How to survive the rise of robots
As machines take over more jobs, a shift in education will be crucial
L ONDON By now, we’re used to the idea of technology largely taking over blue-collar jobs. The Nissan car plant in Sunderland, northeast England, is a classic example: it produces more than 500,000 vehicles a year — more than any other factory in Europe — yet it employs just 6,000 people, a fraction of the number of human workers that would have been needed before advanced robotics transformed the manufacturing process.
As the old joke goes, the factory of the future might need only a human and a dog to keep it running: a dog to make sure no one tampers with the machines, and a human to feed the dog.
But as the leading U.S. economist Tyler Cowen puts it, machines aren’t only replacing human brawn — as they become more advanced, they’re increasingly replacing brains. Or to put it another way: if the most precarious place to be working in Britain in the 1970s and 80s was in a blue-collar role in a factory, today it’s the kind of whitecollar job occupied by the middle classes.
According to the Oxford University academics Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, in the years ahead, millions of jobs in sectors such as accounting and auditing will be replaced with machines that can do the same tasks much more cheaply and effectively than human workers — without salaries, vacation or sick pay — while administrators, paralegals and bank clerks will also be hit hard.
They’re not alone in reaching this conclusion. Earlier this year, a British parliamentary committee on digital skills published a report suggesting that 35 per cent of U.K. jobs are at risk of being automated over the next two decades.
Analysis shows that more than half of all secretarial jobs in the U.K. have already disappeared over the past 10 years, and while there are more than a million callcentre employees in Britain today, advances in speech-recognition software and other technologies mean many of these jobs are also predicted to disappear in the next decade.
This is only the beginning. Selfdriving cars have racked up more than a million kilometres of motoring on American roads and are expected to replace many human drivers in the years ahead. Powerful computers are already carrying out the vast majority of stock-market trading, and teaching hospitals in Boston and other cities are starting to use software to diagnose medical conditions.
The increasing vulnerability of middle-class jobs to technology is likely to have a huge impact on our society. Take Margaret Davies, for example. Until recently, she had worked in a government office in Wales, handling tax inquiries for 26 years. Advances in technology mean more of us are doing our taxes online, which saves the government money, but also means Davies and 33 of her colleagues are being made redundant.
Of course, the technology revolution is not just destroying jobs — it’s creating huge numbers of new ones too, especially in areas such as IT and the creative industries. And the good news is that the new jobs being created pay an average of $20,000 a year more than the jobs being lost to automation.
But a 50-year-old whose job is replaced by software won’t necessarily have the right skills to find employment in the brave new world of artificial intelligence and robotics.
So what can we do? Back in 1997, Garry Kasparov was the first chess grandmaster to be beaten by a computer program, in a milestone in the evolution of technology. After his defeat, he made a passionate case for investing in education and training to ensure humans have a chance of winning the race against the machine. As he put it: “We might not be able to change our hardware, but we can upgrade our software.”
In the U.S., Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and authors of The Second Machine Age, argue that we must drag our education system into the 21st century, particularly our approach to adult training and apprenticeships, which is still based on the needs of the past 100 years.
We need to embed computer science at the heart of our skills agenda and ensure more adults have the opportunity to learn coding — the language of computers and the lingua franca of the technology economy — to enable them to develop and manipulate software and robotics, rather than compete against them.
Business thinker Geoff Colvin, in his book Humans are Underrated, argues that there are tasks we will always want people to carry out, whether providing leadership or working in teams. McAfee and Brynjolfsson agree, suggesting we need to help people develop skills that machines are still relatively bad at, such as creativity, empathy and problem-solving.