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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.
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?
We'll all look like the lazy fucks stuck on the spaceship in WALL-E.
Considering 80% of jobs are either sedentary or require light activity, it's at least likely that people would get in better shape on average if everyone becomes unemployed. I was in great shape when I had the time to spend 15-20 hours per week working out or playing sports, but now that I have a job with real responsibilities I've gained a lot of weight. I was unemployed for about six months during the last recession and I lost 40 pounds. It only took a couple years of working to put it back on.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
You're living in a priviliged bubble where you think because your job requires some skill it can't be automated. Lawyers and paralegals used to think that before advanced algorithms started replacing them too.
Truth is there are very few jobs that can't be automated to at least reduce the requirement for most current employees. Eventually the only people who will be able to get into a field will be the top top performers, the superstars.
This isn't about education either. This is about profit. Current business practices emphasis maximized profit over human presence and with the demand for higher wages to match the cost of living while robotics continue to drop in price, it's inevitable that humans will be replaced (Most 'job creators' have an antagonistic view towards labor anyway). No amount of education will stop this. There will, for a time, be refuge in jobs like repairing the various robots. Google cars won't repair themselves after all. But even that can and will be automated in time.
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.
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 worst part is that these will be mostly immigrant robots.
Robots have already done a pretty good job of replacing unskilled and semi-skilled labor.
What should concern us more is that they're replacing now.
Stop thinking about robots as tin-plated mechanical men or blind automated arm-devices. Start thinking of them as disembodied algorithms. Think of them as Watson. Think of them as Siri. Be afraid.
It's been happening for some time now. AI-directed securities trading programs that make decisions at speeds so fast that the SEC has had to take measures just to give mere humans a chance. In the last few years, we've seen AI playwriting, AI recipe-design, and a lot of other things.
Mostly the AI approach to creativity is pretty primitive at the moment, but when it comes to raw decision making, AIs can often do at least as well as humans. Although to be fair, in some cases, dart boards have been shown to do as well as humans. Machines and dart boards don't let their emotions or their greed cloud their judgements.
What happens when the day comes that major corporations can only be competitive when their executive decisions are made by machines? First you clear out the executive suite - who needs all those VPs and C-levels? Then, might as well dump the CEO himself, since he's nothing but a figurehead. The actual decision-making is done on a rental basis from IBM. Sales people? We've been training people to be "self serve" when buying for decades now.
This is the real SkyNet and it's already happening. Hopefully it won't make a computed decision to kill all humans, but that doesn't mean that it has to keep them on the payroll either.
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.
By 2005, robots have already replaced SAP consultants. Which is easy, to be honest. They could get away with repeating 3 sentences over and over:
That cannot be done in SAP.
That wasn't specified.
That has to be done on your end.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
People have been claiming that automation will lead to vast numbers of unemployed since the early days of the industrial revolution - the original Luddites - and, to date, have been demonstrably in error.
The key phrase there is "to date". At one time it was inconceivable that we would ever run out of oil, or forests, or that we could have any significant impact on a thing so vast as our planet's weather. Yet today we recognize these things as real threats to our survival as a species. I would say the idea that "we'll always have jobs for everyone" is a similar fallacy; there may always be opportunity for humans to work and create, but will there always be an economic need for them to do so? When robots do all of the physical work, and Artificial Intelligence makes all of the necessary decisions to keep the supply chains and the factories and the mines running smoothly, and there are robots that repair other robots, as well as maintaining the machines that the AI's run on, and the electrical plants that power them - what need will there be for man to work? Check out Marshall Brain's Manna for a compelling picture of how our advancements in automation and AI might well effect our economy and our society.
The increased use of robotics in industry, manufacturing, and other sectors, is almost certainly just the latest change that will ultimately just result in another redistribution of the labour pool to areas that have not been automated.
"areas that have not yet been automated". FTFY
It still sucks if you are one of those put out of work by a robot and have to try and find employment elsewhere, but doom and gloom on a national scale is just FUD.
It shouldn't suck, and it doesn't have to suck. If the benefits of automation and increased efficiency were spread around as they should be, instead of being the new currency of the hoarders in the "point-one-percent" class, we could all have better lives.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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.
I know right? A potential ballet dancer was dropping off a pallet of canned goods at the store last week. I thought- just a little training and he'll be dancing in tights in no time.
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By definition, half the people are below average intelligence.
Being more honest, about 1/6 of the population is 1 standard deviation lower than normal. That's about 1/6 of the population who literally won't be able to work for less than the cost of the robot that replaces them.
Many of the new jobs require you to be close to 1 standard deviation above normal. That's about 1/6 of the population.
It's not just about intelligence- it's also about drive. And with a labor glut, compensation for labor (has been) and will be depressed. Over time- without higher taxes on those earning outsized compensation you'll see societal unrest and instability.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.