Robots are coming ... to steal jobs
NEW STUDY SUGGESTS ONE WORKER IN 16 WILL BE REPLACED BY ROBOTS IN FIVE YEARS, BEGINNING WITH CUSTOMER SERVICE AND TAXIS
By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6 per cent of all jobs in the US — one out of every 16 jobs — starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers.
That’s just one cheery takeaway from a report released by market research company Forrester last week.
These robots, or intelligent agents, represent a set of AI-powered systems that can understand human behaviour and make decisions on our behalf.
Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now as well as chatbots and automated robotic systems.
For now, they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs like selfdriving cars. These robots can be helpful for companies looking to cut costs, but not so good if you’re an employee working in a simple-to-automate field.
“By 2021 a disruptive tidal wave will begin. Solutions powered by AI/cognitive technology will displace jobs, with the biggest impact felt in transportation, logistics, customer service and consumer services,” said Forrester’s Brian Hopkins in the report.
The Inevitable Robot Uprising has already started, with at least 45 per cent of US online adults saying they use at least one of the aforementioned digital concierges. Intelligent agents can access calendars, email accounts, browsing history, playlists, purchases and media viewing history to create a detailed view of any given individual. With this knowledge, virtual agents can provide highly customised assistance, which is valuable to shops or banks trying to deliver better customer service.
Forrester paints a picture of the not-too-distant future. “The doorbell rings, and it’s the delivery of a new pair of running shoes, in the right style, colour, and size, just as you needed to replace your old ones. And here’s the kicker: you didn’t order them. Your intelligent agent did.”
In the transportation industry, Uber, Google and Tesla are working on driverless cars, while similar technology is creeping its way into trucking to replace expensive human drivers. It’s easy to get dazzled by such innovations, but what happens to the 6 per cent? The call centre staff, the taxi drivers and the truckers.
“Six per cent is huge. In an economy that’s really not creating regular full-time jobs, the ability of people to easily find new employment is going to diminish. So we will have people wanting to work and struggling to find jobs because the same trends are beginning to occur in other historically richer job creation areas like banking, retail and health care,” said Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union.
Studies have shown that higher rates of unemployment are linked to less volunteerism and higher crime. Taxi drivers around the world have already reacted with violent protests to the arrival of Uber. Imagine how people react when Uber eliminates drivers from its fleet.
Of all the economic questions being debated today, the most frightening one is, “Will the robots take our jobs?”
This nightmare scenario comes in several flavours. The extreme version is that automation simply makes human workers obsolete, just as cars made horses redundant. A less apocalyptic possibility is what economists call “skill-biased technological change” — people who are technically savvy, mentally flexible and educated will reap greater and greater rewards while everyone else sees their wages decline.
These two scenarios might look different on paper, but the net result is largely the same — a very big portion of humanity would be either be impoverished or reduced to living off of the government dole. Books like The Wealth of Humans ,by economics writer Ryan Avent, explore this frightening possibility.
So far, the robot revolution hasn’t happened, or at least not very much — if it had, we’d be seeing faster productivity growth and higher unemployment. A few papers have claimed to see evidence of companies substituting machines for humans more than in the past, but so far the evidence remains scant.
The robot revolution is more of a longterm concern, driven by the rapid advances in machine learning and other technologies that seem to allow machines to mimic or even surpass human cognition. If computers can do mental tasks better and machines can do physical tasks better than humans, what special skills do we have left?
Predicting whether machines will make the bulk of humans useless is beyond my capability. The future of technology is much too hard to predict. But I can say this: one of the main arguments often used to rule out this worrisome possibility is very shaky.
If you think that history proves that humans can’t be replaced, think again.
I see this argument all the time. Because humans have never been replaced before, people say, it can’t happen in the future. Many cite the example of the Luddites, British textile workers in the early 19th century who protested against the introduction of technologies that could do their jobs more cheaply.
In retrospect, the Luddites look foolish. As industrial technology improved, skilled workers were not impoverished — instead, they found ever-more-lucrative jobs that made use of new tools. As a result, “Luddite” is now a term of derision for those who doubt the power of technology to improve the world.
A more sophisticated version of this argument is offered by John Lewis of the Bank of England, in a recent blog post. Reviewing economic history, he shows what most people intuitively understand — new technology has complemented human labour rather than replacing it. Indeed, as Lewis points out, most macroeconomic models assume that the relationship between technology and humans is basically fixed.
That’s the problem, though — economic assumptions are right, until they’re not. The future isn’t always like the past. Sometimes it breaks in radical ways.
The clearest, most important example is the Industrial Revolution itself. For thousands of years before 1800, the wealth of the average human was almost constant. New technologies were invented — steel, the horse collar, plumbing, the compass, paper. But per capita output barely went up.
Most people were still indigent farmers.
Progress
Imagine an economist or pundit in 1780, observing the new industrial technologies that were popping up in the UK. Imagine him scoffing at the entrepreneurs and visionaries who predicted that the power loom and the steam engine heralded the dawn of a new era of abundance for humanity. “Nonsense,” the sceptic would say. “Technologies of the past have never allowed the mass of the species to escape from poverty, so why should this new crop be any different?”
We all know what happened next. The new technologies were qualitatively different. And that resulted in an abrupt acceleration of wealth generation the likes of which the world had never seen. What happened in 1800 and afterward utterly defied all of the lessons of history up until that point.
And automation could now do the same. There is no fundamental law of economics that says that technology must always complement human labour. In fact, the math of how robots could replace humans is simple and well understood.
If the elasticity of substitution between capital and labour — basically, jargon for “how easy it is to replace humans with machines” — goes up, labour’s share of income can go down and down. Skill-biased technological change, which rewards the top workers while punishing everyone else, has also been modelled by economic theorists for decades.
So there is no deep, abiding reason why the future will look like the past. Machines have never replaced humans before, and they probably aren’t doing so right now.
But that says very little about whether they will in the future. The nature of technology is that it changes the world in ways that are totally new and unanticipated. For all we know, this time really might be different.