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Robots Will Eliminate 6% of All US Jobs By 2021, Says Report (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the U.S., starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers. That's just one cheery takeaway from a report released by market research company Forrester this week. These robots, or intelligent agents, represent a set of AI-powered systems that can understand human behavior and make decisions on our behalf. Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now as well as chatbots and automated robotic systems. For now, they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs like self-driving cars. The Inevitable Robot Uprising has already started, with at least 45% of U.S. online adults saying they use at least one of the aforementioned digital concierges. Intelligent agents can access calendars, email accounts, browsing history, playlists, purchases and media viewing history to create a detailed view of any given individual. With this knowledge, virtual agents can provide highly customized assistance, which is valuable to shops or banks trying to deliver better customer service. The report predicts there will be a net loss of 7% of U.S. jobs by 2025 -- 16% of U.S. jobs will be replaced, while the equivalent of 9% jobs will be created. The report forecasts 8.9 million new jobs in the U.S. by 2025, some of which include robot monitoring professionals, data scientists, automation specialists, and content curators.
I think robots replace jobs for less skilled labor. Leaving them with less options for alternative jobs. Many times getting new jobs with less incomes. The past recession has taught us that. A participation rate at historic lows, and a U6 number which is people under employed or eligible workers who have stopped looking.
Is still at anemic highs. Unless we can improve overall educational achievements and skills for these alternative jobs. Many underachievers or low skill people will begin to see less and less opportunities. This poses a serious potential of increased demand for government assistance.
It's sad to watch division of labor and industrialization slowly deliver on its long standing promise: at last, having to work less and less for survival, and our society incapable of coping with that: no decent survival without a job (except for the small rich minority, that is).
We as a society need a plan for that, and those in power (or with near access to it) just keep repeating, sheepishly, the mantra "moar of the same".
Ideas?
So, will all those millionaire rappers etc get replaced?
It's a poverty issue, not a racial one.
Yes, there is some bias caused by the actual racism of the past, but you will not solve that with quotas or any stupid racist measure.
Just fight poverty and watch your "racial issue" evaporate.
By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the U.S., starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers.
Bullshit. I work with robots and automation in my day job. This is a complete fabrication. We are not going to eliminate truck drivers within 5 years. End of story. Will not happen. The technology just isn't even close to being there yet. Even if it was ready today (which it isn't) it would take a decade at minimum to roll it out. No business is going to throw out a perfectly functional truck to buy an expensive self driving truck just because one became available.
The notion that Siri is going to supplant customer service representatives in any meaningful way within 5 years is just stupid. Siri can't even deal with very basic questions that any human would easily understand. And yet they are basically arguing that it will be a substitute for a human within 5 years? Not buying it outside of some corner cases. I can't imaging an automated attendant being able to deal with a screwed up credit card statement. And let's say that somehow they magically pull that trick off. They think that will replace 5%+ of the workforce in under 5 years? Hogwash. Just complete nonsense.
Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now as well as chatbots and automated robotic systems. For now, they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs like self-driving cars.
Umm, what? Some idiot thinks Siri has anything remotely to do with the technology in self driving cars? That is the biggest hand waive I've seen in many a year. We've had Siri and similar technologies for about 5 years and they are no where close to being ready to replace humans in any meaningful numbers. And those technologies have essentially nothing to do with the technologies that would be involved in physical automation.
most of us will laugh at how wrong this article was.
I think robots replace jobs for less skilled labor. Leaving them with less options for alternative jobs.
Sometimes they do but sometimes automation replaces skilled labor. To use a simple example, welding is a job that requires considerable skill and training to do well. You can replace a welder with a robot in cases where the economics make sense. You could in principle replace something like a radiologist with a computer program that reads xrays or replace a paralegal with an expert system. Vulnerability of a specific job to automation has less to do with skilled vs unskilled than it does the economics of that particular job. Automation comes into play when there are opportunities to decrease the unit cost of production. The limit on automation tends to be more economic than technical in a lot of cases.
Leaving them with less options for alternative jobs. Many times getting new jobs with less incomes. The past recession has taught us that.
In the short run this will be true for any job at any time. The entire industrial revolution has been people being pushed from jobs that were no longer necessary into new ones. That's been a good thing for over 200 years and there is no reason to believe that it will cease being a good thing any time soon. Yes sometimes this involves some near term difficulty for some of the work force. In places like the US that have enjoyed higher than average incomes for several decades it might involve a reversion to the mean on incomes compared with global competitors.
Many underachievers or low skill people will begin to see less and less opportunities. This poses a serious potential of increased demand for government assistance.
Umm, why do you think this is something new? That has ALWAYS been the case.
Robots? 6%? Phhh. Small stuff.
100 years ago, tractors eliminated, like, 80%-90% of all US jobs.
Boy, I miss the farm. Plowing, hoeing, raking, weeding; day after day, year after year, endless hard manual labor. Yeah, those were the days....
The US labour force will increase by 6% and provides increased GDP without the extra mouths to feed, infrastructure to support (roads, water, sewage), people to house, etc.
There's some value in that.
Never happened. True story.
It's an education issue. Yes, there is a correlation between poor skills, poor education and it all leading to poor job prospects, but in the end, that's what we're facing. The jobs for people with low skills and low ability to gain any due to a lack of intellectual condition to acquire more (read: too dumb to learn) are the first to go, as we have already seen. And this development continues.
And we, as a society, will have to find a solution for this problem. Intelligence is distributed on a Gauss bell curve. So far we have been "lucky" that all we have eliminated are the people whose intelligence is SO low that they are few. So far we have eliminated the jobs that require an IQ of less than about 70 or 75. That affects about 5 percent of the population, that's something we can compensate. Eliminating jobs under 80 will affect more than 20% and if an IQ of 90 becomes the limit, a third of the population will already be unemployable. With 100, of course, we reach about half of the people.
And no later than that we have a HUGE problem at our hands. Though it is likely that the problems will start way earlier than this. Imagine: You realize that you have NO chance to get a job. Ever. Any job you could do, any job you're capable of, can be filled by a robot that is cheaper. Nobody will EVER employ you. And that't not just you, that's a fourth of the population.
How long do you think such a person would hold still?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is a first. There's never been a situation previously where a significant (and likely unlimited and continuously, and rapidly, growing) wave of higher-qualified workers who did not require wages entered the workforce.
Workers that never cheat, never steal, are never late, very rarely "sick", have no unions, no wages, no insurance, no internecine or even trivial conflict, are unfailingly polite, are immune to office romance, gossip, corporate espionage, complaints of mistreatment, have no interest in and do not require promotion, will never misuse company time, and are replaceable the very moment something more effective is available without any consequences to social security charges, unemployment tithing, legal costs, or need for security personnel to walk the previous "employee" to the door.
Whatever ideas you have of re-employment absorbing the displaced workers need to factor in all of the above.
Here's how it'll go: as soon as the cost of putting automation in place drops below the cost of keeping a human in place, the human will lose their job. The only way to slow this down is to artificially raise the price of letting the human go, which has very rigid practical limits related to cost of product and the nature of competition and will consequently peter out very quickly in any case where it is attempted. Transition to this brand new form of automation will naturally tend to accelerate to whatever degree said automation can be made more sophisticated. That, at present, is looking quite open-ended. If that's true — and we have no significant reason to think it isn't at this time — then the entire process is also open-ended.
At some point in such a process, society will have to formally change its economic structure. This is for the simple reason that large numbers of unemployed citizens will eventually constitute a critical mass of opinion and potential independent action. Either that, or the displaced workers and therefore the cost of supporting them will have to be outright eliminated from society. There are no other paths. Something will have to be done to effectively deal with the former workers. Currently, there is no such accommodating mechanism in place. The closest thing to it is the Basic Income idea; but as yet, that's not a government process, at most it represents tiny experiments, and usually nothing more than unimplemented ideas entirely within the bounds of citizen groups.
Those that persist in viewing this particular technology as highly similar to previous introductions of machinery are not going to be able to anticipate the changes that are coming. It's inevitably going to be a very challenging time for society, and a very, very ugly time for many individuals until the economic and social structures can effectively deal with a non-working populace.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
More typically, they surface as increases in the wealth of the 1% and corresponding increases in financial influence on politicians and regulators that tilt the playing field ever more towards that 1%.
There are exceptions, particularly in computing technology. But generally speaking, almost anyone with a blue-collar job used to be able to afford a decent house, a car, an education, and a stay-at-home spouse. That's no longer typical. That's your blazing red flag, right there. It speaks the truth louder than anything else. The fact that someone has a very powerful computer in their phone won't do much, if anything, to enable the owner buy that house, or stay at home to raise their 1.88 children at the same level as was previously possible. Real income has not kept pace with real costs — and that's pretty much the deciding factor, right there.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.