We now live in a world where cars drive themselves, drones deliver packages, and chatbots take your food or drink orders. Because it is obvious there are so many robots can do, this has led to the fears of machines taking people’s jobs.
The sad fact is that machines and automation will take some people’s jobs because new technology has always done this. That said, there are things that are almost impossible to replicate in a machine or in artificial intelligence. These are the things that ensure machines will never replace humans entirely.
Self-improvement
Humans have the capacity to look within themselves, identify their weaknesses, and improve upon them. People who are able to do this are deemed very valuable to their employers.
These people are also likely to try to improve others so the whole company can work more effectively and efficiently. Once an employee masters a skill, they constantly try to improve on it so they can become the best they can be.
Machines are not able to do this because they only do what they are programmed to. This means their path of improvement lies in the software developers who wrote the software in the first place.
Care and Empathy
Although robots can perform much more complicated surgeries than most doctors can, they cannot replace the care, empathy, and compassion people have for each other. Caregivers, doctors, and therapists all provide something that cannot be replicated in or provided by a machine. The human element that makes these employees who they are is what separates them from the machines.
People Develop and Test the Software
Machines run on code that is written, tested, improved upon, and tested again by software developers before it can be deemed complete. The code that makes the automation of tasks possible also needs to be tested to ensure it is working correctly.
Automated testing requires test cases that are written and tweaked by software developers so they can keep improving on them. Companies that need an outside view of their code look to companies like Global App Testing. This is a company that provides remote code testing to help you release bug-free code faster.
In addition to testing the software that runs automated machines, people are also required to supervise and test how any automation they create performs before it is released to the public.
This automation testing is for safety reasons, and so that the software developer can collect data to improve on the software used. If you are interested in learning more about the subject, you can read about automation testing here. Global App testing discusses why humans are still needed for app testing.
Creative Thinking
The human brain is complicated in more ways than we can understand. For example, everyone understands the concept of creative thinking, but what is it really?
The human brain can take in information and different influences and use those to come up with new, creative, and unique ideas. We can get inspired in many different ways, including through music, art, poetry, and other people’s emotions.
Creative employees drive most companies and are the type of employees businesses seek to recruit. Creativity is where new ideas and products are born and where businesses find opportunities and needs they can fulfill.
Creativity is the one area machines and artificial intelligence (AI) are still lacking. While it is true that machines can replicate things and ideas over and over, they cannot come up with new ideas yet and need human direction.
Adaptability
Humans have survived for so long due to our ability to adapt to different situations. Good employees embrace change and adapt to stay relevant in the context of that change. When an employee is assigned a task outside the scope of what they do regularly.
They will find ways to complete the task by adjusting to the new goals. This is a huge plus for employers who have employees who can do this under high pressure and in fast-moving and busy work and market environments.
Machines, on the other hand, are programmed to carry out certain tasks. If an industry changes, the machines have to be repurposed or replaced so as to cater to the new reality.
Collaboration
Employees produce the best results when they are working together. This collaboration comes from shared goals and the need to be part of something. Employees who work in environments that foster collaboration often find their work a lot more satisfying than those who do not.
Although machines can work together, they cannot do so outside the scope of what they have been programmed to do, which is where collaboration comes in.
Context
Understanding context is one of the ways humans understand each other, different situations, and different information. It is often true that something said at the wrong time, at the wrong place or the wrong way can have a very different meaning. That is humans applying context to that piece of information.
Context helps humans understand business environments, market forces, situational circumstances, and data that cannot be put in numbers, for example, body language.
Machines, and the AI that often powers them, do not understand the context and only use the data they are given and cannot make use of outside data, the context.
Community contribution
Businesses rely a lot on the communities around them. Small businesses rely on local communities and the exchange of wealth in these communities. They seek to make them better in different ways and can go as far as employing only people from those communities.
Machines, on the other hand, cannot forge these relationships. In fact, it has been shown that machines that replace employees with machines alienate the communities around them, which makes them harder to operate in those markets.
Humans Will Keep Control
Although the fears that machines will take out jobs are founded in some reality, the truth is that will never happen. It is more apt to say humans will not let it happen. Humans create machines, and these machines are expected to work within the confines of the rules and instructions software developers give them.
One could argue that AI has the ability to give itself new instructions, but we are decades away from that happening. At the end of the day, humans have created machines to help them and not replace them, which would be a disastrous turn of things.
People Do Not Think Lineally
When we are trying to solve a problem, most of us do not think linearly. We look at the problem from a lot of different angles at the same time and come up with solutions that help us solve that problem. Some might call it advanced problem-solving skills but at the end of the day.
It is just humans thinking the way we always have. Machines, on the other hand, think linearly. They make decisions by following one path until the options available are exhausted and then take another path.
They continue to do this until they come up with a viable solution. Machines are not yet advanced enough to see the whole picture at once as humans do, and they might never because, at the end of the day, they are not humans.
The fear that machines will replace employees might have some truth in it, but those fears are unlikely to ever come true. There are things that humans will always be able to do that machines will not, and it is those things that ensure machines will never replace employees, not entirely anyway.
