Let us change our jobs and become tourist guides before it is too late, I told my wife.
I will take New Dubai and show tourists around the Marina and you concentrate on the historical places in the Bur Dubai side of the Creek, I said.
We will take a short course and register ourselves with the tourism board. I already know First Aid. The only problem however, is that I keep getting lost driving around Dubai and you do not know Deira from Dibba, I told my wife.
Why do we need to know First Aid? she asked.
It says in the course brochure that you need to know life-saving techniques. Maybe because there are so many people running around the globe getting life experiences, and falling into lakes taking pictures, I said.
Why are we changing jobs? asked my wife, looking up from the answer papers that she was marking.
Nobody needs writers anymore, as nobody reads. Everyone is busy taking Selfies, I said.
Not true, said my wife, impatiently. Who will write the content in newspapers and magazines?
“Do you read my columns?” I asked her, and she looked at me sheepishly. In the very near future, there will be apps that can write pieces tailored to your blog or magazine, I said.
Right now, there are online courses from every university around the world. You do not need teachers, just coaches to get through those courses, I said. A senior futurist says that teachers and professors will be out of jobs and coaches, course designers and learning camps will be in, I told my wife.
Already the doctors’ jobs are in jeopardy as the cure for every ailment is online and robots will soon take over surgeons’ jobs, I said. Bots are better than human surgeons as they do not have the slight tremor of the human hands.
Well, this will not happen in our lifetimes. What have you been reading? said my wife.
It is in the papers and it is going to happen within the decade, I said. With driverless cars coming on the streets in America soon, pizza delivery guys will be out of jobs, so will taxi, Uber and truck drivers and petrol station attendants.
Soon in Dubai, there will be no need for driving schools or traffic courts, I said.
We will not need a housemaid anymore, I said. A robot will make the perfect eight-minute boiled egg I always wanted and it will not frighten the cat as our maid does with her singing, I said. Yaay, no more running around for visas. Wonder what will happen to all those typists at the hundreds of typing institutes, I said.
This is amazing, but the article says that with advances in artificial intelligence, computers will take over jobs from lawyers, accountants and stockbrokers, I said. This however, will never happen in India, I said. Everyone is destined for a particular job.
But why study to be a tourist guide, why not something else, asked my wife.
It says here that the entertainment and the tourist industries will be the only ones that will require humans. You already have CGA (computer-generated animation) movies, but you will need human actors that can show human feelings.
You cannot have robots playing the leading role. Maybe only in propaganda movies where you do not have to show any expression, I said.
The futurist says people will be needed to repair robots, work as fashion designers for them and to work as robot therapists. I am sure robots will get depressed, I said. If they see our lifestyle of sitting on chairs the whole day and eating junk food, they might hopefully just go away.
Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai.
