Some way to go for robots in the comms profession

Commentators like Tesla and SpaceX founder Eion Musk, believe society’s answer to artificial intelligence will be to pay a universal basic income for all citizens. His thesis is that people will have more time for both leisure and to work on complex matters. The productivity of robots will pay for a minimum wage for everyone.

It’s already been debated in UK’s Parliament but they turned down the idea in September while in progressive Finland their government intends to run a pilot, giving 2000 people a basic living wage next year.

While artificial intelligence will bring about a revolution by automating routine and mind-numbing jobs it could come at a considerable social cost. Not everyone has the aptitude or the desire to do thought based jobs requiring lengthy interactions with an electronic device. For large numbers of people today work, no matter how basic, gives them meaning and a reason to get up and get going at least five mornings a week.

When I left high school and headed to tertiary education there were some of my peers, admittedly a small number, who took a deliberate decision to carry on with seasonal jobs in the factories, on the wharves and in the freezing works. They did it because the income they were receiving was generally quite high and they liked the fact that they could switch off mentally, work a shift and then truly enjoy their out of work hours in the great outdoors, playing sport, hunting and tramping or pursuing other recreational pursuits.

I sometimes think about what must have happened to those school mates when after a few short years the manual labour jobs began to dry up and incomes dropped. They would have faced tough times, retraining in their 30s, working hard to conjure up ideas for starting small businesses or convincing employers to give them another shot at a career.

Those of us who went into journalism and communications were privileged that there was a market for skills of people who could write plain english, distil complex jargon-laden language into easily understood words and images, providing insights into an increasingly interconnected and accessible world.

But recently, journalism too, has fallen on hard times and while communications and public relations jobs are still on the rise, these will reach a peak as algorithms work out the needs of target audiences even before they have thought about what they want.

The ingredients that may be harder for artificial intelligence to emulate are the emotional quotient elements of empathy, humility, kindness, understanding, creativity and spontaneity. These come together in different ways in individual human beings.

As someone who has sat on a fair few recruitment panels to hire communication practitioners, the mixture of personality, wisdom, commonsense and life experience feature right up there with technical skills and professional knowledge. It’s great to see there are good numbers of great candidates entering a market that is running hot right now.

I’ve a hunch that at least in the communications profession, total replacement by robots is still some way off.