Rise of droids will have us sitting on our ’bots
WE’RE all familiar with Murphy’s law – if anything can go wrong, it most likely will.
In robotics there is Moore’s Law which states computing power doubles every two years, as it has been for decades.
Just think about how your entire CD collection (pardon my age) and more is now in your back pocket on a regularly upgraded mobile phone.
With the rise of the robots, we are on the brink of a devastating revolution that will make our idea of work as dated as a gramaphone record.
Quaint videos of droids whizzing around Chinese factories and Scottish Enterprise reports on the benign advantages of automation don’t grasp the scale or the speed of change. Past work revolutions displaced jobs - farm workers moved into factories, car workers moved into service industries.
This time it will be different. Robotics will change every job and displaced humans will be left with, well, no work.
Hamburger robots can mix, fry and salad up 360 servings an hour. They pay for themselves in a year without taking as much as a day off or a wage slip. McDonalds employ 1.8million people worldwide.
So, blue collar workers will train up for better jobs? No, colour-blind robots are coming for white collar jobs too. In finance thousands have been laid off in automated stock exchanges and online banks.
Thousands of legal documents can be scanned in seconds by computer, making junior legal staff and their expensive degrees redundant.
Forget about becoming a radiologist, a robot can learn to scan and diagnose better, or even a software engineer. Facebook’s data servers are now managed by a software programme requiring few human operatives. Every job involving sitting at screen and manipulating data is at risk.
A 2013 Oxford University study concluded that 47 per cent of jobs in the US are at risk from automation. From construction to health care, we’re being moved out and massive profits and mass unemployment are moving in.
Yes, the economy will remain dependent on human labour for the foreseeable future. But few politicians are waking up to what we will do when there is nothing to do and have no wages to do it with?
You might think this doesn’t affect you. Maybe, like me, you hope this revolution will happen to someone else.
A chapter in The Rise of the Robots, about how technology will create mass unemployment tore away my comfort blanket.
It opens with a newspaper report of a baseball match, wrapping the scores and player reactions to the recent tragic history of the home team. The report is accurate, engaging and written entirely by a computer program.
Worse, it was written in 2009. Industry experts estimate by 2025 more than 90 per cent of newspaper articles will be written by artificial intelligence engines.
These robots – they’re certainly coming for me, and you too.
Except for one hope. At the awesome Robots exhibition in London’s Science Museum, where this train of thought started, a sign in front of a frozen Japanese-built android read: “Temporarily out of order”. Murphy’s Law, re-establishing itself.