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The future job economy, for lack of a better word, looks scary.
We’ve already begun to see the signs of trouble: not only do millennials earn 20% less on average than their baby boomer parents, but they are unemployed and underemployed at high rates.
Fearing for the future employment market, young people, academics, and legislators alike have vouched for largely unprecedented measures to potentially cover wide swaths of society— this site has extensively covered one of said measures, “basic income.”
What if I were to tell you, however, that not all is gloom and doom? Automation may very well cause a net loss of jobs, but it might also open up opportunities that were once unavailable.
This piece will go into reasonable depth about a number of topics, including what automation means; the industries most likely affected, both positively and adversely; the changing nature of work; and the potential for humans and robots to work alongside one another.
“One promising study found that 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist.”
What is Automation?
To save you a Google search, automation is a noun, defined as “the use of largely automatic equipment in a system of manufacturing or other production process.”
This definition in itself, immediately highlights an industry that analysts believe has been, and will continue to be affected by automation; but that’s for later.
Common wisdom would hold that automation is enticing to business owners, as they could get rid of employees in order to save labor costs.
This train of thought has rightfully induced panic in modern-day workers, although perhaps not quite on the scale that the Luddites, over a century ago, experienced.
(It would be must-see TV to watch workers absolutely demolish their robot worker counterparts, much as the Luddites did to weaving machines. It probably won’t happen though.)
The debate over automated labor has grown so frenzied it may have contributed to Andrew Puzder, President Trump’s original nominee for Secretary of Labor, deciding to withdraw his name from consideration. (Puzder, on many occasions, had unabashedly shared his view that human workers should be replaced by robots.)
While automated work has long existed, many fear that this next wave could be particularly detrimental to human employment due to the sheer advancement of AI.
As The Economist explained last year, we have even seen highly-specialized jobs replaced, “thanks to the advance of deep learning and other forms of artificial intelligence.”
Everyone— young and old, educated and uneducated, blue-collar and white-collar— is affected.
Which Industries Will Be Hit ?
While it may sound like a cop-out answer, the truth is that no industry is really safe.
In The Economist article aforementioned, a widely-cited 2013 study conducted by Oxford University is highlighted. In that academic inquiry, the researchers looked at the “probability of computerization for 702 occupations,” finding that 47% of Americans were in jobs that carried a high risk for future automation.
The industries said to be most likely affected were transport and logistics (i.e. drivers of any sort); office support (think receptionist, security, and admin jobs); and sales and service (a wide variety of positions, including cashiers, telemarketers, salesmen, and accountants).
Let’s breakdown one of these industries: transportation.
Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO, has not been shy about his plans to replace human Uber drivers with fully-automated vehicles.
Just this past year, Kalanick not only launched autonomous vehicles in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and other major U.S. cities, but he saw Otto, Uber’s self-driving truck subsidiary, make its first delivery. (50,000 cans of Budweiser, in case you’re wondering.)
Examining companies like Uber, you can easily see how a number of driving-related jobs may easily disappear, directly or indirectly: ridesharing and taxi drivers, truck drivers, bus drivers, etc.
With nearly 3% of the entire U.S. population employed as a driver in some capacity, a fault line is clearly visible. Some have speculated that 5 million American jobs could be lost.
Another field of work many have proclaimed to be doomed is cashiering.
Amazon took us one step closer to a cashier-less world when they announced their first Amazon Go location last December. The Seattle-area grocery store, which has yet to open, promises patrons the experience of “a new kind of store with no checkout required.”
Everything is automated, which has prompted vehement reactions from pretty much anyone with an opinion.
Regardless of appearances, Amazon has maintained that the dual missions of job creation and automation are not incompatible. To support that position, they announced this past January that they plan to hire 100,000 more employees over the next year-and-a-half.
And yes, manufacturing jobs are in great peril. Many speculate that Trump voters were so attracted to him as a candidate due to his promises to bring back jobs from overseas.
The issue is that a majority of these jobs have moved on for good due to technological advances.
If you want to read more on the jobs that’ll likely be cut, here and here, are some good articles on the subject.
What Opportunities Might Open Up?
Another cop-out answer: we don’t entirely know. (If anyone could predict the future with absolute accuracy, they would have to be the most esteemed person in the world. Have to.)
One promising study found that “65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist.”
Think about the implications of this prediction, should it carry any weight. In 20 years, give or take, two-thirds of new jobs may be in professions that adults in 2017 have never heard of.
Let’s examine a single industry: information technology.
While some pundits have started to already write the obituary for IT jobs, there are signs that IT could actually gain a good number of jobs.
This article provides 10 reasons for why that could be the case. They include:
- The fact that programming automated systems and keeping them secure will require human input.
- Humans can provide a safeguard or second-layer of reliability.
- Designing the systems— which is distinct from programming them— will take human involvement.
- Human workers will be needed to repair and enhance existing AI.
- There are some things that automation is simply not designed to do as well as humans.
This last reason perhaps illuminates what we need to do as an entire society: design jobs that we are good at. Better than robots, that is.
I would not be the person to consult insofar as what those jobs are, but I think that’d be a good place to start.
In 2015, The Guardian pointed out how 140 years of data showed that technology had created more jobs than it had destroyed.
Recently, Quartz published a piece revealing how automation has only completely eliminated “one of the 270 detailed occupations listed in the 1950 U.S. Census.” The publication’s main argument is that it is difficult to completely eliminate entire professions.
All in all, the situation is not completely hopeless.
And just to clarify, I’m not arguing that automation will not cause net job loss— losing more jobs than are gained. It almost certainly will.
Rather, I am highlighting some positive forecasts amidst all the hand-wringing.
Humans and Robots Collaborating
Another thing to look out for is the potential capability for robots and humans to work together.
This phenomenon has been covered fairly well in the media; some have even bestowed the name “cobots” upon the new generation of robots involved.
Where robots were once considered too dangerous and unwieldy to work with humans, the potential for synergy between the two has begun to be embraced.
Still, cobots make up a small proportion of the total number of robots sold for industrial purposes: 5%, according to a recent estimate.
Unfortunately, the mistakes and tragedies emanating from this new relationship may catch headlines for the near future.
Case in point, a 57-year-old Michigan woman was in the news recently, for a tragic incident in 2015 in which “a robot’s arm malfunctioned, hitting and crushing [her] head, killing her.”
Let’s hope that the positive and productive instances of cobots working with humans outweigh the negative.
Final Thoughts
There could be legislative solutions to stop the bleeding of coming job losses. Bill Gates has proposed taxing the use of automation in order to mitigate the loss of jobs.
As he explained to Quartz:
“Certainly there will be taxes that relate to automation. Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot come in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”
My thoughts on the entire matter is that we, as individuals, will have to continue to evolve and diversify our skillset to offer tangible value to employers or clients.
Never stop learning, never stop exploring. Complacency is truly the enemy. Trust me, if Gates’ proposal never takes off, there’ll be a ton more of us in the coming years who will be either unemployed or underemployed.
Daniel Steingold is a writer from Los Angeles, CA who’s an advocate for alliterative artistry. Admittedly ambivalent towards social media, he halfheartedly hopes hospitable humans heap plentiful praise upon his prose periodically posted to Facebook.
His two known writing projects, one used and one abused, are The Article Review (thearticlereview.com) and A Wiki a Week (awikiaweek.com), respectively. He enjoys learning about everything under the moon, because, well… the sun BURNS his ghostly white skin.