Is Automation About To Take Our Jobs?

Podcast: The Design Course Academy Podcast
Episode: Is Automation About To Take Our Jobs?
Pub date: 2020-07-27

Is Automation really a danger to your job and mine?

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More often than we care to admit, we hear and read think piece by tech bloggers, enthusiasts, even founders, make the cliche comment of how automation is going to replace jobs that are routinely based; at least one in every article on automation carries that phrase or something close to that. So, in this episode, we take a dig at this phrase, to know if its claims are right, or not.

Years ago, when civilization was slowly creeping in, into the tiny fabrics of humanity, roads were built with bare hands, as stones were crushed with no tools but bare hands. A worker would crush a larger piece of stone on the ground or use a more sordid piece of stone to chip away at a larger one to get the desired size. Along came Mr. Pickax. He was one of man's earliest tools of automation (though spears and flint knives are well ahead in that race), and to a very large extent, made whatever form of job it was used for, easier. So, anyone who could wield Mr. Pickax had a better edge than others who couldn't, to churn out a larger volume of "crushed" stones, more fitting in size, and above all, have a better efficient job in road construction than those still stuck with doing the job by hand. This is my best way of explaining automation.

The man who refuses to evolve in his work approach, will lose to the man who can wield a more efficient tool in that same line of work, and mind you, no tool in itself can wield itself, they're either programmed by man or controlled by man. The marketplace is evolving, and the tools we need to keep up with the expectations of the marketplace, are evolving as well. The marketplace is driven by the needs of the customer. Customers now demand speedy and timely delivery, efficient customer care, etc, and the traditional tools used in delivering these solutions can no longer stand the weight and intensity of the demands placed on it by the marketplace, hence the need to automate a lot of processes. While managing your father's store which caters to 5-10 customers at a time, it was okay to keep records in a book; now the customers have grown to 1 million customers visiting your e-commerce store at the same time, records can no longer be kept in a book; a bookkeeper will no longer do the job, no matter how good she is; hence the entrance of an automated system to the job - a database management system, a Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM), and other amazing tools available to businesses.

Quote: "The Marketplace is driven by the needs of the customer"

Automation in many ways, is an ambiguous representation of what actually happens, as when people hear automation, their mind flies to a machine doing the job of a man with no human interface. Automation doesn't live and die at the hands of robots and crane. Any automatic equipment used in manufacturing, in a processing facility or a process at all, falls right in the alley of automation. Automation in itself is not a danger to your job or mine. The "Auto" part of the word, is only a segment of the process; there's always going to be a human being at the beginning and end of the process. Somewhere in between the processes, there might be some human involvement, but inter-spread between those processes, there are operations that will happen without the involvement of a human agent. So those processes that can run without the

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