Are We Headed for an Automation Apocalypse?
By 2030, 275 million workers worldwide will be forced to switch occupational categories
Zach Killaman takes off for work at a Honda factory in Greensburg, Indiana for the day. But instead of manually applying hoods and bumpers like he did in his first year, he now oversees the machines that do it for him. Killaman said many layoffs occurred once a vast majority of manual labor was deemed unnecessary after automation dominated the factory. For those who stayed, the pay decreased from $18 an hour to $15. “We monitor,” says Killaman. “We hardly get hands-on anymore.”
Where once the warmth of human hands molded the world’s products, long, medal, robotic arms now carefully and strategically put all parts into place. Human workers’ roles have evolved into overseeing the production process, ensuring everything runs smoothly.
Honda factory workers in the small town of Greensburg, Indiana are not the only ones who will experience this technological shift. The McKinsey Global Institute cautions that as many as 375 million workers worldwide will need to switch occupational categories by 2030 due to automation.
According to Shushil Sharma, associate dean at Ball State University’s Miller College of Business, “The 375 million jobs lost will be reutilized.” Workers will need to adapt to learn new skills to keep them relevant in the market. Sharma says the amount of jobs will not necessarily be eliminated, but instead there will be a different variety of jobs available. For many, this is cause for concern.
The Takeover
Widespread automation is coming to fruition sooner than some may have expected. In 2013, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne published a study that analyzed 702 occupations in the U.S.. They discovered 47 percent of workers have jobs at high risk for automation takeover.
Many workers are fearful of the outcome when the so called “automation apocalypse” takes over. According to Futurism, a website whose mission is to drive the development of transformative technologies towards maximizing human potential, machines will soon be able to take over tasks in a range of industries and perform them just as well, if not with more efficiency, quality, and productivity than humans.
In 2017, there is already an artificial intelligence (A-I) that can deliver a medical diagnosis as well as a human doctor, A-I therapists that can outperform their human counterparts in terms of drawing out necessary personal information from patients, robot lawyers capable of defending parking ticket violations, and even “robot journalists.”
Experts agree that just about every job out there is at risk for some type of automation. “Significant losses, and the geographic concentration of those losses, may have large impacts on economic development, population dynamics, and community vulnerability in the future,” According to Ball State’s PhD research economist, Devaraj Srikant, “There may be several ghost towns that could appear as a result of people moving to urban places for a job change.”
“There will be few jobs a robot cannot do better”
In the first few months of 2017, North American companies bought 32 percent more robots than last year, according to data from the Robotic Industries Association. Robots have become less expensive than human labor in the long run, and also more efficient.
A new Chinese factory in Dongguan City created this year by Changying Precision Technology Company has replaced 90 percent of its human workforce with automated machines, According to Business Insider, the company experienced a 250 percent increase in productivity and an 80 percent drop in defects. The factory used to require 650 human workers to manufacture mobile phones. Now it is ran by 60 robot arms that work day and night across 10 production lines. As few as 60 employees are with the company now and most of their tasks involve monitoring computer control systems.
In an interview with Business Insider, Luo Weigiang, general manager of the factory, said the number of people employed could drop to just 20. Considering the achievements made by automation, it won’t be too long before other factories around the world do the same.
The National Bureau of Economic Research released a study this year that revealed for every robot brought into the U.S. workforce between 1990 and 2007, six human jobs were lost. Robots can flip burgers, work in warehouses, handle insurance claims, manage investment portfolios and also do legal research.
From a corporate ownership’s perspective, this poses a question: Why involve human labor if automated labor is cheaper and more efficient?
“There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better,” said Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk at the World Government Summit in Dubai. In 2017, the World Economic Forum has dubbed this technological transition as the “fourth industrial revolution.” This has and will continue to create short-term labor displacement.
In a report by Goldman Sachs Economic Research, when the autonomous vehicle spikes, the four million Americans with driver jobs may experience job losses at a rate of 25,000 a month or 300,000 a year. But there is no guarantee that people who are losing jobs will fulfill the skill criteria for a new one. When autonomous vehicle saturation peaks, U.S. drivers could see job losses at a rate of 25,000 a month, or 300,000 a year.
The Evolution
As automation evolves into a dominant force across a vast majority of industries, optimists like Dr. Sharma suggest that jobs will not necessarily be taken, but will instead evolve. “The nature of jobs will change,” says Sharma.
MIT researcher, John McAfee says “If I had to do it over again, I would put more emphasis on the way technology leads to structural changes in the economy, and less on jobs, jobs, jobs. The central phenomenon is not net job loss, it’s the shift in the kinds of jobs that are available.”
According to Scientific American, humanity is experiencing the most significant transformation since the end of the Second World War. During the 19th century, the amount of cloth in a clothing factory a single weaver could create in an hour increased by a factor of 50, while the labor required per yard of cloth decreased by 98 percent. However, this resulted in a positive impact on employees as the cloth became cheaper, increasing the demand and in turn, creating four times more jobs.
The same type of transition is happening now, but The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that compared to the industrial revolution in the 19th century, the fourth industrial revolution involving A-I is happening ten times faster and at 300 times the scale.
Just as the technological transition occurred in the 19th century, according to Elon Musk, the fourth industrial revolution has and will continue to create lower prices for products. This, in turn, should make the products more appealing to consumers and forge an increased demand that could result in the need for more workers. But how does society cope with this transition smoothly?
Many expert technologists around the world don’t believe we are headed toward a pivotal economical downfall of society, but rather, a transformation. According to Scientific American, in this transformation, implementation of new educational concepts are imperative. The concepts should target and promote critical thinking, creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, rather than molding students into a standardized worker whose tasks can easily be replicated faster and at higher quality by a robot in the future.
Scientific American also suggests that a participatory “sharing economy for all” platform is needed in order to help people become self-employed, set up unique projects, find partners to collaborate with, as well as market products and services.
Don’t Panic Yet
Millions of workers around the world just like Zach Killaman at the Greensburg Honda factory will head to their jobs this morning. However, since the take over of automation, their job criteria have evolved. Zach doesn’t put on the bumpers of cars anymore, but instead is the shift manager, overseeing the workers and machinery as he makes sure everyone’s section is operating efficiently. He analyzes the A-I in the factory and makes note of any malfunctions along the way, which he says are very rare. Although the factory had been dominated by automation in the past five years, there are still jobs left; and according to Killaman, “They are much easier.”
“Evidence shows us that if technology really destroyed jobs, there would be no work today for anyone,” says economist Daniel Lacalle. “The technological revolution we have seen in the past 30 years has been unparalleled and exponential, and there are more jobs, better salaries.”
According to MIT Sloan Management Review, automation will create more jobs involving trainers, explainers and sustainers. Trainers are new jobs that will require human workers to teach A-I systems how they should perform. Explainers seal the gap between technologists and business leaders by providing clarity, and sustainers will function as a safeguard to ensure A-I systems are operating as designed.
Amazon, for example, has increased the number of robots working in its warehouses from 1,400 to 45,000 in the last three years, according to an article in Quartz Media. In that same time frame, the rate at which workers are hired has not changed, as more trainers, explainers and sustainers are needed to help keep things running smoothly when demand increases.
About one third of new jobs created in the U.S. over the past 25 years did not exist previously. According to an article in Quartz, it’s hard to envision what type of jobs will spawn in the next 25 years. According to a McKinsey analysis, the automation age could raise global productivity by as much as 0.8% to 1.4% annually.
One forecast states that the rise of A-I will replace dangerous, humdrum, and degrading work and has the potential to open up more opportunity for humans to focus on creativity rather than menial tasks that don’t require much brain power.
“Any time in history we’ve seen automation occur, people don’t all of the sudden stop being creative and wanting to do interesting new things,” says Aaron Levie, CEO of enterprise software company, Box. “We just don’t do a lot of the redundant, obsolete work.”
MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee said in their 2014 book about automations economic impact, The Second Machine Age: “Our generation has inherited more opportunities to transform the world than any other. That’s a cause for optimism, but only if we are mindful of our choices.”
The fourth industrial revolution has officially began and shows no signs of slowing down. In order to stay up to date with rapid advancements in A-I, millions around the world will be forced to adapt to the evolution of the workforce as new types of jobs with unique skill criteria arise.