However skilled your job is, at some stage it could be done by computer.
The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed -- William Gibson
For many years when you went to the checkout till in the supermarket an employee punched the price of every item into a cash register. Today they use barcode scanning equipment and some supermarkets operate self-service checkouts where shoppers scan their own goods.
Tesco (LSE: TSCO) recently went one step further by opening a store which does not employ any checkout staff, forcing every shopper to use the scanners. "Roboshop" is raising concerns because it requires fewer workers but far worse is in store for supermarket employees. Already some warehouses use robots to remove goods from shelves so it's just a matter of time before supermarkets are using robot shelf-stackers. Ultimately the humans working in a supermarket will mostly be robot supervisors and mechanics.
Whatever your job is there's a good chance that you could be replaced by a robot within the next decade or two. Developments in robotics and artificial intelligence will affect many highly skilled jobs which were thought to be safe from automation. This is bad news for workers but great news for shareholders, particularly because robots don't need cigarette breaks, pay rises or time off and robots don't go on strike!
Need To Cut Costs? Buy A Robot
Ever since the Industrial Revolution businesses have needed to control their costs to avoid losing business to lower-cost competitors. When mill owners installed machines to replace skilled textile workers with cheaper unskilled workers the outcome was the Luddite revolution and in 1812 more British troops were engaged against the Luddites than were fighting Napoleon in the Iberian Peninsula.
Most workers have skills which can be replicated to some degree by robots and/or expert systems (computer programs with weak artificial intelligence (AI) which can match human capabilities in a very limited area of expertise). Some businesses already use weak AI systems; investment banks use weak AI to sort through data and if you've ever talked to a voice-recognition system over the telephone you've run into a weak AI, a computer program that interprets speech and acts accordingly.
Weak AI programs will remove the need for many human employees; good news for shareholders in labour intensive businesses as this permits them to cut their costs dramatically by getting rid of many of their staff. Of course, this is terrible news for those employees who lose their jobs. Such is progress.
Even Highly Skilled Jobs Are Not Safe
Consider the skilled parts of your job. If these skills can be broken down into a process that you can represent in a flowchart, however, complex, then the day will come when a robot or computer program will perform these tasks more efficiently and at a lower cost.
If that sounds shocking bear in mind that many highly skilled jobs largely consist of interpreting data in a mechanical manner. Your local doctor spends much of her time getting patients to describe their symptoms and armed with this information the GP searches through her memory, books and databases to determine the condition(s) that these symptoms describe and thus the course of treatment to prescribe. These symptoms can be punched into an expert system, programmed with medical knowledge, to obtain a diagnosis, and many people do something similar nowadays by typing their symptoms into an internet search engine and seeing what information comes back.
The medical profession endeavours to cast doubt upon internet self-diagnosis, not purely to point out the unreliability of many online sources but also to protect their own interests. Whilst the easy availability of online medical information causes some people to suffer from cyberchondria, you can expect to see cheap, reliable, medical diagnostic systems in a supermarket near you in the next few years.
Military pilots are increasingly being replaced by unmanned drones that are operated from thousands of miles away by controllers who require less training (i.e. cheaper staff). Qinetiq (LSE: QQ) produces in military robots, primarily for bomb disposal, and it looks as if armed robots that exercise their own judgment will soon appear on the battlefield. Put the two together and you've got a robot air force (and far less demand for human pilots).
Bad News For The Unskilled
What happens to the displaced workers? Trade unions and employment law can protect jobs to some extent but it is curtains for a lot of jobs. However, many of these workers will find work elsewhere because technological change will create new industries and thus new opportunities. The problem is that many people firmly believe in the lump of labour fallacy, the false assumption that the total amount of available work in an economy is fixed, and these people will probably become the new Luddites and fight the introduction of robots into the workplace.
It's never been a good time to be unskilled and poorly educated, but it's going to become a lot worse, and these people will find it difficult to find new jobs (hint: get some skills). Change is coming and it won't be stopped. If you think that the march of the robots into the workplace will be halted you might wish to consider why light bulbs aren't banned in order to protect candle makers' jobs!
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