Fin-tech reflections-5: Will my job bereplaced by Robots?

Welearned in this lecture about Robots replacing humans. And I find these twomost interesting: I will not be replaced by robots, and people need to trainthe robots so that they will be laid-off.

Atthe end of the lecture, we took several minutes to do an on-line test. My finalnumber is 7 out of 48. This means 48 tasks that I’m obligated to do, only 7 ofwhich can be replaced by robots. I am SO relieved! Because you know, in lastreflection, I was so worried about the future of unsupervised machine learning.I was not only worrying about my job, I was literally worrying about my veryexistence! But I learned from today’s lecture that it is still very hard for arobot to do works relating to communication, management, complex task analysis,etc. Part of my daily work that can be easily replaced by robots is thequantified part. I am so relieved that I am already in a somewhat managementposition. I am secured, at least for now!

Anotherinteresting fact I learned from the lecture was that humans need to train arobot in order for it to replace them. What a sarcasm! I wonder what people mightfeel when they learnt that they were training their replacements. I thinkprobably similar to what my father felt when he learned that he will not beinvited back to work. A sad story for my father. But a successful restructurationto Chinese economy back in 1998. So, here is the story. China began thelaid-off mission throughout the country, and my father’s factory was the veryfirst one to implement this policy. Nobody understood the whole “laid-off”phrase back then. So, no one was accepting the deal, which was a big headacheto the managers. My father was kind of a leader in the workers, and he thoughthighly of his own expertise, so much that he was so confident that even if hevolunteered to be laid-off, they will ask him to go back. So, my father volunteered.A lot of people followed him, and the managers got their job done. And later,my father found out he was not that important, because no one ever contactedhim. I feel like connected to my father by thinking about these staff.