Robots and the jobs we love to hate | Robotics - Techerati

Euan Davis, European Lead for Cognizant’s Centre for the Future of Work notes. We need to stop defining ourselves by what we do.

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We tend to think about work in terms of “jobs”. You are a programmer, a doctor, a consultant, or a lawyer. When we introduce ourselves, convention dictates we talk about our jobs rather than who we are. The shorthand of our titles allows us to judge and be judged, whether at cocktail parties, in the gym, and in the office.

But defining ourselves by what we do not only prevents people from trying to change jobs when work itself changes. But it also makes new technologies, like AI and robotics, appear more threatening than they actually are.

When we’re young, jobs are typically a minor element of our personal identity, and job-hopping is a way of trying on different identities or as a means to an end: today a barista, tomorrow a marketing person. As people mature and the jobs market channels us into our niches, identities become fixed and fused with whatever puts bread on the table...

Tomorrow’s work will shift considerably in a single lifetime, especially as people live longer than ever before in certain countries. The first person who will live to be 125 has possibly already been born. The idea that this man or woman might work in the same role until they retire is anachronistic.

Unlocking the shackles of the “job” requires a linguistic shift. The next time there is a worrying headline, try replacing the word “job” with the word “tasks.” In that way, it becomes clear that whole jobs are not being automated, only certain aspects of the job. Most work will be augmented by intelligent machines, not obliterated.
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Source: Techerati