#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #jobs #Amazon #AIInvestment #PreparingForAI
Your salary and benefits are so good, you can buy your daughter a big scoop of ice cream.
Or, you can comfortably take your girlfriend out on a dinner date.
These scenarios come from Amazon recruiting ads on television.
But, how long will you have a job, if you work for Amazon, or anywhere in manufacturing?
Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, is investing $100 billion in AI that could ultimately eliminate many manufacturing or warehousing jobs.
Bezos is spearheading a new $100 billion fund to buy and modernize industrial manufacturing firms with AI, often utilizing technology from his own startup, Project Prometheus. Prometheus, focused on physical AI simulations for aerospace and defense, launched with $$$6.2 billion, according to The New York Times.
If people don’t have jobs, will the U.S., state and local governments have to tax robots? That is being debated today, according to reports.
AI seems to be the wave of the future. But, we don’t yet know exactly what toll – or benefit – AI will have on working people.
Certainly, some jobs will be created, but many others will be eliminated over time.
And, from all indications, that time is not too far off.
So, if you are a relatively young person who works in manufacturing, or for companies like Amazon, and have a great salary and benefit package, how long do you think you will have it?
It may be wise to start preparing for – not just thinking about – what you will do next.
Of course, that is much easier said than done. Sometimes, it’s often hard to project where your skills might be useful. You may be matched perfectly to your current job, but jobs go away. Or, jobs change. Or, you may have to look at your environment to see what other jobs you could learn.
You may have to do this on your own time. Your employer, no matter how currently generous he or she may be, likely will NOT be thinking about you as the workplace evolves.
It also may be difficult for some to project what his or her workspace will look like in, say, five, 10 or 15 years.
It is a time for people with detail-oriented jobs to look at the bigger picture.
The details of your job may be important now. But, imagine a machine doing the same thing.
If perfected, or even if not, a machine likely will do a job faster than a human. Will it do it as well? Will the company care about the quality of human touch? If the machine does a good-enough job at a faster rate at less cost to the company, it could be very easily embraced.
AI, robots and other technology are NOT substitutes for human talent. Perhaps we should think of this in foodie terms. The small farmer who raises grass-fed beef without any artificial enhancement to the cattle will produce great meat. But, overprocessed meat is cheaper. What do you think most consumers will buy more of?
We can’t stop AI. But, we’ve gotten enough warning that we should ALL be preparing for it.
Peter