NAEEMA AND THE ROBOTS

Naeema AL-Masoadi: 80% of jobs will disappear

Naeema is judge in national and international robots competitions. She has experience in training as it’s her current profession. Mawarid interviewed Naeema to know more about robots and their implications on human resources, future of employment, and the Sultanate’s trend towrards artificial intellengince and robots.

Interviewer: Wahab AL-Jadidi

• What is your professional experience?

I started as an Arbic teacher in MOE and I developed myself in training. Currently, I work as a training specialist in the human resources development departemnt. I recently entered the robots world doing robots training, and participating as a judge of national and international robot competitions.

• What do you do as training specialist?

I idnetify training needs, plan the traning budget, and implemnt the training plan through conducting and doing all the necessary arrangements for in-house courses. I distribute course feedback to the trainees and analyze the results. I work on the employees’ performance management system as well and record the assessment results. The most important thing in training is the follow up of the trainees and the mesurenet of the return of investemnt and imrpove the training methods and assess the perfomace improvemnt afte the training.

• Is training is a necessity or luxury?

Organizations can achieve their goals if every employees worked professionally and to do so employees needs good training. This will be done through identifying the organization and the individual employees’ needs or to have a training plan to fillfill these needs beside knowledge transfer and evaluating the effectiveness of the training. The importance of training can be known by:

a) The improvement of employees performance.

b) Cope with the technology and systems developments.

c) Reduce the supervision time.

d) Reduce work related accidents.

e) Reach to job security

• How did you enter the world of robots?

The start was when I was a master student at Arab Open University, I supported the students to complete their senior project in intensive robots designs and programing and we published it in Oman newspaper which was the start of my work in this field especially the importance of robots in training.

• Why is this field?

The noble aim of each teacher is to encourage the students on self learning and encourages them to learn. Robots design and programing is a learning by doing which is one of the best teaching methods. The practical practice of designing, making and the programming of selfmoving robots teaches the students advanced mathematics, scientific and technical concepts. The students will learn and do instead of attending intensive theoretical courses. The education trend now is to teach all mathematics, science, engineering, and technology as integrated skills under what is called STEM.

• How do you see the future of young Omanis in the robots making and design?

Robots are the future of all sciences for all generations and the Omanis as well as they are very capable to learn fast and they have the thirst to technology.Robots design and programming opens the doors to the Omani generation to be more effective and productive so they will participate in many scientific events nationwide or internationally.

• What are your participations as a referee in the Arab world? How important is the participation to you?

I participated at many competitions locally and within the Arab world e.g. the eleventh Arab championship at Sharm Ashaikh in Egypt in 2018, the Arab championship in Kuwait in 2018, and recently in Jordan in 2019. These participations are a good chance to improve our skills and to know the prominent participants in this field.

• Who are the people who can participate in these competitions?

The participants should have the essential knowledge of robots design and programming. They should know what’s beyond robots design; teaching cooperation, how to be proactive and encourage them to speak their opinions in clear scientific way freely.

• Do you think that robots will take over some jobs?

It can happen for jobs that doesn’t require discussion to achieve the tasks but it can’t replace human being at all as human has feelings and immediate problem solving sense of himself and others opposite to the robots which requires programming to react.

• What’s the impact of robots on employees?

Many studies focused on the positive and negative effects of robots and they came out with 80% of the current jobs will disappear and other studies says that intelligent tools will do more than half of the current jobs in the coming two decades.

• How can the robots overpass humans at work?

Robots came to do jobs on behalf of people or as a support. The main advantages of robots to people is they eliminates risks , do routine work, saves effort and time and reduces cost by replacing workers which increases productivity and profit margins. Robots usually does the very critical work which reduces injuries among workers.

• What the Sultanate’s future in using robots?

There are still very little efforts in this field but we are working towards further achievements.

• Are there any government plans in this regard?

Yes. In Comex 2019, “technology intelligence”, many government entities participated in Oman digital section which contains 23 booths from Oman and other government and private entities from Saudi, Kuwait and Singapore. These entities aims to educate the visitors of projects and initiatives implemented within the national strategy of Oman digital and e-government society. They market these projects and launch new projects.Oman’s booth has many sections e.g. Creativity section which is about technology intelligence. The new sections are smart mobile applications, virtual reality and the young creative section where children displays their school projects in programming, mechanics, robots and engineering toys.. The cybersecurity section has the digital evidence, Arab center for cybersecurity and children internet security. The initiatives section includes open source programming projects, smart city portal, Sasa for application developments and others. There is a section for electronic verification and approval.

• What other things do you want to add?

Thank you for the interview and I wish our students a good time in their summer vacation where they can spend their time and effort to learn useful things.