Jobless future? - Automation and Anxiety

How many days have you woken up wondering your job might be replaced by a machine?

Philosophers, scientists, and economist are now discussing the consequences of Artificial Intelligence, this groundbreaking technology that basically enables machines to accomplish jobs that could not be done by an individual alone. A.I. in daily life has not been around for long, but it is moving and growing at a rapid speed.

The worrying trigger is a quote from an avid aspirer of many, the famous technologist and entrepreneur, Elon Musk stating that, “ With artificial Intelligence, we are summoning the demon”. This coming from the founder of Tesla cars which use the latest AI technology to drive themselves aggravates the anxiety further.

To be brutally honest, A.I. Has made our lives far simpler than we could imagine. And it holds the potential to simplify it even further and in the process, take away our jobs. In order to forecast the future, we must first look at the past. The human race has been through a similar scenario during the Industrial revolution when we saw numerous jobs being replaced by machinery. Textile workers were furious with the creation of steam engines and protested that their livelihoods were being destroyed. However, this also led to the creation of new jobs such as operating and maintaining of machines. If you look at the weaving process during the industrial revolution, more and more tasks were being automated leading to increased and cheaper demand of cloth. A recent example would be when bank tellers around the world saw their life come to a close end with the creation of the ATM by taking over most of their daily tasks. In the United States, “their average number fell from 20 per branch in 1988 to 13 in 2004” (The Economist, June 25th 2016). Nevertheless, this significantly reduced the running costs in a bank, leading to the expansion of new branches in response to customer demand, with the creation of new jobs such as customer service and sales. Research has shown that the most vulnerable jobs to be lost to A.I., are the most routine jobs that are usually characterized by low-paid, unskilled workers. Jobs such as manufacturing, transport, office support, receptionists, security and logistics all have a high risk of potential of automation. This also illustrates that non-routine cognitive jobs have increased and are much less prone to be computerized. Some examples of these jobs are graphic designers and senior managers that are highly skilled and highly paid workers.

It is true that higher demand in a specific product is the number one priority for most establishments. Automating a specific task to reduce costs and increase efficiency of a product will lead to  to greater demand for it. The reality of the situation is that even though it is inevitable that AI will impact human jobs greatly and will reduce the number of jobs in specific sectors more than others, it is strongly believed that by using AI, others jobs will be created that have not been automated and will consequently lead to more specific fields to work in. To save ourselves until that happens, adaptation is key.