RIA's research editor and communications manager, Fazila Farouk, talked to Caledon FM's Annette Jahnel on her Future Perfect show about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, artificial intelligence and its impact on white collar workers in South Africa. A major challenge she highlights is the fact that the jobs, which have traditionally allowed people entry into the middle class, are now disappearing. This is a major setback for a country ravaged by economic inequality.

The story of automation in America has long been told in shuttered factories and declining Midwestern cities. But the latest wave of advancements in artificial intelligence may be bring the prospect of machine replacement beyond blue collar work. Developers are creating algorithms that promise to take over vast amounts of work in white collar fields like law and medicine, potentially upending traditionally high-status fields. For people in those once-secure positions, the questions are whose jobs may be changed, how soon, and what new opportunities may arise to take their place. Knowledge work that involves repetitive tasks or large amounts of data, such as lawyers' often arduous document discovery process, is particularly ripe for disruption from AI, experts say.

A lot of our lives, both our working lives and our personal lives, are spent doing repetitive, uncreative tasks. Many of these tasks are enjoyable: they include hobbies like gardening or baking that we enjoy for hard-to-articulate reasons. But, they also include things we don't want to do, like laundry or washing the dishes. While we cannot simply program a robot to do the tasks listed above, there are a lot of repetitive tasks, especially ones that don't involve manipulating physical objects, for which we can. For example, scientific software packages like Wolfram Alpha can solve most differential equations automatically, so that humans no longer have to solve them by hand.