Soon, many of us may be replaced by robots
Smart machine use is rising
There has never been a better time to be an American robot.
Even without nativist economic policies that could drive up labor costs, trigger worker shortages and provide businesses with additional incentives to automate, machines appear set to replace their human creators in everlarger numbers. Multiple studies suggest that between one-third and onehalf of all professions will be vulnerable to automation over the next two decades.
The degree of vulnerability is not only a function of the traditional distinction between manual and cognitive labor; rather, the rise of artificial intelligence and “deep learning” machines could eventually replace many tasks now deemed “routine.” That category includes white-collar workers in such high-paying professions as medicine and law.
It seems that robots have friends in high places.
Andrew Puzder, chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants and President Donald Trump’s first choice for labor secretary, told Business Insider magazine last year that robots are “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex or race discrimination case.”
Sounds just like the robots I know.
Oddly, many Americans seem less fearful of losing their jobs to a machine than to other people; then again, our huntergatherer ancestors competing for survival in a dangerous world of limited resources were never threatened by robots. The evolutionary wariness that once provided a survival advantage to people most attuned to superficial human differences does not recognize threats from machines, smart or otherwise.
The emotion-laced issue of how to revive manufacturing employment has eclipsed the more important long-term problem of how all workers can survive the quickening pace of automation. Since 1983, the number of U.S. workers employed in tasks considered either “non-routine cognitive” and “non-routine manual” has roughly doubled, while those employed in jobs considered “routine cognitive” and “routine manual” has stagnated.
But really, who knew the labor market could be so complicated?
Skeptics of the negative effect of artificial intelligence on employment acknowledge that the U.S. economy is undergoing major changes. They note, however, that during previous machine-driven transformations — most notably from agriculture to factories and from factories to service employment — automation always created many times more jobs that it destroyed.
True enough. Yet the loss of manufacturing jobs to automation — a trend that is equally pronounced overseas as in the U.S. — has not underwritten the same broadbased income gains that flowed from the post-agrarian economy of the early 20th century.
Between 1950 and 1975, labor productivity and compensation tracked each other; since then, the lines have decoupled, with productivity growing because of automation and wages staying flat due to less demand for human labor.
Silicon Valley entrepreneur and futurist Martin Ford sees that trend accelerating. The author of “Rise of the Robots,” Ford believes the current technological transformation is qualitatively different from its predecessors and will produce a dramatically different outcome.
“Machines are starting to think and take on cognitive capability in a much broader sense than previously,” Ford told me a recent phone interview. “They are making decisions and solving problems. What’s really central to this issue is that machines are now capable of learning.”
In effect, the pupil could soon replace the teacher.
Ford advises younger Americans to seek careers that involve creativity and deep human interaction. “The last thing you want to do is focus on something that is fundamentally routine, repetitive and predictable. Robots and algorithms are going to be able to do that.”
For those left behind — a group that Ford thinks could become unimaginably large by current standards within 20 years — some form of national guaranteed income might become necessary. He notes that experiments with the concept already are underway in Europe and that the idea is gaining traction in the United States. Bill Gates has proposed a tax on robots to fund retraining for workers displaced by smart machines.
Some of the looming disruptions have the potential to astonish. Kristian Hammond, the cofounder of Narrative Science, a Chicago-based company that programs computers to write news stories, predicts that before long, an algorithm will win a Pulitzer Prize.
Thus no doubt making it the envy of every other algorithm in the newsroom.