Robots will displace 5 million jobs by 2020
Cox Media Group National Content Desk
Monday, Jan. 18, 2016
Technological change means that 7 million jobs will be lost and 2 million will be gained in the next five years, according toBloomberg.com.
The report comes from research by the World Economic Forum research. The WEF’s report,‘Future of Jobs,’said that the loss of jobs from technology are causing problems and that it is up to officials to fix.
“To prevent a worst-case scenario, technological change accompanied by talent shortages, mass unemployment and growing inequality, reskilling and upskilling of today’s workers will be critical," the report said. "It is simply not possible to weather the current technological revolution by waiting for the next generation’s workforce to become better prepared.
“Developments in previously disjointed fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing and genetics and biotechnology are all building on and amplifying one another. Smart systems, homes, factories, farms, grids or entire cities, will help tackle problems ranging from supply chain management to climate change.”
Because of these changes, new technology challenges administrative and office jobs. Two-thirds of jobs in those fields will be lost.
Jobs in industries related to computers, math and engineering are expected to grow, but women will be disproportionately displaced because of their low numbers in STEM fields, the report said.
The WEF surveyed Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey, the U.K. and the U.S.
Unofficial Business: How to stay employed in a robot world
BUSINESS
ByMatt Kempner- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
April 21, 2016
Most of us apparently don’t believe we’re replaceable on the job. At least not by a robot or algorithms and lines of code.
Two-thirds of Americans expect that in 50 years, computers and robots will do much of the work people do now, according to a recently released Pew Research Center survey. But a much bigger block of those surveyed said their own jobs and careers are safe from robotizing. “That’s ego,” K.P. Reddy told me. He’s chief executive of Atlanta-based SoftWear Automation, a young business that helps produce robotic systems to automate sewing in the textiles industry. He’s done this automation thing before. An earlier company pushed more technology into the architecture industry, which allowed firms to shed drafting jobs.
Robots and other forms of automation already handle so much in our lives that we hardly register when they’re around.
At Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, nobody with a pulse is driving the underground plane trains. Or sorting baggage below the airport. At customs, a kiosk grills passengers about what they have to declare and gets their fingerprints and photo before they get to a human agent.
I’m told the number of workers at the airport keeps growing. But there’s no doubt that in the broader world, robots will be taking more of our jobs. Lots more, eventually.
So I asked some smart people what we can do to avoid being robotized out of careers.
“Mediocre jobs performed by mediocre talent” will be at risk of being eliminated, Reddy told me.
So, for example, if you want to be a shoemaker, be an artisan who makes the finest, hand-crafted, unique shoes, he said.
Prepping the kids
Reddy is prepping his two teenage sons for what’s ahead.
He insists they get undergraduate engineering degrees (“it is the root of everything”), no matter what career they go into. He pushes them to be good in the arts, which he figures isn’t going to be automated. And he gets them into sports for the whole team work, perseverance and competition thing.
It’s likely that robots will get cheaper, so more employers will buy them. More automation should make products and services cheaper.
What I don’t know is whether all the jobs that are killed will be replaced with even more new and innovative ones or whether there simply will be fewer jobs to go around.
Either way, the path to staying employed could get tougher.
Workers need to keep updating their skills to avoid obsolescence, Reddy said.
“This isn’t an ‘if’ question; it is a ‘when,’” he said. “Disrupt yourself or someone else will disrupt you.”
Plenty of change will be very gradual. And even when automation happens in a business, roughly 20 percent of a task may be tough to do without human intervention, said Elizabeth Mynatt, a professor and executive director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology.
That’s probably not wonderfully comforting if your job is reliant on the other 80 percent, though your employer could give you new duties.
Fellow Georgia Tech professor Henrik Christensen, who leads the university’s robotics institute, sees the next wave of automation as “empowering” for workers. He expects it will lead to more jobs in the future, some in areas we haven’t yet thought of.
Here is some of what Christensen and Mynatt see ahead:
More pressure to refresh your skills throughout life.
More importance on networking to keep abreast of changes and job options.
More technology will look like video games, so Christensen likes kids honing memory and motor control skills with gaming. (Sorry, parents.)
Basic knowledge of computers becomes even more crucial. Mynatt suggest more people should get versed in the fundamentals of data analytics. Yummy!
Christensen predicts within five years coast-to-coast cargo planes will be pilot-less. Within 15 years he said he expects wide adoption of driver-less motor vehicles, risking big job losses for truck, taxi and Uber drivers. Mynatt also sees a big fall off for driving work.
The ranks of lots of jobs will shrink. Mynatt expects to see proportionately fewer jobs in information processing (such as some telemarketing jobs) and restaurant waiters. Christensen foresees fewer professors as more learning shifts online with some super professors teaching more people.
What jobs are a safer bet?
CEOs, as a job, are safe, as are other top executive strategy positions, Christensen said. (They always manage to come out OK, don’t they?)
Arts and other positions demanding creativity are more likely to last, Christensen predicts.
Mynatt sees a growing demand for all kinds of jobs in health care, from surgeons to home health care workers, despite things like robots for surgery and perhaps for heavy lifting in personal care homes.
Very localized, customized manufacturing is likely to add jobs, at least for a while, even as broader, bulk manufacturing continues to automate, Mynatt said.
How robots will change the American workforce
Gary Robbins, San Diego Union-Tribune December 15, 2016
Thirty of the world’s top scientists are scheduled tomeet at UC San Diego in February to discuss the toughest challenges in robotics and automation, including how to make driverless cars safe for a mass audience.
The expertsare being brought together byHenrikChristensen, the prominent Georgia Tech engineer who was hired in July torun UC San Diego’s young Contextual Robotics Institute.
Christensen said at the time, “I want to build a research institute that, ideally, will be in the top five in the world five years from now. Why not see if we can make San Diego ‘Robot Valley.’”
The February forum is being eyed as a step toward raising the university’s visibility in robotics, a field defined by grand advances and embarrassing setbacks. Christensen sat down with The San DiegoUnion-Tribune this week to talk about what’s likely to happen in the near term. The following is an edited version of that conversation:
Q: Automation and robotics areadvancing quickly. What impact will thishave on employment in the United States?
A: We see two trends. We will use robots and automation to bring manufacturing jobs back from overseas,primarily from SoutheastAsia. At the same time, we will seesome jobs get displaced by automation. There will befully automated, driverless transportation in this country by 2020, and that will eliminate some jobs now held by workers like truck drivers and taxi drivers.
Q: Will there be a net increase ordecrease injobs?
A: To be honest with you, we don’t know.There was a recent study on this by the National Academies,but there wasn’t enough good data to make it clear what the outcome will be. We do see a lot of change occurring. Amazon isprintingbooks at itslocal distribution centers, then sending them on to customers. They print the book, put a cover on it, and off it goes. That cuts down on transportation jobs and costs.
Q: Are you saying that Amazon is just beginning to do this?
A: It’s happening today. This program has been in existence for more than a year. The lastestimate I heard was that 65 percent of the books Amazon delivers are printed in itslocal distribution centers. Amazon wants to do (widespread) deliveries ofgroceries, too.
Q: But doesn't thisassume that the technology ofdriverless vehicles ismuch further alongthan it actually is?
A:My own prediction is that kids born today will never get to drive a car. Autonomous, driverless cars are 10, 15 years out. All theautomotive companies — Daimler, GM, Ford — are saying that within five years they will have autonomous, driverless cars on the road.
Q: We’re both baby boomers. We’ve driven all of our lives. How do you feel about kids never having this experience?
A: I love to drive my car, but it’s a question of how much time people waste sitting in traffic and not doing something else. The average person in San Diegoprobablyspends an hour commuting every day. If theycould become moreproductive, that would be good.
Withautonomous, driverless cars, we can put twice as many vehicles on the road as we have today, and do it without improving the infrastructure.
Q: Does thatmean San Diego County willneed fewer parking garages?
A: There wouldbe no need to have parking garages in downtown San Diego.In theory, you’dget out of the car and say, ‘Pickme up at 4 p.m.’ Long-term — we’re talking 20 years into the future — you're not even going to own a car. A car becomes a service.
Q: Who is going to orchestrate all of this movement tomake sure Interstate 5 isn't some black hole of traffic at 5 p.m. eachday?
A:We have to think of this in terms of how can we realize mass transportation. I would like to have trucks that don't drive during rush hour. I’d like McDonald’s and others to make deliveriesoutside of rush hour.
Q: Do you have one central agency orchestrating the movement of these vehicles?
A: My expectation is that the city of San Diego would have taxes based onwhen you use the transportation system.So if you want to make deliveries at 8 a.m., when everyone else is on the road, it would be more expensive to use the freeway.
We will see significant displacement of taxi drivers, truck drivers, all of these transportation functions. So the question is: What will they do? The unskilled laborers are the ones whoare in danger.They have jobsthat can easily bedone by robots. The question is, “Can we retrain those people fast enough for the new jobs that will be created in areas like manufacturing?”
Q: In the U.S.,we currently have about 6 million unfilled jobs. Many of those positionscould be filled if people had the right skills. In many cases, people have the opportunity to get those skills but don't go ahead and do it. So ...
A: California is in a relatively good position on this. ButI used to live in Georgia, where 34 percent of the population never finishes high school. They’re not going to be able to get retrained to do these new jobs. That’s why it’s very important that we make sure that people’s education is high enough that they can get retrained later.
Q: Elon Musk, the president of SpaceX and Tesla, said it may be necessary for the U.S.to have a universal basicincome.Should the government paya certain amount of money to unemployed workers?
A: I think what they’re saying is that whether you have a job or you don’t have a job, you have a minimum basic income that’sguaranteedfor life. We are starting to see trends like this. In Sweden, they recently reduced the number of work hours per week from 40 to 30, and they still have seven weeks of vacation every year. That is going towarda socialistic model where you guarantee a basic level of income.
I think that in the U.S.,that would be a really hard thing (for lawmakers to approve). It would lead to significantly higher taxes, it would require a departure from the current political system.
Q: Do you see any downsideto theevolution of robots?Last year, Google was awarded a patent that involves customizingthe personality of robots. There seems to besome disturbing privacy issues there. Or am I reading too much into it?
A: I think we’re going to see robots that are going to learn from you. They’regoing to use potentially all of the data that’s available about you.
We would like to build a robot that would help(elderly people) stayin their house another five years. The cost of going to a managed-care facility is somewhere around $80,000 a year. If you could stay in your home,the cost would only be about $20,000.
When we buildthe robot, we would want it to know: What is your personality? When do you get up in the morning? When do you go to bed?Are you a tennis person? ATV person? I think people would want the robot to behighly customized to them.
The real question is, whoelse has access to that data?Is it going to be companies like Facebook, Google and Apple? Arewe confident that they are not going to abuse that information to try to sell you information, or sell it to somebody else?
Q: You said we have to show thatrobots can’t be hacked. We haven’t shown that ability in current society, so is this a solvable problem?
A:I think we have been very ignorant about privacy. But we're getting to a point right where we are starting to pay attention.
Q: Was 2016 a tipping point year in hacking? Major websites were knocked offline. The Democratic National Committee was hacked. Everywhere we turn, we hear a story about hacking. Has the issuereally begun to sink in for the general public?
A: I don’t think we’re there yet. I think all of intellectuals are worried about it. But if you go and talk toeveryday people, it’s not such a big deal. Unfortunately, I think things have to get a lotworse before they get better.
It has to impact youor a larger number of peoplewho say, “Uh-oh, they’ve gotten into my bank account.”Or a big portion of the grid goes downand the East Coast is suddenly without electricity for a couple of days. People will go, “Wow, nowthis has hitme.”
When the hack hits theirpersonal lives, people will say we need to stop it. But it’s not going to be an easy thing to fix.
The robot that takes your job should pay taxes, says Bill Gates
Kevin J. Delaney February 17, 2017 Quartz
Robots are taking human jobs. But Bill Gates believes that governments should tax companies’ use of them, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment.
It’s a striking position from the world’s richest man and a self-described techno-optimist who co-founded Microsoft, one of the leading players in artificial-intelligence technology.
In a recent interview with Quartz, Gates said that a robot tax could finance jobs taking care of elderly people or working with kids in schools, for which needs are unmet and to which humans are particularly well suited. He argues that governments must oversee such programs rather than relying on businesses, in order to redirect the jobs to help people with lower incomes. The idea is not totally theoretical: EU lawmakers considered a proposal to tax robot owners to pay for training for workers who lose their jobs, though on Feb. 16 the legislators ultimately rejected it.
“You ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed” of automation, Gates argues. That’s because the technology and business cases for replacing humans in a wide range of jobs are arriving simultaneously, and it’s important to be able to manage that displacement. “You cross the threshold of job replacement of certain activities all sort of at once,” Gates says, citing warehouse work and driving as some of the job categories that in the next 20 years will have robots doing them.
You can watch Gates’ remarks in the video above. Below is a transcript, lightly edited for style and clarity.
Quartz: What do you think of a robot tax? This is the idea that in order to generate funds for training of workers, in areas such as manufacturing, who are displaced by automation, one concrete thing that governments could do is tax the installation of a robot in a factory, for example.
Bill Gates: Certainly there will be taxes that relate to automation. Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.