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Need to know ~ Topics & Events
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Robots – competing with humans
Image: Gerd Altmann, Pixabay
Why current?
2020-11-28
Imagine being in a hotel and getting room service – not from a human being, but from a robot. This is not futuristic fantasy; it’s already happening!
Since the coronavirus pandemic caused businesses to reduce their work forces due to safety restrictions and fears of spreading the virus, many companies have started to automate their workforce. And the faster those companies made the transition to automation, the better positioned they became to tackle a whole host of new challenges that threatened to either significantly diminish their bottom lines or put them out of business entirely.
From self-checkouts at grocery stores to drones that make deliveries, we have seen a sudden acceleration in a trend toward more automation that was already picking up speed before the COVID-19 outbreak. Generally, automation doesn’t increase in a steady way. Instead, it is catalyzed by unforeseen economic setbacks that force businesses to quickly figure out how to lower their labor costs.
The World Economic Forum has reported that around 85 million jobs will be lost to automation by 2025. Although new jobs to develop automation are also expected to be created, the WEF warns that unless there is coordination among governments, workers, and the business community, the world will see massive increases in levels of unemployment. Without structures in place to support people in their attempts to compete with what robots have to offer, economic collapse among large segments of the population is imminent.
More about automation and what it means for our world of work
Robots don’t need sickdays
Since the moment in human evolution when we began developing labor-saving technologies, automation has reduced the amount of work required of people. This is largely seen as progress in our world. If we hadn’t developed farm machines, for example, many of us would be looking at a future of back-breaking field work. In the United States, 31% of jobs in 1910 were in farming. Now, that number is less than 1%.
Today, companies see lots of pluses to having less people around and more machines taking their places. A robot can lay bricks up to ten times faster than a human can. At a call center, a software program can help reduce a thousand-person staff to just 100. Moreover, while a top-performing call agent can respond to about six calls an hour, a bot can handle up to 10,000 customer questions in the same amount of time. Now during the coronavirus pandemic, when it isn’t safe for people to stand close to one another, robots can take over jobs on assembly lines and at recycling facilities. There are robots that make salads in university dining halls and others that patrol buildings as security guards. Automation has reached jobs in the meat industry, in the food-processing industry, and in the planting and harvesting of crops. Artificial intelligence has also been brought into areas like finance. 360,000 hours of work done by lawyers over a year’s time could be handled in mere seconds by AI.
Employers like the fact that robots don’t get sick, don’t get more expensive to “employ” even when minimum wages go up, don’t need to take breaks, don’t need safety programs, and get a predictable amount of work done each and every day.
But not everybody wins with automation
Most of the jobs that are lost to automation are ones held by people earning low wages. Hotel receptionists and housekeeping staff, sales clerks in shops, toll collectors, customer service agents, subway train drivers, miners…. All of these jobs, and many more, are likely to become increasingly performed by robots.
People who are highly-educated benefit from the advantages of automation. They generally see their areas of paid work unaffected by automation, and at the same time can reap the benefits of lower costs on the goods and services that they purchase.
Those who lose their jobs to automated replacements often have trouble re-entering the work force. And as the types of jobs that served as lifelines for generations disappear, people get stuck in a cycle of poverty that is difficult to break out of. They cannot easily afford to get educated in a new field that would provide them with job opportunities. Because of this, the divide between the haves and the have-nots grows.
Can the cycle be broken?
The cycle of poverty is one in which people work long hours in low-paying positions, never having the opportunity to even think about preparing for an alternative future in which their positions may not exist anymore. They also might not have the funds to pay for training programs in new fields that involve automation.
The abrupt uptick of automation taking place right now was triggered by COVID-19. From one day to the next, businesses had to figure out how to stay afloat with a reduced labor force. This made them consider automation. In many cases, this solution not only proved to be effective for the moment but presented business-owners with promising possibilities for the future. Many will stick with the robots and never bring back the human-filled positions that existed before the pandemic.
In the meantime, the people who lost their jobs are left out in the cold. They probably won’t get their jobs back once the spread of the coronavirus gets under control, and they don’t have the education or training needed to get new jobs in higher-tech industries.
Some in the United States believe that the federal government should step in and help provide people who lost their jobs with the education they would need to move ahead and eventually work again. But experts say that the educational facilities that would be needed to handle an influx of millions of people needing to be trained simply don’t exist right now.
How to be prepared for an automated future
The labor market is unpredictable, and when change does come, it tends to hit suddenly. But some things seem clear. Certain jobs are more likely to disappear in the near future than others. Those include manufacturing and farming. On the other hand, certain skill sets will be sought after. Those include expertise in the health and social services, in technical services, and in education. Jobs in these fields cannot easily be taken over by machines.
On-going learning will be important for workers as we move into an increasingly automated world. Gone are the days when you got twelve years of schooling, a few years of college, and then a job, into which you could settle until retirement. Now, it’s important to have a more fluid outlook, to be able to stay ahead of the curve, pay attention to trends, and then adjust to them accordingly. This means possibly changing jobs and even professions several times over the span of a working career.
In school, children need to learn problem-solving skills, how to work well with others, how to think critically, and how to switch to new technologies quickly and easily.
Some people argue that we must reimagine the concept of having a job or a profession. It isn’t anymore a steady, predictable road that we travel down until we retire. Rather, being part of the workforce is more similar to surfing in the ocean. One must have the ability to ride each wave of change. For this reason, educational systems must change, too, in order to prepare kids for a new landscape of work.
Sources: Aratani, Lauren, The Guardian, “Robots on the rise as Americans experience record job losses amid pandemic,” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/robots-replacing-jobs, November 27.2020; Semuels, Alana, Time, “Millions of Americans Have Lost Jobs in the Pandemic – and Robots and AI are Replacing Them Faster Than Ever,” https://time.com/machines-jobs-coronavirus/, August 6, 2020; Leprince-Ringuet, Daphne, ZDNet, “Robots will take 50 million jobs in the next decade. These are the skills you’ll need to stay employed,” https://www.zdnet.com/article/robots-will-take-50-million-jobs, July 13, 2020.