How long before my job is replaced? When will a machine or software be able to do what I do? According to the analysis of the potential long-term impact of automation done by PricewaterhouseCoopers together with Forbes, entitled: “Will robots really steal our jobs?” in 2020, 37% of workers in the EU, UK, USA, and Japan worry about losing their jobs due to artificial intelligence or other automation. For as long as I can remember, the battle of “man” vs. “robots” has been part of the world billboard, with Hollywood assigning to the collective imagination the dystopian future in which Skynet will kill us all when it dominates the world and John Connor will save us from genocide. Not to mention Mad Max, where we end up killing each other when we win the war against the robots. Possibly this is where some of our mistrust towards technology comes from, although we also grew up with the illusion of the inventions of The Jetsons and Back to the Future—which reminds me of a fleeting Facebook article in which we millennials claim for the flying cars we were promised to have in this future-of-the-eighties we are living in -.

So, to be afraid or not to be afraid? I am not. None of us should be. Technology has been replacing jobs for as long as we have been doing technology. That is exactly why we humans have dedicated ourselves to evolving as a species and have allowed ourselves to have and be what we are today. Many factors may be affecting how we perceive this process, and one of the most influential is access to information. We may be scared of losing our jobs if we constantly hear the news that by 2030, 52% of jobs in the transportation and warehousing sector will be performed by machines and robotics. Or that drones are already delivering packages and cabs are driving themselves. We are in an era of saturation, and it is important to remember that media manipulation drastically influences our daily actions, and we must maintain the ability to discern and select what we consume from the media.

If we continue with the breakdown of the sectors that are most vulnerable to replacement by A.I.s, after transportation and warehousing is the manufacturing sector, followed by the construction sector, then administration and customer service, sales, finance, insurance, communication, and eventually the rest of the labor sectors, which reminds us that we are all replaceable, but this is popularly known as “the cycle of life”. If we consider that technology is a thing of the past and not of the future, this replacement cycle makes sense. Hawking said that we walk on the shoulders of giants; technological advances and preceding discoveries drive and foster the development of successors. The use of fire is technology, as is the building of houses around it and all the heavy machinery that was developed to build our cities. At what point did we stop feeling that technology helps us and start feeling that it replaces us?

If we assess the types of jobs that are being replaced most rapidly, we find that manual tasks represent the most vulnerable type, with 39% of positions (approximately) that will be replaced by robotics or some type of automation by 2030, followed by routine tasks (37%), computing (29%), management and administration (27%), social skills (16%) and literary skills (14%). It is worth noting that among the tasks most vulnerable to replacement are those that require a lower level of education, and this generally continues on an inversely proportional scale, i.e., the less schooling, the greater the vulnerability, the greater the schooling, the less vulnerability. Does this not sound similar to the immense inequality gap that already dominates the labor market in Latin America? In its Social Inequality Matrix, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean ( CEPAL) considers Latin America the most unequal region in the world, with the highest rates of inequalities in territory and education, which directly affect productive processes that have a great impact on the differential distribution of power and participation in decision-making processes, as well as on the social relations of exclusion or inclusion and the capacity of people to develop economically and exert their rights. This inequality is an expression of the structural heterogeneity existing in the Latin American development model.

So, when we speak of vulnerability to replacement by artificial intelligence, we are referring directly to the historically most vulnerable population, the poor and the least educated, and it is precisely in this context that a great opportunity appears for our people to emerge towards the quality of life, within a framework of respect for cultures, genders, choices, ethnicities, and cosmovisions of life in general. Foremost, we must broaden and unlearn some concepts of “development” and “success” that dominate the world jargon and discredit many lifestyles that are also valid. I say this after observing the rejection of electricity and other basic services in some rural communities on the southern coast of Cocibolca in Nicaragua. Many peasants in the area simply consider that their life is ideal, they still have clean water with easy ground access, they have clean air, they cultivate their land and with the work they do they support their families. Some indicators may tell us that by living on less than two dollars a day they live in poverty, that without access to electricity they are underdeveloped or that without access to basic services they do not have minimum health conditions. In other cases, we even go so far as to nullify ancestral wisdom and consider illiterate those who have abundant knowledge of the land, the body, and the spirit. With this comment, I do not intend to escalate this situation to all rural communities, nor to discredit the indicators of quality of life in terms of schooling and economy, but rather to encourage the specific assessment of each case and the inclusion of the vastness of concepts of “life” that coexist in our region. On the other hand, the urban population should also be evaluated specifically, within the plurality of voices and the constant metamorphosis to which it is exposed, with much more caution.

This automation of manual and repetitive labor, which threatens the poorest population, who are the ones who currently perform it, represents an opportunity to create markets and come up with more decent and respectful jobs for them. It is a complex position and may represent a paradigm, to replace the labor force of the working class with robotics, but do we really want to perpetuate the work exploitation that is already established? The challenge is to find new jobs and ensure that the integral development of human beings focuses on personal fulfillment and their path to happiness. We already live in a world where power is in the hands of 3% of the world's population and the corporatism model is evidently on the verge of collapse, leaving in its wake climate change, wars, deforestation, famine, obesity, pandemics, and so many other disasters that the new generations must mitigate. Artificial intelligence is our ally in this journey towards the holistic evolution of the human race and the perpetuation of our species. Suppose robotics and its automaton factories replace sweatshops where women and children (mainly women and children) are exploited in 16-hour work shifts for a few cents an hour. In that case, it could be positive, and it could be considered a little egocentric in the simplistic and privileged discourse that “work is work” and that at least in this way these people have a source of income.

Historically, the development of the greatest nations and even academic knowledge has been possible thanks to slavery. If artificial intelligence would allow all the beings that inhabit the planet to have a minimum of guarantees, more people, and not just a few, would be able to dedicate themselves to their personal fulfillment. It is a challenge for Latin America to import this automation system from the first world because it is still felt as a problem of other regions. And we envision in the distant future, the replacement of the workforce to be a reality. The opportunity to include automation and artificial intelligence in development projects, entrepreneurship, and the boiling of the economy and not be imposed by surprise when it inevitably happens, is an advantage of living in underdevelopment if there were any. Consider also that not only manual labor is being replaced, but also those that are considered specialized and even creative. Today, artificial intelligence and robotics are capable of devising and painting pictures, making music, designing, and even writing an article similar to this one, all done solely by a machine.

The new generations have the challenge of educating and diversifying ourselves in as many manual and intellectual skills as possible, for which A.I.s allow us to access learning platforms where the limit of what we can learn is almost non-existent. We must handle as much specialized software as possible and include all the state-of-the-art technological development within our reach, investing in good quality hardware, not as an object of vanity, but as a working tool. The democratization of technology will allow a greater portion of the population to have access to this equipment and the automation of tasks will allow us to focus on managing areas of humanity that have generally been displaced, such as mental health, spirituality, and physical well-being. We have the challenge of handling a greater number of languages, which could be English, Japanese, Python, or script.

The development of all these skills no longer belongs only to those who have the purchasing power to pay for education, since technology and automation also allow a person from any social stratum to educate themselves autonomously, efficiently, and with quality. Being open to the idea that we are replaceable is also an act of humility and the more interdependence and management of technologies we have, the greater our adaptability and survival chances.