The AI Book

CHAPTER 72Humans versus Machines: Who Will Still Have a Job in 50 Years?

By Duena Blomstrom¹

¹CEO and Co-Founder, PeopleNotTech and Emotional Banking

From a purely business perspective, it is no secret to anyone that work has changed substantially in the last 50 years, and in the last 20, the speed of change has picked up even further. The next 50 years promise to be even more interesting from the perspective of the workforce. Every constant that was true of the white-collar work environment in the 1980s, 1990s and even 2000s has become optional, has disappeared or is in flux, from the set-up and location of the place where we do our work to the tools we use and the manner in which we do it. The main driver behind this is, of course, technology. Having changed the way in which we communicate and relate to each other on a personal level, technology has affected how we work in offices, not only from the way it enables work but also in the way it drives the speed of execution.

The New Normal

The business competitive landscape has also fundamentally changed: due to the influence of technology, companies who are native to this new environment of speed and focused execution using digital tools are immensely successful and have become so in a very short time span. The darlings of Silicon Valley (not only Google, Amazon, Apple or Facebook but also Netflix, Spotify or Zappos) all have very different business models and purposes but an incredibly large number of similarities when it ...