New age looms for jobs and it requires an intelligent response
Six out of 10 of all Chinese jobs could be lost over the next 20 years as a result of artificial intelligence, according to a study by the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University.
While the main focus of the G20 summit in Buenos Aires this weekend will be the expected meeting about trade on the sidelines between President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump, the future of work — one of the main agenda items — is increasingly a pressing issue.
Leaders and officials from the world’s leading 20 nations are likely to stress the importance of education in dealing with it — retraining people for the jobs that robots cannot do.
There are increasing concerns, however, that the fourth industrial revolution may be upon us before we can actually do anything about.
China could be one of the worst hit because of its preponderance of manufacturing jobs.
Yet even a heavily service sector economy like the United States is set to lose 47 percent jobs, according to the same Oxford study, Europe will lose 40 percent of its jobs and, perhaps most alarmingly, a country like Ethiopia — which has seen manufacturing as a route to economic progress — 80 percent of its.
Ian Goldin, director of the Oxford Martin Program on Technological and Economic Change, believes that people have underestimated the scale of the numbers of jobs at risk.
“Basically anything that is repetitive and rules-based that doesn’t require dexterity and empathy or very high levels of skills and sophistication could be disintermediated by artificial intelligence and machine learning.”
Disintermediation is a word perhaps we are going to get very familiar with. There are those, however, who think we are worrying too much.
Zhu Ning, Oceanwide Professor of Finance at Tsinghua University and a well-known China economist said we have been living with AI for a long time.
“The term was first coined in 1956. I think it still really depends on how or where the really important breakthroughs will come that will determine the speed of change,” he said.
One vital aspect that may separate the fourth industrial revolution from the previous three is that it may not create new jobs.
The first, in 18th century Britain, destroyed agricultural jobs but saw the emergence of factories.
The second, in the early 20th century led to mass production and assembly workers.
And the third — the computer revolution — may have destroyed clerical jobs such as those of bank tellers but led to people working in call centers.
According to Goldin, even those new jobs are at risk since people seem to prefer dealing with robots rather than people.
“Automated respondents are getting higher customer satisfaction ratings than humans,” he said.
One possible solution, of course, is for us all to do nothing and accept a universal basic income.
According to economist Douglas McWilliams, author of the new book, The Inequality Paradox, rich countries such as the US are still 20 years from being able to afford this.
For countries like China without a Western-style welfare system it is something that seems unattainable to begin with.
One of the reservations also about a universal basic income is that we won’t all pursue worthwhile leisure pursuits like reading and painting but end up on drugs, like in the US Rust Belt, where there is now widespread opioid addiction.
Trump might get his dream of US companies reshoring to these areas from places like China but it is robots and not Americans they will be employing.
Those at the G20 might be right in thinking that education may yet provide the solution to these problems.
It is good though that intellectual energy is being expended on how to deal with the world we might find in the 2030s rather than thinking up how to revert to the protectionist one of the 1930s.