Dubai: More than 50 per cent of jobs are expected to be lost to artificial intelligence and robots in the next 10 years, said an expert at The Government Summit who shared his insight on the future.
“The world is no longer changing every 100 years,” said Dr Peter Diamandis, Co-Founder of Singularity University and Founder of the X-Prize during a session titled ‘The World in 2050’. “It is changing year by year.”
Because of the fast rate of change, companies and individuals should not have a local and linear way of thinking towards the future, he said.
“When the inventor of the digital camera approached Kodak, they turned him down as they had a linear way of thinking and so did not know that his invention was the key to the future of photography,” Diamandis said. “Kodak eventually announced its bankruptcy in 2012.”
As a result of technology evolving constantly, Diamandis said a study predicted that 40 per cent of the future 500 companies will no longer exist in 10 years.
“Let us look at the Osborne computer, a portable computer mostly used by accountants in 1982,” Diamandis said. “Twenty-five years later, in 2007, it was replaced by smartphones. So in another 25 years, 2032, you can only imagine the change, the internet will be everywhere.”
Diamandis said computers are currently being built to build other faster computers, adding that what we are seeing now are faster cheaper computers that are driving a whole array of technologies.
“Right now the only constant is change, and change is moving at an increasing rate,” he said.
Diamandis predicts that artificial intelligence (AI) similar to iPhone’s Siri will be responsible for taking jobs from humans in the near future.
“AI can today do most of the things that humans can do, they can think better than humans, they can translate and understand 85 languages and they can read and write so it is predicted that they will take 50 per cent of human’s jobs in 10 years,” said Diamandis.
Robots will also be responsible for the loss of 50 per cent of the jobs in the service sector in 10 years as they will compete with imported labour sources as the cost of labour will drop to just the cost of power (electricity), said Diamandis.
“Robots will enter every aspect of our daily life and we are not talking about in 45 to 50 years we are talking about now, they already exist now and they are being used now,” he said.
Diamandis said we should be empowered by these robots and AI, in fact humans should learn from them.
He predicts that Google Glass will be used by all humans adding that the world is growing to become a world of a trillion lenses.
“The whole world will have the answers to every question at anytime and anywhere.”
Diamandis also pointed to the rapid development of 3D printers, which are predicted to be able to create almost everything in future.
“Imagine if we can print cement, we will be able to build our houses with 3D printers,” Diamandis said. “3D printers will also be able to print food and organs. This means we are entering a world where manufacturing will become geography- independent.”
3D printers will empower individuals and small company owners, creativity will sky rocket because they can create whatever vision they have, he added.
This will also increase the culture of copying,
“We will enter the copy economy,” he said.
Diamandis added that because of genomics, the UAE can now afford to sequence every Emirati citizen.
“We will have high life expectancy and biology will become the new programming language,” he said.
