Many of the great inventions of the last 200 years were designed to replace human labor. Tractors, Assembly Lines, Computers were engineered to substitute human labor for better machine perfection and digital results and yet the fraction of adults employed in the labor market is higher now than it was in 1890 and it’s risen in just about every decade. This poses a paradox. Our machines increasingly do our work. Why doesn’t this make our jobs redundant and our skills obsolete? WHY ARE STILL SO MANY JOBS? It’s like an ATM can do certain cash handling tasks faster and better than tellers. But that didn’t make tellers superfluous, it increases their problem-solving skills and relationships with customers. The same principle applies if we’re diagnosing a patient, making a self-driving car, making robots to do our labor or other jobs. As our tools improve, technology magnifies our leverage and increases the importance of our expertise and our judgement and creativity. Does that mean there’s nothing to worry about? Automation, Employment, robots and jobs it’ll all take care of itself? Let’s think about it.
Automation is being used in almost every area of technology. It is in Factories, Cars, Machineries, in your Home, inside your personal gadgets and almost in everything you see in daily life. Sounds fascinating. But due to automation a lot of jobs are handled by robots and other kinds of machines. But you may still ask How does automation affect employment? Well Robots present quite a few advantages to companies over human laborers. They are cheaper to hire, always follow directions, don’t require Human Resources management, scale easier, accomplish tasks faster, and don’t join unions or go on strike. That’s why big companies like Facebook and Amazon are more focused on automation and AI rather than human laborers. So, the common answer here seems to be: yes, it will kill/is killing jobs. Automation and AI is replacing workers who have less specialized skills, perhaps call centre operators, office assistants (to a limited extent), and maybe soon, taxi drivers and truck drivers. Bad news is AI does evolve. It’s growing in Software Application, Industries, in geographic and economic scope. A more fitting analogy would be machinery in an automobile plant that not only made the parts one day, but then learned how to assemble them the week after, and then how to design cars a year later. Advanced AI can now address medical diagnosis, stock market trading, weather prediction and human behavioral modelling. Very soon, it will be able to find a role in education. It can already deal with complex systems in software and mathematics, and seems to be only limited in applications that require interactions with the physical world (sensors are still imperfect), and with people. So, you see it’s clear that the upcoming decades will be full of Automation, AI, unemployment and a world indirectly (till they get to know their capacity) running by machines. So, should we stop making AI and Automation kind of things and go back to the old school? Well everything we implied is one face of a coin. Let’s see the second one.
When telephones appeared in the world, many postmen lost their jobs but parallelly many jobs were created in hardware and software and now there are 3 million employment in the IT sector in India alone. So, automation does kill the lower skill set but creates a larger skill set jobs in large amounts. But still in the far future Automation/AI will kill jobs far more than we can re(train) in time. So, what is the factor or quality that Automation/ AI can’t do but the humans can? It’s creativity and emotional responses. Jobs that involve labor are already (or soon to be) replaced. Jobs that require logical reasoning are being replaced. So perhaps researchers in academia will survive longer than most, and artists (though AI stylistic mimicry is already quite impressive and their results enjoyable), and counsellors/psychologists/case workers, and decision makers like CEOs who cannot be predictable or error prone. And hopefully software engineers and algorithm designers who develop AI systems.
Now, I started this all with a paradox. History has repeatedly offered an answer for this paradox. The first part of the answer is technology magnifies our leverage, increases the importance, the added value of our judgements, expertise and creativity. The second part of the answer is our endless inventiveness and bottomless desires for better. So, there is always new work to do. Future doesn’t hinge on our imagination. We can’t predict the future (remembered that “2020 will have flying cars” predictions). But if I were a postman in 1890 and an economist from the 21st century came to me and said,” in the next hundred years the world will no longer need a postman purely due to Automation and better productivity and technology. (Ironically we still need them to some extent) What do you think you gonna do?” I would not have said,” Oh, we got this. We’ll do app development, yoga instruction etc.” but I hope I would have the wisdom to say,” Wow, You guys are having a better medium of communication and technology. That’s an amazing amount of progress. I hope humanity finds something remarkable to do with all that prosperity.” And by and large, I would say it has.
