Artificial Intelligence is Coming for Your Job!

For decades university degrees and higher education were recognized as the way to a more prosperous future.

After all, university graduates, on average, earn several times more than those who only have a high school diploma. But there can be exceptions.

Jobs coming from professional degrees like masters and doctorates were known as safe. However, with the growth of artificial intelligence across the globe, especially in China, things are changing quickly, according to a report in Entrepreneur.

Becoming a doctor, dentist, lawyer or something similar assured you that you would be comfortable. But now with the rise of so-called second generation of artificial intelligence things are changing.

Thanks to rapid advances in robotics, automation and artificial intelligence, jobs are falling to machines left and right.

Meanwhile, according to an Oxford study, at least 47% of currently well paying jobs could be lost to automation in the next 20 years.

 Banking and Finance

Those looking to move down to the Tehran Stock Exchange may be in for a shock in a few decades as finance is one of the industries with a significant risk of computers trading on behalf of clients.

One company in the US, Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, announced last year that it was going to  cut staff in favor of automation with AI.

Closer to home, the Central Bank of Iran has finally got round to begin regulating the country’s financial technology sector (fintech).

Although things are moving slowly in Iran in terms of regulations, startups based in and out of Iran will at some point in the future shake the teetering global banking system.

Remember, nobody thought the Snapp ride-hailing app could have ripped apart the traditional taxi industry in hardly  twelve months.  

If local financial companies are not sharp enough, they will be joining the thousands of taxi drivers who didn’t see multi-million dollar investment coming to shake their industry.

 Doctors and Medicine

Doctors may feel like they are safe. I mean who could possibly comprehend a robot doing a tonsillectomy any time soon?

That said, there are several areas of the medical industry already being shown to be better served by technology than exhausted humans and 3 am.

One example would be IBM’s Watson super-computer which has been recorded to be more accurate than a radiologist in spotting cancers and anomalies on X-Rays.

That software can compare several thousand similar scans and work out something a human could never spot looking at just one X-ray on a light box.

Moreover, telemedicine has been trialed across the globe from as far afield as Africa with doctors in North America advising young doctors how to operate in real-time.

 Big Data and Lawyers

Trainee solicitors may be in for a big hit in the near future as several thousand law practices have parsed jobs away from juniors and paralegals for the last several years.

One young graduate in the UK removed the lawyer entirely from the legal process creating a smart parking ticket complaint system.

 The young man charged a nominal fee and has so far made thousands of pounds, doing away with the costs of a lawyer.

‘Lawtech’ may seem a long way away from Iran’s archaic legal system, but across the globe now there are more than 2,000 startups looking into exactly this area.

 Journalism

Gulp. Yes as I write this I am already familiar with several startups globally and in Iran which are already doing part of the job of journalists.

One startup I talked to three years ago, could take raw data and turn it into a 500-word article -- with perfect grammar.

Moreover, the firm said converting Tehran Stock Exchange data from Persian into English “would be easy as Iran uses the same Arabic numerals as us.”