oculus headsets that FB bought for $2bn, Microsoft’s Hololens or whatever the secretive Magic Leap AR company Google invested $500million into, you know with that much technical expertise and money invested it’s not just gaming that they want to change, it’s real life. Combining improved VR/AR hardware with exponentially increased graphics rendering, collaborative work in the virtual world will be staggeringly immersive. In the future going to work could be as simple as putting on the headset. The technology may reach a point where companies may prefer the virtual over the for many reasons such as it being cheaper, easier to expand and more efficient. What country is a virtual office located in? Could increase incentive for companies to say the office is located in low taxing countries or not even in any country but in the “cloud”, this may cause problems for governments in collecting tax.

VR has the potential to be more powerful for a business than an office could ever be, even thinking of replicating the “office” model could be completely undervaluing the potential of virtual world technology where any work environment is possible, there are no limits. Many people current office roles could be susceptible to this technology, Employers using VR can overcome remote communication disadvantages meaning they no longer have physical inefficiencies or geographical location limitations and could recruit from anywhere in the world with no H-1B Visa’s or migration hurdles to go through. This could substantially disrupt people living in cities/countries with higher living cost because workers in cheaper living areas(which are now producing many STEM graduates) could undercut them. Especially if tools like Skype instant translation is combined with mouth/audio syncing in the virtual world, then you could communicate with people speaking different languages. Over the next decade more and more people will be collaboratively and flexibly working in the cloud without any fixed location a study by

A report by the Economist found as technology develops, however, it seems increasingly likely that the 20th-century construct of people trooping across a city to sit next to each other simply to do their job will come increasingly under question, as more flexible approaches emerge. As such, eight in ten executives agree that the working environment will become “virtual” thanks to more secure mobile technologies and cloud computing. The workforce will become and full of freelance contractors, employees will accessible to companies in any location in a we are entering.

The 4 above videos show that immersive communication, in any language, with a remote is possible in the near future, the only other barriers to businesses are culture, timezone and the difficulty of the manager orchestrating many remote people, the latter which could be facilitated by an advanced form of Siri or AI one day.
The credo of the politician today is: “Why are you not hiring more people here?” The credo of the C.E.O. today is: “You only hire someone — anywhere — if you absolutely have to,” if a smarter machine, robot or computer program is not available. Yes, this is a simplification, but the trend is accurate. The trend is that for more and more jobs, average is over. Thanks to the merger of, and advances in, globalization and the information technology revolution, every boss now has cheaper, easier access to more above-average software, automation, robotics, cheap labor and cheap genius than ever before. So just doing a job in an average way will not return an average lifestyle any longer. - Thomas L. Friedman

Even more disruption is possible for high-tech jobs like software developer roles. Automation tools such as website design companies like Squarespace which allow non developers to make websites eliminating the need for many web developers, can create superstars which crowd out competitors. The world is increasingly moving towards outcomes where those that create something unique or special command increased returns on their efforts while the rest get lower and lower returns. Microsoft Research’s Machine Teaching project is creating tools that would allow anyone to teach a computer how to do machine learning tasks, even if that person has no expertise in data analysis or computer science. Eventually, Simard hopes that a subject matter expert –such as a doctor, an information worker or a chef – could use these machine teaching tools to train models capable of doing tasks on their behalf.

A computer program has been developed that fixes old than expert engineers, similar tools could one day arrive for programming which could eventually move it to a higher layer of abstraction and be combined with advanced voice recognition and natural language processing tools. DARPA has an upcoming Cyber Grand Challenge which again is testing people versus machines, the challenge is to develop automatic software to protect a computer from an attack with malware. If it is achieved some cyber security occupations could face disruption. DARPA have also funded an $11m project for the next four years with more than a dozen Rice University researchers working on the
"If successful, PLINY has the potential to be a transformative technology," said David Melski, VP of Research at GrammaTech. "It has the potential to change the way programming is done, the way programming is taught, and who does programming. It could give the power to express computation to people who don’t currently have it."

The reason this STEM section is quite long is because I see many people arrogantly dismiss the potential for them to be disrupted and claim they were smart for picking a "safe" career and people which didn't its their own fault and victim blaming others saying they should have got a STEM degree. Yet as outlined this is clearly not the case as some high skilled, STEM and even the people who program the machines are vulnerable to disruption. For the "smart" people who may pick a career they think is safe from being automated or outsourced or disrupted, I wonder about your empathy to your parents, siblings, relatives, friends, spouse, children etc? Just because you think your situation is going to be OK for you doesn't mean you can be oblivious to everyone else who could struggle.

Even if you do manage to pick a career that appears safe from direct disruption doesn't necessarily mean that it's immune from disruption by external forces. The market system is dependent on customers, and if large numbers of consumers (perhaps even a majority) are without any means to purchase goods and services, the market economy cannot succeed. Your taxes may go up as a consequence, public services be reduced and in the worst case scenario it could cause another recession. The mantra "My jobs safe, I don’t care about anyone else" else is unbelievably short-sighted. Even Billionaire CEO's are worrying about this. Technology will disrupt almost all sectors of the economy, it not only threatens lower skilled jobs but also has the potential to replace higher skilled jobs and open those jobs to more global competition, no business is safe from the effects of the coming disruption.

Education Disruption

Perhaps the the most useful skill for this fast changing world is to be and motivated to learn new things. Technological growth and the accompanying changes in business models, make the adaptation of skill sets absolutely fundamental for successful participation in the labour market. This is why the current system where people are deterred from gaining higher skills, which will be valuable to society, by charging extortionate fees is so illogical, nonsensical and devastatingly foolish that it seriously questions the education credentials of the people who allow it to happen. We need to facilitate, encourage and want more people to gain skills and re-skill themselves, especially as we are now in a globally competitive market.

Education has the potential to be disrupted by and become more engaging and effective. The way to get better education may be to get rid of human lecturers. Elon Musk believes education should be more like an interactive game, and much less like what is it today which is a rather boring experience with one person droning on in front of others.
“I think of the days of old without movie or video games, if you wanted to see a play, at any given town you would have a troop of actors generally usually wouldn't be very good. Now with movies you take the best actors in the world, best script writers, best directors, best sound, best editing and special effects, multiple takes, all to make it really compelling, thats why you want to sit down and watch a movie, thats how teaching should be. There is still a role for teachers but it should be a helping role as for when pupils get stuck as opposed to just lecturing in front of a classroom”

With a movie you also have the ability to pause and rewind to rewatch scenes or take breaks. Think of a high school physics lesson as amazing as the film Interstellar, with orchestral score, incredible space visuals of black holes and wormholes, distant planets and Matthew Mcconaughey. We will soon have incredibly immersive imagine the ability to stand on Mars as your learn about it. You can make education experience enjoyable, captivating, interactive and gamified and like films which have top actors who are the best of their trade you can get the best charismatic, passionate and entertaining educators. The VR school will become more engaging than any passive experience such as listening to a teacher at a blackboard or watching a video.

Massive Open Online Courses(Moocs) have only just started to arrive, with more popularity and refinement and combination with VR tech they will start to make some university’s If you look at current huge list of free available Moocs such as Coursera , Udacity , edX, The Open University, Khan Academy , Udemy , Apple U and many others you can see the amount of free education that is now accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

As the new wave of the industrial revolution makes more and more roles redundant, it is important that proactive steps be taken to ensure workers develop the skills to remain in the workforce. They need to teach the ability to analyse data and not simply recite facts and figures, they need to retrain workers from industries facing imminent collapse. Operating virtually unchanged for over 500 years, universities around the world are not going to be able to carry on at their current pace of educating people against an exponential technology, universities themselves need a radical shakeup of their operations and move to become an exponential technology, thay have to utilise new technology to optimise teaching. Just like IBM’s Watson will soon become the worlds best teacher, an AI will become the worlds best teacher.

We know the traditional lecture format in teaching students has many inefficiencies and teachers have to spread out there time and resources to the whole class, minimising the personal interaction.
An designed to help provide a better education for children in Malawi has proved an equally effective learning tool for pupils in the UK. In six weeks, children made the same progress in maths as expected after 12 to 18 months of teaching. Advancing Artificial Intelligence will become better than humans at IBM are working on educational software which learns about you to tailor make lesson plans for

The software will explain difficult concepts easily at the learners pace, the software will be able to read your face when you are stuck, and react by slowing down or advising a break. You will be able to ask question to a digital assistant like Siri without feeling embarrassed as you might be surrounded by peers. It will give you instant feedback and encouragement like a game. If a state of the art cheap AI Mooc's come along with virtual reality and other engaging, optimised, tailored educational material, then current education models will be inferior and struggle to compete. These AI teachers may diminish the need for teacher assistants, which was #24 on most popular jobs list. This new technology will make many college buildings and the numerous amounts of staff that work there unnecessary. Even though this will disrupt many jobs its the best solution to better prepare students and adults for the job market of the future against rising college costs and it's current inefficiency against exponential disruption

Technological Disruption

We know we cant stop this increasing technological disruption, Ben Horowitz says "technological change is largely inevitable and impossible to stop. Short of closing borders and halting communications, like North Korea, an economy cannot turn its back on progress."
A Pew Report found these reasons to be concerned about it this time;
1) Impacts from automation have thus far impacted mostly blue-collar employment; the coming wave of innovation threatens to upend white-collar work as well.
2) Certain highly-skilled workers will succeed wildly in this new environment—but far more may be displaced into lower paying service industry jobs at best, or permanent unemployment at worst.
3) Our educational system is not adequately preparing us for work of the future, and our political and economic institutions are poorly equipped to handle these hard choices.
Bill Gates believes the rate of innovation is accelerating. "The magic of software is we can take something and figure it out and replicate it for very little cost. The kind of change we’ve had over the past 250 years, we’ll get more than that in the next 50 years."

A study by Deloitte found a massive impact is unavoidable for Canada. The way Canadians live and work is about to change profoundly. For the past year we have studied the Canadian economy in depth and surveyed over 700 business leaders across the country. "Rapid advances in technology are poised to disrupt Canada’s economy, and our businesses aren’t prepared for it and the damage could be catastrophic. Only 13% of firms are highly prepared, excelling in all four key areas of preparedness, Disruption isn’t going to happen in the distant future – it’s happening now.” - CIO at Deloitte Canada.
Ray Kurzweil’s Law of accelerating returns predicts "As exponential growth continues to accelerate into the first half of the twenty-first century, It will appear to explode into infinity, at least from the limited and linear perspective of contemporary humans."

Some technology experts are optimistic about the future believing we will create enough new jobs for people. I agree partially, we will create many new jobs and industries, no one could have predicted the internet 50 years ago and all the jobs that it created, we could be 1 year away from a new technological innovation as substantial as the internet, no one can know for certain what the new jobs as humans find ever more demands and desires. It would be arrogant to suggest we won’t find new work to do. Tom Malone, author of The Future of Work - "While individual workers may have suffered, new productive uses were found for the workforce as a whole. Yet that does not guarantee the transition will be smooth, says Mr Malone. The concern is the speed of creation of new jobs and what skills they need. "

Where I disagree is if enough new jobs will be created, this race can not go on forever, human skills are, as of this time, limited. Robots have already surpassed us on strength and will do so in dexterity, senses, knowledge, vision, natural language understanding soon and possibly intelligence and creativity one day, until then it continually erodes what many people have to offer. We can expect new type of work to become more complex because the easy parts will be relentlessly replaced by technology, leaving only the components that require more complex human skills. The other part I disagree with is the speed of new jobs being created, will job growth be fast enough compared to the pace of technology which is improving at a rate never before seen? What about if outsourcing potential increases, what happens if more companies leave to equally skilled countries which demand lower pay? Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers - “Until a few years ago, I didn’t think this was a very complicated subject: the Luddites were wrong, and the believers in technology and technological progress were right. I’m not so completely certain now.”

participation labour force

Their is already evidence of our failed creativity to create new jobs for people in the above present day employment statistics. The labor-participation rate in June was 62.6% which is the lowest since October of 1977. There were only about 5.38 million job openings for the 8,549,000 people classed as unemployed in April 2015.
"Historically, humans have contributed muscle and brains to production but we are now being outcompeted by machinery, in both areas, in many jobs. - Mark Walker Machines are encroaching in the last area that we have a competitive edge. So, unlike the displacement of labor during the First Great Transformation, there is no untapped category for surplus human labor to migrate to. Even supposing new sectors of the economy open up, their demand for human labor is likely to be very weak since these new sectors too will be faced with the question of whether to employ robots or humans. The cost advantage will lie with robots for the most part, and so there will be weak demand for human mental labor in the future just as the demand for human muscle dropped precipitously in the past."

An optimistic argument about job creation is difficult with the the type of jobs being currently, they are mostly jobs that are to displacement by technology in the near future. The UK economy shows a shift to low-skilled jobs, every 10 middle-skilled jobs that disappeared in the UK between 1996 and 2008, about 4.5 of the replacement jobs were high-skilled and 5.5 were low-skilled. According to data from the U.S. Department of Labor, Of the top 10 "Occupations with the Most Openings," nine fall into government-designated wage categories of "very low" and "low," It turns out the vast preponderance of job openings these days consists of low-skill, hourly wage work with high turnover. The current slate of "help wanted" ads overwhelmingly involves cashiers, waitresses and waiters, personal care aides, janitors, those who stock store shelves, and the likes of Hardee's and Taco Bell.

men labour force

Between 2009 and 2013, low-wage jobs outnumbered high-wage jobs by some 800,000 with 1.7 million versus 1.1 million jobs, though low-wage jobs made up less than one in five (19 percent) of all employment in 2009, they accounted for nearly 40 percent (39 percent) of all new jobs created out to 2013. Looked at this way, the recovery may not have been exactly jobless, but it has certainly been dominated far by poor quality, low-paying jobs. The recovery — if we can call it that — has been driven largely by low-wage jobs. Nationwide, low-wage jobs have grown at a 6 percent clip, roughly double the rate for overall job growth (3.1 percent) and the growth rate in high-wage jobs (3 percent). Home health care workers, food service workers, retail salespeople and custodians will account for nearly 1 million of the 2.4 million new, low-skill jobs expected to be added in the U.S. by 2017, according to a USA TODAY analysis of jobs data.
Gerald Huff - “If you look at the most common jobs, the top 50 occupations theres only one, software engineer, which is new in the last 100 years. People say oh we will invent whole new industries that people will work in, the new industries that we are inventing are not mass employers, they simply do not generate mass numbers of jobs of the kind we had in those other industries, we added 4x as much jobs in food service and retail than any other high tech industry in the last 20 years. Those are the jobs that we have been creating and those are the jobs that are very subject to automation.”

Historically, when job losses have been caused by productivity-enhancing technologies they have tended to create demand via higher incomes and lower prices, which have generated new jobs economy wide. However, in the more globalised economy, it remains to be seen whether the next wave of the industrial revolution will generate a net increase in employment within this country. Brynjolfsson and McAfee state: “Digital technologies change rapidly, but organisations and skills aren’t keeping pace. As a result, millions of people are being left behind. Their incomes and jobs are being destroyed, leaving them worse off than before the digital revolution. While the foundation of our economic system presumes a strong link between value creation and job creation, the Great Recession reveals the weakening or breakage of that link.

Many people are going to find their limited skills are no longer valuable, for many jobs they will find that Humans Need Not Apply. What happens if vast numbers of people can no longer make money by selling their labor and re-skillng takes years, how will they support themselves during this time, how will the economy sustain growth if another recession hits due to people losing jobs and being unable to pay mortgages, student loans and other debts? The Great Depression had unemployment rate in the U.S. of 25%, are we looking at a worse unemployment rate than that? How will an ageing population increased need for care services be supported, who is going to contribute into paying into the pension fund if less people have incomes to tax? What job will a child born in 2015 have when they are 16 compared to a 16 year old today?
What happens when a 16 year old find all their skills are they have no skill that is deemed worth paying minimum wage for, what skills will they have that a robot or machine, older more experienced unemployed worker or a cheaper worker via can’t do? Will the vulnerable and poor suffer the most? Economist Tyler Cowen observes that rich economies seem to be bifurcating into a small group of workers with skills that are highly complementary with machine intelligence, for whom he has high hopes, and the rest for whom not so much.

In this hyper connected world we are entering there will be global competition for jobs, will find it difficult to get a foot onto the skills ladder for that first bit of experience if there are severely reduced retail, fast food jobs amd other low skilled entry level opportunities. College will be hard to financially save up for if less full time work is and pay through if less low skilled part time work is available or if parents lose jobs and can't offer financial support. The average savings account balance in the U.S. was $5,923 in 2011, according to a 2012 report by Pitney Bowes. It's normally the youth who find it hardest to find work, using Europe as a prime example. They may look to careers in the military but they are currently creating autonomous drones to replace pilots and plans to shrink infantry forces by using robots are in development. Some may even resort to sex work yet even the oldest occupation is not safe from disruption due to sex robots or indistinguishable CGI porn in virtual reality. If Google are successful in increasing the healthy lifespan by a few years then older people will not retire as early to allow younger workers to replace them, making it even harder for young people to find work.

men labour force

Less men are working than ever before In the 1960s, only one in 20 American men between 25 and 54 was not working. According to Mr Summers’s extrapolations, in ten years the number could be one in seven. Less men are graduating from college compared to women, young males with with less education and expertise will fall behind. By 2012, the share of young women enrolled in college immediately after high school had increased to 71%, but it remained unchanged for young men at 61%. Young uneducated men are going to suffer the worst and this should be our greatest cause for concern.

For young low-skilled males a bleak future of having less income, less less job opportunities and low social mobility. For the “lucky” males that are still able to live at home with their parents and not have to pay the current living costs they might see their failure to be able to be independent as their own fault. They will find it increasingly difficult to to court a partner, have a relationship, home, raise a family and so on as their parents did and become disillusioned as they realise the American dream is lost for them. In this lost generation an alienated underclass may develop where many males become depressed, angry, develop mental issues, drugs, crime, prison, and all over side effects correlated to poverty, unemployment and lack of opportunity.

If you have an increase of unemployed, hopeless, angry young men then expect social unrest such as rioting, more than half of the people between the ages of 16 and 64 were out of work in Sandtown-Winchester in Baltimore during the recent riots. In the more severe case they may become frustrated or scared and either side, the people who don't have jobs and the people who do but whose living conditions have deteriorated, may direct their anger at each other or at scapegoats such as minorities and blame immigrants “for taking our jobs” or a certain race or type of people as the cause of their problems and may revert to extreme forms of nationalism as has happened in the past. We are looking at 70% of low skilled work being automated which generally employs low educated people, an extreme party getting into power and capitalise on a vulnerable populace is not completely unthinkable, unfortunately, and one of my biggest concerns for our future.

This is not isolated to any country and not just developed worlds, there could be global conflicts between nations, violent revolutions are increasingly likely with increasing civil unrest too and could cause even more disruption and suffering. Almost 202 million people were unemployed in 2013 around the world, an increase of almost five million from the year before. If current trends continue, global unemployment is set to gradually worsen, reaching more than 215 million jobseekers by 2018. During this period, it is estimated that around 40 million net new jobs will be created every year, which is short of the 42.6 million people who will enter the labour market each year looking for work. Meanwhile, the global youth unemployment rate is almost three times as high as the adult unemployment rate. In certain countries, almost one-quarter of young people aged 15 to 29 are now neither in employment, nor in education or training. Advanced robotics will be especially bad for the Chinese economy which is largely dependent on manufacturing jobs.
Vivek Wadwa - Even if the Chinese automate their factories with AI-powered robots and manufacture 3D printers, it will no longer make sense to ship raw materials all the way to China to have them assembled into finished products and shipped back to the U.S. Manufacturing will once again become a local industry with products being manufactured near raw materials or markets. So China has many reasons to worry. I worry if we will create the new jobs fast enough and distribute the prosperity.

By 2050, world population is expected to increase from the current 7.2 billion people to 9.6 billion and there will be almost as many people in Nigeria as in the US, Ethiopia will have twice as many people as projected in the United Kingdom or Germany. Sustaining that many people if they can't find employment, add into the mix environmental disruptions from global warming causing even more resource scarcity in poorer regions will cause suffering, leading to more extremist groups to develop like ISIS but with potentially advanced terrorism in the use of drones or bio-weapons, the future looks very precarious, nationally and globally.

We can predict what jobs will face the most disruption and can see the trends on what types of new jobs are being created - They are both low skilled. There will be a huge drop in demand for traditional skills. Gaining an entirely isn't easy, think about the 50 year old unemployed truck driver or the 26% of fast food workers with children, how are they meant to retrain while they experience increasing insecurity of employment and income? People will be caught off guard, the transformation could be too much too quick for too many people. There have been distinct losers in recent economic adjustments, particularly unskilled youth and workers unable to develop skills in demand, such as older males made redundant from traditional manufacturing roles. For these workers there is a vicious circle associated with their inability to re-engage with the labour market You cannot just take middle-aged workers out of factory, transport or retail environments, put them into classrooms and then expect them to immediately learn new skills for new jobs in that unfamiliar setting. We need better solutions to support while they re-skill and adapt. A career for life is over.

The societal upheaval of many people without a steady income training for new jobs, the strain and on families and stress on relationships may be too great while faced with problems of stagnant wages, rising wealth and income inequality and climate change. What is certain that humans have a limited skill set and each year robots are gaining them and improving upon them due to exponentially improving Computers, AI, Robotics and Automation tools. With so much change possible it should be great in the long run but bad in the interim period as society and governments struggles to adjusts with pace of change. As mentioned in the introduction, many forget to mention how the transition was for workers during the industrial revolution who faced disruption from agriculture to factory work, and just focus on the end result, our governments may be doing the same. Do we want to prepare for any problems a large disruption could bring or do we want to carry on dismissing it as Luddism?

Conclusion

The speed of technological innovation is rapidly increasing. All these technologies mentioned and the many more emerging ones being developed be amazing. Less people having to work mundane jobs, more productivity, the ability to construct houses faster, cheaper and stronger, self driving cars saving lives and allowing disabled people to travel easier, 3D printing saving on transportation and environmental costs as goods no longer having to be shipped from China, cheaper access to expert knowledge and aid from around the world, a team of the best medical, legal, education experts available in your pocket, the list goes on...
It will be really incredible, once we reach this incredible future but we need to manage the journey there well so that everyone can and enjoy the increased wealth and prosperity of advancing technology, not just the 1%. We should all be able to equally welcome our new robotic overlords which have the potential to improve all of our lives substantially.

Given the rate of change of technology, preparation for dealing with this disruption must begin now. According to we are entering into an economy where the rate of return on capital outstrips the rate of growth, inherited wealth will always grow faster than earned wealth. If is failing and can no longer provide opportunity, social mobility or a better future for the next generation, if capitalism produces stagnant wages and higher living costs, unemployment, child poverty, global warming and rising wealth and income inequality which is creating a society, if these have no sign of stopping then we as a society need to start We need to evaluate and decide whether or not its the best system for our If the American Dream becomes to not have poor parents then maybe capitalisms time is up.

We need to aspire for a more sustainable and egalitarian society, move towards and promote people to organise their place of work and the means of which may increasingly be “the robots”, into more equal, fairer and democratic arrangements such as Governments need to redistribute through tax and encourage unions, especially for the increasing amount of unstable independent workers, they need to bring democracy, regulation and fair benefits to their work places. The Uber model, where all the financial risks go to the employee and they receive no employee benefits, regulations, or stability where they can be fired easily without warning can not be the future of employment for the next generation. Independent freelancers need to unionise. These measures will help promote fairer wages which will reduce the extreme forms of we are experiencing. By reducing income inequality a and more vacation time is now possible as people earn more per hour, as people cut down on hours then more available hours are created for unemployed people to work. This sustains economic growth, alleviates unemployment, increases leisure time and GDP and allow more tax to be gained to fund the next solution.

In many areas productivity has become from employment. We need to accept that it isn't immoral to be unemployed. We can’t continue with our attitude everyone must earn a or victim blaming the poor or unemployed when they are obviously suffering and need the most help, not abuse. We have to agree as a society to support the unfortunate people who are not vilify them. Once this is achieved and reductions in wealth/income inequality it will be easier to create and fund an Unconditional Basic Income. This will guarantee every citizen a right to a minimum level of subsistence which will allow safety nets for people who are disrupted so they can safely be able to retrain and find new and engaging work without the of starvation, poverty, homelessness or other kinds of suffering that occur now. Just improving won't be enough on it's own, the above solutions are vital and there are many others but with the huge length of this already I picked my top 3, I feel these are most effective and I hope we will be able to make the public more aware of the potential impact of Exponential Disruption we face and the policies to ease the transition into an abundant future for all.

What will mass amounts of humans have to offer in labor in 50 years that cant be done by the advancing ai, machines and software and why that shouldn't be a good thing, it means after centuries of struggling for survival we can finally sit back and enjoy being alive full time. All this technology is meant to make our lives better by freeing us from work. Can we not imagine a situation where the majority of our needs are taken care of, material and construction needs by 3D printers and robotics, energy by solar, wind and fusion, education and health by ai, food grown indoors and harvested by robots and fresh water extracted from the ocean? I discuss this incredible future of abundance on my website

We are about to cross an ocean and awaiting at the other end is a fantastic land full of prosperity and abundance where all our needs are taken care off and no one suffers. Unfortunately towards the end of this journey the seas will become increasingly stormy and to make matter worse the majority of us have flimsy boats. We need to prepare people adequately for the stormy seas ahead by allowing people opportunities to rebuild and improve their boat along the journey, allow safety ropes for people who fall out of their boat, and ask some of the people with bigger boats to share some of their wood. This storm is coming, its up to us how many casualties we want to prevent. - Nathan Leigh

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