Automation: Friend Or Foe?

Everyone is affected by automation. How we relate to automation determines whether or not it undermines us, or allows us to profit from it. Learn to profit from it.

Meet Jena and Jeno.  2 of Hotel Jen’s most famous staff.  (Hotel Jen is a luxury hotel group from Singapore.)

Jen and Jeno aren’t human, they’re robots.  Specifically, room service delivery robots.

While a lot’s been written about how automation is going to start taking our jobs, this brought sparked some debate (and quite possibly fear) because, prior to this, it’s been fairly accepted that robots would ever take the place of humans in the luxury service industry – and some have even called the luxury service industry “automation proof”!

The fact is that automation is going to affect everybody.  It’s ultimately how we relate to automation, that will determine how it affects us.

Even if we see it as an obstacle, we need to acknowledge that life invariably brings challenges and obstacles.

Those challenges and obstacles do not determine our future. It is how we react to those challenges and obstacles that that does that.

Challenges and obstacles often cause us to lament the loss of the opportunities, or stability, but they often bring us opportunity as well.

I didn’t always look at things that way.

I spent 20 years working as a corporate lawyer in Singapore, and was truly blessed to have climbed the corporate ladder very quickly. I felt secure, thinking to myself, as long as I’m really good at what I’m doing, I’ve got a job for life.

In corporate legal work, prior to a company purchasing another company, extensive due diligence is carried out. This is a painful task that often cost a fair bit of money due to the number of hours of lawyers’ time that required to carry it out. It is also a part of legal work that can bring about a lot of liability if things go wrong.

This process started to become automated. Computers were scanning these in bulk faster and more accurately than any human could. Once that happened, I started worrying about how secure my job really was.

Granted, that was work that was typically undertaken by junior associates, and it would not any direct impact on me. But the writing was clearly on the wall, and I wondered when computer processing power would start replacing the need for senior lawyers.

It was quite by chance that I ended learning about online marketing. But once I did, I realized that automation was more of a friend than a foe for anyone wanting to understand it.

I also realized that automation had reached a point where it was available to small enterprises and home based businesses. I had learnt to run a business selling things online, and automation meant that I could do this from home without needing to incur the overheads of a usual business.

When a line of business works, you just “copy and paste” it. Essentially, that is automation at its simplest, but that is the sort of thing that allows you to multiply your work without multiplying ourselves.

We’ve all done this at some level – such as when we use template letters, documents or slides in the course of our work.

The power of automation is plain to see – it took me 20 years of hard work as a lawyer to reach the income I did – I decided to make automation a friend instead of a feared foe, and replaced that income within 6 months of starting to learn it. *

So, I encourage you to embrace this change. Fearing automation will not make it go away, but taking the time to learn it could possibly change your life for the better, in ways you could only imagine.