Gartner’s dire prediction.
By The American Bazaar Staff
WASHINGTON, DC: If you think recession is still not over, in just over 10 years’ time, by 2025, a third of all workers globally will be replaced by robots, automated machines and drones, according to Gartner.
The explosive crystal ball gazing comes from Peter Sondergaard, Gartner’s research director, speaking at the Symposium/ITxpo, reported ComputerWorld.
“One day, a drone may be your eyes and ears,” said Peter Sondergaard, Gartner’s research director. “Drones are just one of many kinds of emerging technologies that extend well beyond the traditional information technology world — these are smart machines.”
In five years, drones will be a standard part of operations in many industries, used in agriculture, geographical surveys and oil and gas pipeline inspections, said the report.
Smart machines are an emerging “super class” of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind, said Sondergaard. Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text. This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, says Gartner.
“Knowledge work will be automated,” said Sondergaard, as will physical jobs with the arrival of smart robots, according to the ComputerWorld report.
“Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025,” said Sondergaard. “New digital businesses require less labor; machines will be make sense of data faster than humans can.”
Gartner is not the only one to predict how technology is going to shape the workforce.
In February, PBS NewsHour’s Making Sense talked to authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of “The Second Machine Age” about what was different with this new wave of technological advancement:
“We are at an inflection point. The first big inflection point in human history was about 200 years ago, when the steam engine started the industrial revolution,” Brynjolfsson said. “That was a period that saw a whole set of new machines come along that could automate muscle power, physical work.”
“In recent years, we are seeing a wave of technologies that can augment, automate all sorts of cognitive tasks,” he added, “and we think, ultimately, those will have as big, or an even bigger effect on humanity as the first industrial revolution.”