By Rachel Lau

“BE a doctor, an engineer, an accountant, a lawyer – or don’t bother at all.”

You’ve likely heard these words come from your parents’ mouths at some point in your life.

In fact, many of us at one point probably considered jumping into these professions because we think that they’re the most stable jobs out there – guaranteed to rise against the test of time again and again.

However, technology is growing at such a fast pace that many jobs are at risk of being redundant in the near future.

The quick pace of tech growth has caused the scope of these professions to widen exponentially in the past few centuries, all while constantly transforming the landscape of our workforce.

Our first industrial revolution used water and steam power to mechanise our production, the second used electric power to fuel mass production, and the third used electronics and information communication technology (ICT) to automate production.

With each revolution, more and more blue-collar jobs become redundant because our advancing technology proved to be more efficient at handling certain tasks than we were.

And with the advent of a fourth industrial revolution that hints breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), computer learning, robotics, internet of things, and nanotechnology – some are finally speculating that our most revered white-collar jobs will finally be placed on the chopping board.

Point in case is a report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) suggesting that this might really be the case for lawyers and accountants in the far future.

“AI and machine learning drivers are expected to lead to negative employment outcomes in job families such as Education and Training, Legal and Business and Financial Operations,” asserted the report.

It is suggested that advancements in AI and learning could cut a lot of the menial work in the legal and financial professions such as reviewing contracts, legal research and audit exercises as AI could process through documents at high speed, determining whether or not something is amiss.

Similarly, an article published in the New Zealand Medical Journal called ‘Artificial intelligence in medicine: human need not apply’, suggested that doctors may also face negative employment outcomes as AI technology has already demonstrated that it is capable performing accurate medical diagnosis of patients.

According to the article, the way AI technology is able to do this is through a unique pattern recognition algorithm that compares a patient’s data to predefined disease categories.

Current examples of this taking place are IBM Venture Capital Group’s (IBM) self-learning AI Watson who has been reported to be already out-diagnosing medical residents in certain situations, and web-based AI Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) which has a reported 96 per cent rate of correct diagnosis in 50 consecutive cases published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“This is comparable with human doctors, who have been shown to make the correct diagnosis in 95 per cent of outpatients,” said the article.

While the successes of these AI technologies are indicative of a huge change to many of our whitecollar jobs, it should be noted that they are not expected to occur anytime in the near future as the WEF report forecasts that they do not foresee these technologies being advanced enough by year 2020 to have widespread impact on global employment levels.

But with a relentless march of innovation and research led by tech companies, what can we expect to happen when AI technology has progressed to a point where it can outperform us in most day to day tasks?

According to president of Australian Computer Society, Anthony Wong, the most obvious development from this would be that the requirements of our workforce would change drastically.

In an interview with BizHive Weekly earlier this year, Wong detailed that the biggest change that we would see in the workforce is likely that all jobs in the future would require more extensive ICT skills.

Currently, the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission is reporting that 43.2 per cent of our internet users require ICT usage skills at their place of work while 17.9 per cent require ICT technical skills.

Wong expects these figures to boost drastically in future – causing some of our jobs to disappear entirely as we get replaced by computer and robots. However, he is also of the opinion that this redundancy of jobs would only be for the more repetitive jobs like menial labour, and that most jobs on the market right now would be mostly likely safe guarded as long as it requires some form of skills that robotics cannot replicate.

“The problem with computers and robots is that they rely on data which is derived from the past. So the biggest challenge we have our hand right now is whether or not we can build intelligent machines to learn from past data and predict the future.

“And in a way, we already achieved this as some our tech innovations like IBM’s Watson have already demonstrated learning capabilities.

“Yes, we might lose some repetitive jobs but in turn we will create higher skilled jobs as well which can help,” guided Wong.

He opines that professions and industries on the whole are all expected to be impacted by digital advancement but will not turn obsolete and instead just transform in the sense that ICT technical skills and diversified skills will much more desirable in the future.

For example, a surgeon in the future will not be the same surgeon that we know now because they need to pick up more ICT skills in order to effectively utilise the new and improved programs and technologies that are being created to allow for more precise and less invasive surgeries.

Similarly, the law profession will also began to slowly incorporate more and more AI driven software that will cut down time in the acts of legal reviews and research – requiring lawyers to improve their skill sets in programming and ICT skills to effectively utilise these technologies.

Agreeing with this, Director of IBM’s software strategy, Deborah Magid asserts that these ICT and programming skills are imperative to our future workforce and advocates that education for them should start young.

“Currently, some schools are starting to teach about these things, they are starting to start curriculums like this where kids can get their hand on some of these high tech devices.

“I think this is great because the kids can learn how to program things that are physical like a watering system or a music system, whatever that they care to do.

“And this allows them to learn valuable programming skills just by doing things,” she shared to The Borneo Post in previous interview.