Technological disruption is forcing many to re-evaluate our own sense of identity. While I’ve written before on the need to let go of tying your identity around your career, it will become more imperative as many of our careers now get outsourced to robots and artificial intelligence.
Factories in Germany and China are already being re-tooled to have a complete robot assembly line. Autonomous vehicles will upend the taxi, delivery and truck driving industry. Even the fallback part-time job of flipping burgers is on the way out. As for front-line customer service employees (mainly cashiers), self-checkouts and touch-screen ordering are currently replacing them.
This is only the first wave.
The careers thereafter to be outsourced will be cognitive ones including teaching, law and medicine.
I don’t delude myself for a minute that the field of teaching is immune and I will need to make some hard choices in the near future. The tools available today, including the creators behind making them accessible, far exceed my capacity as an individual to reach every student I teach.
Yes, there is a dark side to all of this, but that comes with anything we do.
Where we’re heading as a species is going to be a vastly different landscape than where we’ve been. Although, I’m certain some things will never change including people writing songs about love and others proclaiming the end of the world is soon.
How will we adapt?
When we consider people today who want to make a change in their life (personal, career or otherwise), we can see the difficulty. The challenge they face is not in eyeing a new path and pointing themselves in that direction, but getting off the path they are currently on.
There are some things we find exceedingly difficult to let go. It can feel like a betrayal of our true selves to just leave it behind.
Yet, this is what is really needed for any change to happen.
Learning something new is the easy part because we’re intrinsically motivated to do it. Letting go is the necessary part.
If we want to make it through the next epoch of human history, we’re going to have to let go.