Robot Jobs: Creatives
Image Source: Time Out Tokyo
Because most of us believe that creativity and imagination emanate from a place that is irrevocably human–from a soulful place–it’s difficult to believe that creative jobs could ever be taken over by technology. However, studies show that even jobs like actor and musician may be robotized.
In the 19th century, technology-driven industrialization presented some farmers and laborers with the opportunity to pursue more creative endeavors, as technology took over tedious but necessary tasks. Today, technology-driven industrialization may soon remove humans from such creative endeavors.
According to Frey and Osborne, actors, for one, have a 37.4% chance of being automated in 20 years. That process has, in some ways, already begun: RoboThespian is a life-sized humanoid robot made to entertain. Its creators describe the robot as “an anthropomorphic machine, a dot on the graph that starts with automata, and will end when we are no longer able to distinguish the living from the mechanized.”
As for musicians, a fully robotic, three-piece band already exists in Japan. The group, Z-Machines, consists of a humanoid guitarist with 78 fingers, a 22-armed drummer, and a keyboardist that strikes the keys with green lasers. The music is not only impressive, it reveals the fascinating potential robotics have in the music industry of the future.
Much of what was once science fiction is now reality. In 20 years, will nearly half of the population be unemployed, sitting idly on the sidelines while robots do their jobs? Or will advances in technology create entirely new fields of work, like they did for the majority of farmers during the Industrial Revolution? Automation brings endless questions, but the main one continues to be, what will become of us humans?
