So, where do you see yourself in ten years?
By Lily Gordon
For a class project back in middle school, I made a video where I played both the role of the interviewee and the interviewer, à la Barbara Walters. Lily asked Lily about her family, her interests and, as Barbara would, where she saw herself in ten years. I got excited imagining my future life as an aspiring Hollywood director or writing pieces for the Wall Street Journal. It wasn't hard for eleven-year-old me to envision ten years down the road.
For a class project back in middle school, I made a video where I played both the role of the interviewee and the interviewer, à la Barbara Walters. Lily asked Lily about her family, her interests and, as Barbara would, where she saw herself in ten years. I got excited imagining my future life as an aspiring Hollywood director or writing pieces for the Wall Street Journal. It wasn't hard for eleven-year-old me to envision ten years down the road.
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| Photo Pixabay 2017 |
Well, ten years later and I'm just now learning how much I have to learn. This past summer I interned at Coursera, the world's largest online education platform, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Coursera's big blockbuster course that premiered during my time at the company was on deep learning taught by the company's founder and artificial intelligence thought leader Andrew Ng. I hadn't heard of deep learning before going to Coursera. It didn't seem like a particularly interesting or ground breaking topic. It was just another techno geek coding course. Boy, was I wrong.
As a member of the three person public relations team at Coursera, I was included on the PR activities leading up to the Deep Learning course launch. It was then that I realized that deep learning is how Siri, Shazam, Google Translate and a million other super useful applications work. I also saw that the topic of artificial intelligence, the concept of robots becoming smarter to help humans do things, was hot for reporters. The Deep Learning course launch yielded coverage in TechCrunch, Wired, NPR's Marketplace, Fast Company, Quartz, Bloomberg TV, and the MIT Technology Review. It was time for me to get hip to this little thing called AI.
So, I've jumped into the Crater Lake of AI. Every day there are new advancements to the technology out there, which really throws a monkey wrench into the whole question of "where do you see yourself in ten years?" Ten years ago online translation tools were laughable. Today, there are computer translators that can perform at a higher, faster level than humans. Ten years ago reporters were the ones pumping out news stories. Today, publications such as The Washington Post are using robots to write articles. The rapidly evolving capabilities of AI mean the future of every industry is facing an uncertain future. I can't say where truck drivers, reporters or chefs will be in ten years, much less where I will be.
That's why I'm honing in on that specific question. Where will the public relations field be in ten years? What role with AI play in the development of the field? Will there still be a job for me, an aspiring PR practitioner, in ten years? Or will Watson, HAL and Siri replace me?
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| Photo Matan Segev 2017 |
According to the organization 80,000 Hours, the advent of super intelligent AI, computers that are smarter than humans, will be the next industrial revolution. Everything will change and governments, companies and individuals are not preparing enough for this monumental shift. NPR's Planet Money calculated the likelihood of various jobs being automated. Public relations specialists have a 17.5 percent chance of being automated in the next twenty years.
I'm taking a closer look at how the PR field will evolve and what that means for aspiring and current practitioners. Through this blog, I'll explore new developments from chatbots to robo-journalists and posit what the year 2027 may look like. Maybe the next time I'm asked, "Where do you see yourself in ten years?" during a job interview or by my parents at Christmas, I'll finally have a clearer picture.