The threat of a jobless world
– Frey Thomas (July 27th, 2012)
People are seriously worried. I’ve been in a number of conversations recently where people are very worried about our coming era of automation where fewer and fewer jobs will be left for people to do. A few months ago I predicted that over 2 billion jobs will disappear by 2030. With technologies like driverless cars, robotic assembly lines, and teacherless schools on the horizon, the writing is on the wall and people are getting nervous.
At the same time, our best thinkers don’t seem to have good answers for what comes next. Our best colleges are training students for jobs that will no longer exist. Our business leaders are myopically focused on what’s best for them. They have an obligation to hire the fewest number of people they can get away with, and to trim staff and expenses wherever possible. And politicians don’t know what to think because there are no lobbyists for the future unemployed.
In the past, the vast majority of our layoffs were caused by economic downturns. As we move into the future, the tide will shift, and the majority of our layoffs will be caused by automation and technology.
Reproduced by permission of The Da Vinci Institute
Thomas Frey, copyright (c) The Da Vinci Institute, Threat of a jobless world
The jobless future
When IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue beat the reigning world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, people still believed that computers winning against humans in free form games using natural language will remain a distant possibility. Only 14 years later, Watson, a pattern-recognising supercomputer developed by IBM, outwitted the best human competition in popular and syntactically tricky general-knowledge quiz show ‘Jeopardy!’
Watson is being currently put to use in various adaptations across a range of industries to help with all sorts of pattern-recognition problems. An Economist article informs that its acumen will grow with time and its costs will fall, as firms learn to harness its abilities. It highlights that big data and smart machines will merge to make many occupations in a few industries redundant while in others it will make it possible to do more work with a smaller workforce. Text-mining programmes will displace professional jobs in legal services. Biopsies will be analysed more efficiently by image-processing software than lab technicians. Accountants may follow travel agents and tellers into the unemployment line as tax software improves. Machines are already turning basic sports results and financial data into good-enough news stories.
The cost of such machines and AI are dwindling downwards and operating cost of some the robots used on factory floors is now less than the salary of an average Chinese worker. Besides, unlike human beings, robots don’t complain, join labour unions, or get distracted while putting themselves readily on work 24 hours a day and requiring only minimal maintenance.
Economists almost universally believed in something called the ‘Luddite fallacy’, which basically says that advancing technology will always create more jobs than it destroys. In other words, any fear that technology will never cause widespread, long term unemployment is a fallacy. This has always been true in the past. Advanced technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) are ultimately changing the economic rules.
Our perspective
Almost exactly two centuries ago, Mary Shelly began writing what she assumed to be a short story, but culminated into a full fledged novel, ‘Frankenstein’. The novel was a critical success and thereafter ‘Frankenstein’ no longer just meant a surname but became better known to represent ‘an agency or creation that slips from the control of and ultimately destroys its creator.”’
Back to the present day, apocalyptic warnings, generally the reserve of fiction writers, are being given by scientist Stephen Hawkings (… I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race), billionaire Elon Musk (….I like to just keep an eye on what’s going on with artificial intelligence. I think there is a potential dangerous outcome there.) and Microsoft founder, Bill Gates.(… I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.)
In the knowledge economy, human capability is a function of their brain power, which can be attributed as a software. And like all softwares, they need to continuously upgrade and outperform other humans to be useful. The competition is now no longer limited among humans only.
Meet Amelia – a new artificial intelligence platform that makes it possible to automate knowledge work across a broad range of functions. Exposed to the same information as any new hire, Amelia can quickly apply her knowledge to solve queries in a wide range of business processes, but only in a fraction of the time it takes traditionally to train someone in a new role. And yes, she speaks more than 20 languages!
Further pages in the book will reveal how almost all fields of human profession are being overtaken by robots and Artificial Intelligence. That includes the creative fields too, as we have bots, which can make music, write articles and create art too. Not only that, bots can even critique art as well.
The current Artificial Intelligence (AI) application is on an irrevocable accelerated path and even the ominous premonitions by Industry leaders and scientists can’t stop it. Bill Gates is concerned about the possible dangers of AI, but according to Eric Horvitz, the head of Microsoft Research’s main lab, “over a quarter of all attention and resources” at his lab are focused on AI-related activities.
To summarise, every one of us should invest far more than peripheral attention to the ways a whole gamut of technologies are changing our world at an unprecedented scale – replacing our thinking minds by software – to benefit from the changes rather than become surprised victims of the change.
Above all, as parents we have a double responsibility – save our own careers and professional development as well as convincingly communicate the lessons to our children.
Gazing through the crystal ball
- Advancement in technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will kill the vast majority of jobs as we know them today (just as the industrial revolution did, but it’ll be much faster this time); however, a world of new opportunities will arise across the world for still-scare ‘knowledge workers’
- The skillset required to be employed in future – the skillset of knowledge workers – will be different and much diverse than today. Those who will be employed in future will not be versed in one or two skills, but will be versatile, adaptable and greatly multi-skilled.
- Even the largest of corporations and governments will have smaller workforce and security of lifelong employment will fade to oblivion.
