We’re all aware that technology changes the workplace. Jobs disappear; sometimes to be replaced by other jobs that didn’t exist before. During the industrial revolution we were replacing manual labor with machines. The coming revolution is for white collar “knowledge” jobs. How soon will yours be among them?
There have been incredible advances in Artificial Intelligence and computers understanding the world around. When you bring together some of the advances, it’s obvious that there will be repercussions within production, post and distribution that will change the way we do our work.
I say this, fully aware that the work I do in metadata-driven production will likely accelerate that process.
Not all technology is equally accessible, but when you assess what’s possible, then the future does not look good for technical assistants. Fortunately the creative work in production and editing will take longer, but there is a lot of production that is essentially formulaic, and therefore ripe for automation, as long as we get the right metadata.
While speech to text is still a work in progress, the technologies owned by Nuance (used by Apple for Dictation and Siri input), Google, Microsoft Cognitive Services and IBM Watson are now better than 90% accurate, without training.
There are many Natural Language Processing engines that will derive keywords, and context from that derived text. We use one for Lumberjack System’s Magic Keywords; Apple has one as part of the Siri purchase, IBM Watson and Microsoft also have a NLP API available.
Cloud site is one online API that will recognize the content of images. IBM Watson and Microsoft have  similar engines, and there are others that ‘recognize’ the content of images. Of course facial detection (there is a face) and facial recognition (this face is Philip) is a well established technology. Google AI is also getting better at machine vision. TechCrunch recently ran an article on the Key trends in machine learning and AI.
Computers are being trained to recognize emotion (Microsoft Cognitive Services, Emotient) and predict human behavior.
Which technologies will be combined to take your job? And what will you do when it does?