7 Surprising Things That Soon Won't Need A Person To Work
By Features Desk
Friday, December 1, 2017.
The world is stepping ever closer to removing the human element from a process. This means that a lot more things will become automated and instead of having a person in the driver’s seat it will be empty with a machine automatically operating it. Here are some things that are likely (or have already) removed the people part of how they work. Hopefully this article won't make you too terrified for the robot uprising, but at the very least you might feel a little more prepared.
Cooking Food
Gourmet and restaurant chefs are likely going to be fine, but fast food chefs should watch out. When it comes to flipping burgers, a machine can probably do your job for you and at a much cheaper cost. There is already one such robot that can flip burgers called Flippy. It is being used in the CaliBurger restaurant in Pasadena, California. However, there are plans to roll Flippy out to a further 50 restaurants over the next couple of years. Soon you could be telling a robot that you want a double cheeseburger with onions instead of a person. The jury is out on whether people appreciate being served by a machine rather than a person, but as this kind of thing becomes more popular in the fast food restaurant industry, we are likely to find out soon.
Cars
Driverless cars are already a thing. They might not be popular or being used very much, but they do exist. It is only a matter of time until they become commonplace on our roads in countries around the world. In theory driverless cars are safer because they remove the dangerous human element from driving a car. No longer will there be accidents because of a tired, drunk or poor driver. Instead, these driverless cars will be able to calculate how best to stop a collision and save lives. In theory that is, but as of yet, it is mostly untested. There has been little accounting for how much a person can stop an accident from occurring or how they deal with usual circumstances. However, there is no stopping progress, and we are likely to see more and more companies creating driverless cars. It will not be long until we start to see automated taxis, buses and commuters.
Planes
Speaking of things that are driverless, did you know that driverless planes are also a thing? Well, they are. They have yet to make their way to commercial passenger flights yet, but there is already a working version being used by the Swiss Defence Department. These are more than just oversized drones, and they do not require someone to be holding a control pad. Instead, they are planes in their own right and have the capacity to carry people to their destination. The future of aviation and pilotless planes seem set on making this kind of thing widespread, and in the future it is likely that we will see them being used to take people on their holidays and back again. They are like something from science fiction.
Trains
Trains are an obvious next choice of vehicle that will become automated. A lot of train scheduling and departures is already calculated through a machine, so the logical next step is to remove the drivers completely. This way the machine will know exactly when to start and stop the train depending on the distance to the next stop and the timetable. It is likely that people will still be needed to operate parts of the train from a central hub and deal with passengers, but eventually, even these things might become the role of a robot. Taking away drivers, is the first step towards automating your train journeys. If it means that trains depart and arrive on time, then I think we can chalk this one up to a win.
Finances
A lot of finances already use computers and algorithms to calculate where to make investments, when to sell stock and when they buy shares, so it is not a huge leap to assume in the future they will cut out the middleman (quite literally) and just go with the machine running the whole thing. It is estimated that approximately 30% of the banking industry jobs will go to an AI within 5-10 years. Unfortunately, an AI can stop trends and patterns far quicker and effectively than a person, so jobs like financial analysts will be some of the first to go. Banks already have more automated machines than bank tellers, and this is a trend that is only going to continue as we see more and more automation in the future. Eventually, banking machines will replace tellers altogether.
Construction
Construction workers use heavy machinery to create buildings and other structures. However, it is likely that we will soon have robots performing their jobs. Similar to how in iRobot (hopefully without any of the menace) there are robots that just control demolition machines, we will start to remove the human workforce in place of an automated machine driven workforce. The benefits of a machine building things are that they will be able to carry larger weights and it will reduce the risk of injury or accidents on the building site. The world will start to feel extremely futurist when we see the first construction robots put into play and see them performing better than their human counterparts.
Farms
There are already automated elements in a lot of farms. One example is the automatic milking system used on cows. There is a farm in Germany that has a Voluntary Milking System that allows the cow to walk up to it and for a robot to start milking. All of this takes place when the cow wants to be milked and complete cuts out the need for human interference. As the technology becomes cheaper and the possibilities expand to other animals, we are certain to see farms becoming more and more automated with fewer people needed to operate them, and in the future, a farmer will likely just be a series of machines that have little to no human oversight.