In 30 years, the world’s best CEO will be a robot, says Chinese billionaire and Alibaba founder Jack Ma. The maverick entrepreneur, who is worth £22.8 billion ($28.4 billion), said advances in technology would render CEOs irrelevant in the next 30 years.
‘In 30 years, a robot will likely be on the cover of Time Magazine as the best CEO,’ Ma said at an entrepreneurship conference in central China, according to CNN.
There is no doubt the blitzkrieg of modern technology will leave hundreds of thousands of human beings redundant and without a proper occupation. The competition has reached a new level. The rivals this time are well-endowed machines and robots. You can very well guess who will win. It’s just a matter of time before intelligent machines replace human beings en masse and cause seismic changes in world economy.
Jack Ma also said that robots will get the world’s top jobs because they are “quicker and more rational” than humans. The 52-year-old Chinese entrepreneur, who owns the world’s largest retail platform, also warned robots will bring “far more pain than happiness” in the next three decades.
Robots replacing human beings? Job cuts galore
What Ma is saying might well turn out to be true. As companies and organizations increasingly go for automation and new-age technologies such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Mining, Virtual Reality, Deep Learning, among others, jobs will drastically be slashed. The phenomenon has already started showing its effects with regular job cuts across the Information Technology sector.
Its consequences are already being felt. Wipro, India’s third largest software services company, reportedly sacked 600–1000 employees. Cognizant laid off 6,000 employees. Reportedly, tech major IBM is planning to lay off 5000 employees, while another tech biggie Microsoft may probably cut 2800 jobs. Infosys has also announced 8000–9000 job cuts.
Coming-of-age of machines armed with Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Machines are learning fast and deciphering patterns through sophisticated algorithms and mathematical models. Very soon the number of jobs taken away from human beings would dramatically increase–changing the economy irretrievably–and given away to machines armed with big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning. And let me tell you that in most of the areas, human beings would be no match for the advanced machines.
“IBM’s supercomputer Watson can crunch data at 67 million pages per second. It has machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data analytics built into it. Within just a few years, it would have collected huge amount of data, difficult to even imagine, enabling it to carry out tasks and take decisions. Modern innovation like Watson will be in a position to replace about 80–90% of human jobs. The effects have already started trickling in,” says an IBM employee.
According to a survey, around two out of three British people are of the opinion that an “android takeover” in the future is a “genuine concern.” Let’s wait and watch the reshaping of the world order or as Jack Ma says: “In the next three decades, the world will experience far more pain than happiness.”
