RISE OF THE ROBOTS Don’t fear it — they’re already here
They’re already taking jobs, but mainly ones we don’t want to do
With the exception of Boston Dynamics, a US company that has become famous for its publicity-hungry YouTube videos of dancing cyborgs, most robotics businesses prefer to operate under the radar.
With good reason, too. Robots do not find themselves in many workers’ good books. Both blue- and white-collar workers fear being replaced by them, as advances in mechanical engineering and artificial intelligence software continue.
Alarm at robots’ potential impact on the workforce has led to calls for them to be taxed, which has created a rare alliance of Bill Gates, UK opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn and economist Robert Shiller.
They argue that taxing human workers, and not robot ones, will place the fleshier of the two at a disadvantage when the inevitable battle between them comes.
So it is easy to see why the companies that are creating the next generation of robot workers are keeping quiet about it, fearing they will be viewed as evil job-stealers rather than innovators.
Robots are not viewed with universal pessimism, of course. Their supporters point out that new technologies have been feared as job-destroying for centuries. The reality has, instead, been huge productivity benefits, allowing the most repetitive and mind-numbing tasks to be automated and freeing up humans for the jobs robots cannot do.
This does not convince everyone, though. Predicting the effects of technology is never easy, and what held true in the past does not necessarily apply to the future, especially as the pace of change picks up.
But the truth is that we do not need to guess about the future to examine the effects of the robot revolution. The rise of robotics in factories, warehouses and laboratories is not some point on the horizon, it is happening now. If we want to study their effect, it makes more sense to examine the present.
Global sales of industrial robots rose to 381,000 last year, up 30% on a year ago, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Since 2012, sales have grown by an average of 19% a year, and they are due to almost double again by 2021.
Robot density, the ratio of robots to humans in the workplace, is also rising. In the manufacturing sector, there were 85 robots for every 10,000 employees last year, up from 69 two years earlier. In some countries, this is much higher: in South Korea, the figure was 710.
Robot density — the ratio of robots to humans in the workplace — is rising
New applications for robots are coming up constantly. Cattle farmers in Nebraska recently began using robots to move herds more safely. In Milton Keynes in the UK, robots that deliver packages to people’s front doors are being tested.
It is still early days, but it is fair to say we are at least partially into the march of the robots, rather than waiting for it to begin.
And as for the effect on workers, initial evidence shows few signs of the jobless dystopia we are warned of. Unemployment in Britain is at historic lows. This northern summer, the US labour department reported that for the first time since records began, there were more job openings in the economy than there were workers.
Many of these unfilled jobs are not in areas like medicine and IT; they are simply down to a lack of workers, full stop.
Farmers are struggling to find enough employees to pick their crops, leaving produce rotting in fields. The US long-haul trucking industry was short of 51,000 drivers at the end of last year. One manufacturing company in Indiana is putting new job applicants who fail drug tests through rehab, so urgently does it need staff.
Robots are ripe for picking up the slack in these industries: several robotics companies are working on areas such as driverless lorries and crop picking.
In these cases, robots are not so much taking jobs away from humans as filling the openings that the humans do not want.
This is creating a boom for the robotics companies themselves. Last year, investors put $2.7bn (R38.4bn) into the sector, according to ABI Research, up by a quarter.
Things could change, of course. A rapid acceleration in the speed of robotics development could mean they take jobs quicker than workers move into new ones. Major advances in artificial intelligence could mean robots starting to replace the jobs that we do want, instead of filling the ones we don’t want.
But there is little evidence of that. Robots have already invaded the workforce, but they haven’t given us any reason to fear them.