Machines and robots have already taken over many of the jobs that used to be performed by humans. This development will only continue in the future. There’s no way to stop it. The question is whether the change is necessarily going to have a negative effect. It might actually end up giving us a whole new perspective on our work life!

In the radio program “The Naked Scientists” from BBC, futurist Liselotte Lyngsø talks about what we can expect from future work life, where robots have been given all the physically tough assignments.

How to get a job in the future: be good at being a human

Take a deep breath and stop getting worried about loosing your job to fast and top tuned robots. Think about how it might end up being a total win win situation. All indicators show that the more we put technology into different areas, the more busy we get ourselves. Within healthcare, we now monitor elderly people in order to know exactly when they need water or exercise. It has created this hydra’s head with even more jobs for the healthcare providers. We will be around 10 billion people so there will be plenty of stuff to do, it will just be different tasks than we’re used to.

Today, many people get stressed and have to take leaves from their work. In the future we’ll look back and think that “people were so primitive, pushing people like lemons! Now we can actually get something better out of people, because we understand how they work.”

Yes, robots will take over many of the jobs that we have today. Luckily, there will be so many new jobs that we haven’t even discovered yet. Those jobs will require qualities that robots can’t offer, such as an emphatic mindset. We’ll make robots do the “hard work” and have people work in a whole other way. A way, tailored for them individually, so that they won’t get stressed and depressed. We’ll also go from “headhunting” to “teamhunting” because people work better together and need human contact. We won’t go on retirement anymore, instead we’ll take breaks and get recharged during our work life.

Empathy is key

“Looking at ourselves as machines, that’s a big mistake. We really have to find out about human nature. Empathy will be important and difficult for the machines to master and the ability to be irritated is going to be the key to clever innovation. Likewise people can get lazy, and that’s also a good sentiment if you want to create a better planet because we find ways of doing things in smarter ways. We have to tease out human capabilities and find out how to find our individual potentials”.

-Liselotte Lyngsø

Listen to the whole radio program with Liselotte Lyngsø and learn about what future offices are going to look like when holograms are fully developed. You can also discover why we’ll replace our traditional education with micro chips and implants of memories!

You can also read the article “This is what work will look like in year 2100” from Fast Company, where Lyngsø explains further about the subject of how people will work in the future of machines and robots.