Pack Up Your Desk, We’re All Going to Lose Our Jobs to Robots

All hail the robots. They’re coming for our jobs.

A new study released by the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Monday predicts that robots and artificial intelligence will result in the loss of 5 million jobs globally over the next five years. The research was conducted among 15 countries that account for approximately 65 percent of the world’s workforce.

So who will be the hardest hit?

Sorry office workers, your time is up. All that time you spend by the water cooler gossiping with coworkers about the latest episode of Making a Murderer may come to an end. Two-thirds of your jobs will soon be taken over by smart machines. And as for the women among you, you’ll be particularly affected, because a disproportionate number of you are employed in low-growth areas like sales and administration.

“People with college degrees, even professional degrees, people like lawyers are doing things that ultimately are predictable,” Martin Ford, artificial intelligence expert and author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, tells Wired. “A lot of those jobs are going to be susceptible over time.”

Related: Did Zulily engage in amazing customer service or a brilliant publicity stunt?

There is a silver lining though. Positions that require very specific skills like critical thinking, emotional reasoning and active listening will become in-demand by employers. Overall, demand for jobs like data analysts and specialist sales representatives will boom.

The truth is that robots can only do so much. There is always going to be a “human factor”, meaning robots will never be able to predict human behaviour when it comes to business reasoning, choices and marketing. Robots can only help in “processing” tasks, but not in making decisions that require critical thinking and emotions.

As for creative thinking — meaning the ability to put two ideas together that are seemly unrelated or invoke a specific emotion — robots are not able to do this as effectively as humans.

Case in point, remember the Dove video campaign “You’re More Beautiful Than You Think” from 2013 that went viral? The video ad left many women viewers with a complex set of emotions. It relied on the conceptual ideas of self-reflection and self-awareness for its success. Would a robot realistically be able to conceive, create and execute the marketing plan for it? Doubtful.

And in the context of customer service, can a robot detect the subtle emotional cues coming from a disgruntled customer and then offer them a discount? While some might say, yes. We argue that robots, at least in their current incarnation, suck at it.

Related: Top 5 customer service marketing campaigns of 2015

Curiously enough, another international study about robots and the economy released Monday reveals that 40 percent of young people fear losing their jobs to robots within a decade. The poll was conducted among 9,000 16- to 25-year-olds in Australia, Brazil, Britain, China, France, Germany, India, United States, and South Africa.

Many of them believe their education hasn’t prepared them for the real world with 80 percent citing they were forced to learn new technological skills, easily performed by a robot, not taught them in school.

So, what’s the take-away from these two research studies? If you want a bright working future, keep up-to-date on the latest Google products and increase your emotional IQ. Only then will you fend off the CP3Os of the world.