When I first came to the US from South Korea, I was surprised to hear so much about robotics. People loved to talk about conflicts and concerns in the machine era, that seemed to be quite near in the US. Maybe because wages in the US are relatively high, companies are keenly interested in how they can replace human labors with machines. I understood that some technologies, like autonomous driving and voice recognition, could impact on some jobs, such as truck driving and a McDonald’s cashier. Also, imagine 3D printers produce bikes! Those are simple and repetitive tasks that anybody could expect to be automated and replaced. I never expected complicated jobs to be replaced.
Things are radically changing. Even jobs that require college education will soon be replaced. What is a high-level education? What did you learn during college? My definition is learning how to set up a hypothesis, find relevant evidence, link and prove your findings, and apply them to individual fields. Such an academic approach was like a language that any college graduates could understand what the authors argue by following a process. This thoughtful process was long considered possible only by human beings. However, machines have begun to penetrate into that area through machine learning. Machines are able to find patterns and optimal points, and even raise issues like human beings in massive data. During my research at Collibra, I found out that a solid dataset could set up KPI targets, which are unbiased and actionable. Capital budgeting has become easier for computers to do when they can analyze massive amounts of past data. Unfortunately, such examples are my jobs.
What’s more, machines can perform much better than human beings. According to Vittorio Colao, CEO of Vodafone, machines performed than top-tier employees in making decisions, strategizing and corporate planning. Furthermore, machines work 24/7 and do not require any vacation. Vodafone is a long-time icon in the telecom industry where I have worked at.
I highly recommend listening to this episode about the interview with Vittorio Colao, CEO of Vodafone. This is somehow scary, but a reality.
https://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/podcast/Pages/podcast-details.aspx?episode=6664142
There may be a bright side. Masayoshi Son warned of the Singularity, but also stated that humans could control and manage the artificial intelligence during the SoftBank 2018 keynote speech. I set up my survival strategy to collaborate well with machines. The first to do was to learn and understand the machines’ language. I have to be prepared when the machines are my boss. I started to learn Python, the easiest coding language for non-coders. Learning by doing! I’d like to launch a project that shows how humans collaborate with machines. I would like to disclose procedures in the following posts.
Learning by doing! The project is about finding intersections between investment and machine learning. Let’s begin!