Patrick Dicks is the owner of Dicks Consulting Group, an adjunct professor, and an expert in automation and artificial intelligence with over 25 years of technology experience. Dicks has been conducting research for a number of years and has noticed that automation and artificial intelligence are gaining momentum and this influx of change will leave Americans unprepared to handle the fourth Industrial Revolution.
“This fourth Industrial Revolution will eliminate more job opportunities for women and minorities than ever before,” Dicks said.
Dicks spoke with rolling out about his research, and what people can do to get ahead of this revolution.
Who will be affected by this shift?
Retail, administrative work, and anything with a repetitive task will be affected. Anything to where you’re doing work all day. If you go to a department store, you can order clothes online, or you can pick them up from the store. If you go to certain restaurants, they have kiosks. They don’t need cashiers. I went to a McDonald’s and there was no cashier, the young lady just brought food to me. In certain places like Virginia, they already have robot waiters and waitresses bringing you your food. With a pandemic going on, people are trying to have less contact with people so they have a robot program to bring food to people. Those industries are going to be hit hard, especially administrative work. Microsoft Outlook has a scheduling assistant, so when you have men and women at work in those executive roles, they don’t need to work anymore because we can have a memo that can be a template to where a person could just go in and cut and paste and send that information to people.
What can we do to get ahead of this change?
We take a step back, and we come up with a plan. You have to think about what careers are out there right now, what is going away, and where can you see yourself in five years. I tell people you have to think about your life. If you don’t have a plan, you’re going to fail right now. I tell anyone there’s no other time in society than now that a process, robot, or machine can replace you. Just look at how cities are overpopulated and look at how rural areas are shrinking. I’d probably say my parents worked themselves to a breaking point, just like a lot of other baby boomers. Now with all the technological advances, it says we just have to be smarter. We have to take what’s around us and think about what can we embrace and use. What can we continuously train on? What can make us better? What can we transfer to our kids, because it’s going to take a lot of awareness. Everybody just has to take a step back and see what’s going on.
Where can people find more of your work?
You can find me on Instagram @kingofautomation and my website is www.automationawareness.com.
