If you're like me, there is a good chance your job won't exist in 20 years. We are not alone; earlier this year, Oxford researchers estimated that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are susceptible to computerized automation over the next two decades, in careers ranging from transportation and logistics to administrative support to customer service.
The business of automation is already pervading corporate consciousness. Early December, Amazon gave a preview of its drone delivery service - a concept so alien they had to clarify it wasn't a prank.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/98BIu9dpwHU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>The next morning, I listened on NPR to an altogether logical conversation: why couldn't Amazon Prime Air automate pizza delivery? Or laundry delivery? Or really the entirety of human logistics?
Conversations like these are fascinating. They are also meaningless for 47 percent of us, right now.
The reality is that we're not there yet. Automated phone responses still deliver poor customer service: natural language processing has yet to mimic even basic human interaction. Automated judgments with big data and machine learning apply only to those handful of companies with big databases. Prime Air? At current, there is exactly one company in the world with the infrastructure and capital to pull off drone delivery. 20 years is a soft deadline.
Instead, as we enter these interim decades, many workplaces are becoming dumbbells. On one end are operations and support employees. They are creative problem solvers who execute complex business processes. On the other are engineers and data scientists. They are creative problem solvers who execute complex business processes -- 100 times more efficiently.
Make no mistake: automatable jobs are complex. Human or not, they involve many dependencies, take up a lot of memory, and require careful maintenance and optimization. Think of the Bed Bath & Beyond employee who knows the location of every obscure item in the store. Or the customer service rep at Amazon who has memorized every line in the company's refund policy. Or the UPS driver who can compute any local route in a fifty-mile radius.
Just going to work every day is a feat -- and yet, it sucks to know that someone can do your job (much) better; and even worse to think you can't ever get there yourself. I've felt the same way.
I assumed that software was the only way to automate my job. I learned the basics of software and database engineering, and built an application that reduced hundreds of complex rules into a single click. It took me a year. In that year, I delivered far less value than I should have. In that year, I became a single point of failure in my domain.
As an employee, my mindset cost productivity. For management, similar mindsets can have far worse consequences. When companies attempt to optimize humans the same way they can optimize software, they not only sacrifice productivity, but also that very basic need we have to take pride in our work.
In the next few examples, I'm sharing some anecdotes about coworkers and companies I admire who used people as their source code for automation.