The Rise of the Robots

And why automation is an opportunity, not a threat

If the news is anything to go by, more and more are people wondering how robots will affect their jobs — and the stats are pretty terrifying. It’s predicted one million jobs will vanish by 2026. 800 million within a decade by another count. Or one in three by 2030, by another. And all these predictions raise a good question: will the jobs of today even exist tomorrow?

NASA’s version of The Creation of Adam, featuring a ‘Robonaut’.

It’s hard to ignore the reality that automation could transform virtually every job in every industry. So far surgical robotics in medicine, drones in the military and industrial robots in manufacturing are some high profile examples. But there are few jobs that can’t be improved by adding some level of automation.

And it’s this that’s the got the middle classes especially worried — because now the threat to jobs isn’t just about manual labour. Right now tech is expensive and manual labour — at least in the developing world — is cheaper. This, in turn, means there’s a massive financial benefit to automating higher paying jobs in the developed world.

But amid all this doom and gloom, there are some clear positives.

First off, while the headlines make it seem like every job is under threat, there’s actually very little agreement. Predictions vary massively — sometimes by hundreds of millions — and no one can agree which jobs will be around in 20 years and which won’t. There are just too many variables.

Then there are the new jobs created by the rise of automation. Whole industries are already springing up around robotics and autonomous, connected devices. Surely this will continue — bringing with it all kinds of job roles that just don’t exist yet. And that’s before we put the potential of blockchain into the mix. It’s a huge opportunity that rarely features in all these articles describing evil job-stealing robots.

Automation doesn’t have to mean lost jobs, but new jobs.

But there’s another untapped resource that people aren’t talking about: who owns the robots? It’s safe to say that the assumption is large corporations will have the lion’s share. Industrialists. Venture capitalists. The 1%. They’ll be the ones to benefit from the rise of automation, right?

Well, maybe not.

All of us at MyBit have been following these developments closely — and we’re part of a movement to distribute wealth in a better, fairer way. We’re building an ecosystem lets anyone invest in devices that can generate revenue. So rather than some investment fund owning all of the assets, everyone can get a share of the profits.

We’ve started with smart benches, cryptocurrency ATMs and miners before moving on to autonomous vehicles and industrial robotics — and every kind of connected, revenue-generating device. One day, we hope to empower people to make a living from machine labour. And it’s why, at MyBit, we see the rise of automation not as a threat — but an opportunity to be embraced.

And so, perhaps the future isn’t so scary after all…

Until next time!

The MyBit Team.