After my blog yesterday about mortgage by machines, I left out one key component: humans. You have to remember that machines don’t think, they only appear to think because we develop them that way. Sure, there may be sentient machines at some point in the future when we get to the great Singularity but, until then, we humans run the machines.
We talk about rules-based algorithms for example, but who wrote the rules and developed the algorithms? We did. We talk about artificial intelligence but there is a key word in that phrase: artificial. Machines are not intelligent. They just appear be because we want them to look that way.
So, what are humans really needed for these days? Well, I bucket future human jobs in three major categories: trainers, explainers and sustainers.
The first thing humans will be doing is training the machines to do the jobs we don’t want to do, like underwriting a mortgage. But the people who train the machines to do that job will need to know underwriting a mortgage in real-life to let the machine do its job.
Secondly, we need people who can explain to other people how the machines work, what they are doing and why. It may sound simple, but imagine finding a mortgage machine in a hundred years and no-one knows what it does or why. Maybe they won’t have mortgages in a hundred years, but I’m pretty sure they’ll still have COBOL and you definitely need someone who can explain that to the sustainers.
The sustainers are the third category of future human jobs, and they’re there to make sure the machines still work if they break down and, oh yes, they will break down. Some may even go rogue, and someone will need to know where the ‘off’ switch can be found.
Some may doubt that we will get to this level of extreme, but the key fact is that without humans who train, explain and sustain the machines, you just have a dumb piece of machinery that could get things wrong, break down at any moment or go rogue.
In other words, no matter how far we push the envelope of future automation, you’re still going to need someone who knows what’s going on and how things work.
