In the video, Anthony Goldbloom expresses the futuristic and proactive nature of technology and its implication in various professions in the near future. Anthony narrows down on the potential threats artificial intelligence (AI) poses to careers since if it doesn’t entirely take up some roles, it might scale down human involvement. However, what passes across as promising in Anthony’s presentation is that automation can only take over repetitive and automatable tasks, rendering critical functions such as corporate strategy design and some aspects of decision-making exclusively to humans. Anthony agrees with Jacobs & Chase (2018) that robotics is at the heart of next-generation supply chains. However, for the smart job-seeker in the supply chain, the risk posed by industrial automation should be minimal compared to the negative impacts.
Anthony’s presentation is extremely relevant to the supply chain, and efforts are already in place to automate some parts of the chain. While working in a nearby parcel delivery and distribution centre, my colleagues and I were tasked with arranging the parcels in neat stacks and loading them in trucks all day. The company recently rolled out a pilot program to have robots unload incoming trucks and place them in neat piles. The program, designated to a quarter of the total traffic, was as effective as humans and recorded slightly less turnaround time and higher accuracy with sorting the parcels in alphabetical order. Although the innovation did not displace any worker, it makes me connect better with Anthony’s fears about the impact of technology on employment in the future. Ideally, I get to understand better what it means when he ends in saying that people need to differentiate themselves from computers by learning to solve novel challenges in ways computers cannot, to retain their jobs.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Technology-driven innovation helps companies mitigate losses on the supply chain by enhancing smart tracking systems that can detect fraud or damage along the way (Girling, 2020). Some of these innovations improve integration and cloud operations, directly minimizing human involvement, thus pushing the casual worker to differentiate himself from the machines to have a place in the workspace. All in all, computers are not here to eradicate human labour but to optimize it, and precisely, to add functional value to it.
References
Anthony, G. (2016, February). The Jobs We'll Lose to Machines — and the Ones We Won't. TED . Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_goldbloom_the_jobs_we_ll_lose_to_machines_and_the_ones_we_won_t
Girling, W. (2020, June 30). “How Digital Automation is Shaping Modern Supply Chains.” Supply Chain Digital . Retrieved https://www.supplychaindigital.com/technology/how-digital-automation-shaping-modern-supply-chains
Jacobs, F. R. & Chase, R. B. (2018). Operations and Supply Chain Management (15 th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
