Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Firstly, I would like to apologise. A famous Game of Thrones quote: ‘There is a beast in every man and it stirs when you put a sword in his hand’.
Similarly, bestow upon me an opportunity to share some new science stuff and the inner nerd in me canters to the surfaces and stays out of control for some time!
While science and technology usually seem to dictate progress and improvement, they might have just unfavourably ventured into the domain of finance too where machines now claim to be capable of number crunching, identifying patterns and making predictions using artificial intelligence (AI).
Furthermore, those applying to retain fields in the accounting and financial world may even be required to complete courses and have knowledge of AI to be considered.
This ‘progress’ could be like placing a person on a sledge on the ice of increasing job insecurity and higher stress levels.
The more efficient use of algorithms by machines could mean that the ‘brains’ that humans were so proud of possessing may not be, in ‘economics’ terms, our absolute or comparative advantage any longer.
Supermarkets in many countries no longer have counters manned by employees, preferring customer self-service checkout machines, cutting staffing costs and allegedly cutting queue times. They have not arrived in Bahrain yet where shoppers even get their goods packed from them by a person!
Baristas may be next in line for the chop, with the technology undergoing tweaks to serving the perfect brew, thus replacing people in the art of coffee-making.
The turn of the 21st Century saw us competing more and more with fellow Homo sapiens … will the rest of our time expect us to compete with bots too?
