Technology rapidly changing the nature and way we work

I do not wish to be a spoilsport for the Ajira Digital Programme or any other online jobs initiative but to taper expectation with the reality, which is that advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence will make short work of the current tasks that we have come to know and expect as possible for online assignment and delivery.

The Google Brain project gave us Tensor Flow, an open source software library for ML; while Deep Mind, acquired by Google in 2014, has built a neural network capable of learning on its own.

Facebook AI Research is also pushing the boundaries at scale; Microsoft too with its AI and Research Group.

Companies such as Automated Insights and Narrative Science are able to produce “human-sounding narratives from data”.

This has massive ramifications at a time when media is looking for relevance, product- market fit and business models at scale that needs to take care of long tail consumption.

We have an under-supply of medical doctors in Kenya and most parts of Africa. Lots of knowledge in very few heads, a situation that scales poorly.

Now think of anyone with a basic training capable of being the human interface to collect samples but with the support of a cognitive system that is constantly learning from live and historical data resulting in better prognosis and creation of personalised treatment regimens that look into often ignored matters such as drug interactions.

IBM, Dell, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard and others are playing in this league. Every process or task that we know from our attempts at becoming a business process outsourcing hub will be fully automated in the near future.

Payroll, accounting, transcription, data sanitisation, identification and tagging, document processing, writing and a host of others will be assigned to workhorses in the cloud which need no sleep and also have infinitely fewer errors.

Software development does not escape this noose, and I see a future where anyone can write out a scope and have an AI and ML powered system write out the entire back-end and front-end plus handle optimised DevOps.

The focus needs to be creating supply for the long term by up-skilling and re-tooling both the current and emergent workforce.

We need to also re-imagine traditional blue collar roles that many frown upon as they may be the saving grace that absorb a large percentage of people whose roles disappear.

Work as we know it has changed.

Mr Njihia is CEO of Symbiotic. Twitter: @mbuguanjihia