We’re always looking to pin our
problems on a villain because it makes us feel better. When it comes to
the ongoing debate about creating and protecting jobs, the villain has
varied over the years: Japan Inc industrialists, dot-com flim-flam men,
free-trade fanatics, the offshore menace, the Wall Street one per cent.
However, in the 2015 jobs narrative, the villain is the robot, an adversary that literally doesn’t have a heart. Robots and their artificially intelligent kin, we’re told, will eventually replace everyone from package deliverers, retail store greeters, airport baggage handlers and truck drivers to novelists, airline pilots, accountants and doctors.
A rigorous 2013 University of Oxford study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A Osborne argues that advances in computers, automation and Artificial Intelligence will put 47 per cent of US jobs at risk. But the prevailing pessimism reflects a fundamental lack of imagination.
People are extrapolating the technological advances they foresee to a static version of tomorrow’s economy and fail to imagine the possibilities that those advances could create. When Bell Labs scientists invented the transistor in the 1940s, did most people imagine the myriad products, services, vendors, vendor ecosystems, offshoot industries and hundreds of millions of jobs that it would spawn? Or did they just see computers replacing jobs at abacus and typewriter manufacturers as the transistor was commercialised? Today’s employment pessimists remind me of English scholar Thomas Malthus, who predicted two centuries ago that population growth would soon overwhelm man’s ability to subsist, let alone prosper.
Malthus, though, failed to envisage the productivity acceleration of the coming industrial and technological revolutions. Likewise, the pessimists of today cannot possibly know the nature of jobs that will be created. Forbes writer John Tamny raises a critical point in a recent post on this subject, “It’s in poorer countries that the nature of work is static. In rich ones, we constantly innovate away the toil of the past in favour of more prosperous work forms that are less back-breaking and consume less of our time.”
This progress means that we, as a collective labour force, can spend fewer hours digging ditches, filing forms and more time doing work that really improves other people’s lives: treating and curing diseases, creating new sources of renewable energy, improving education, growing food more productively, raising financial capital to start and expand businesses. That deep disruption won’t be a trivial matter; it’s not to be dismissed. But let’s not be so quick to kiss off most of today’s jobs either. When we look towards even an AI-dominated future, we tend to underestimate the value and power of human presence, emotion, creativity and flexibility.
It’s as if we think musicians, teachers, counsellors, caregivers, coaches, clergy, trial lawyers, architects, writers, business strategists and entrepreneurs are only imperfect droids to be replaced with perfect (and less costly) ones.
People bring a lot to the workplace through their very humanity. Intelligent machines (like ones today that do predictive data analytics) are more likely to complement human activity and decision-making. Take healthcare for example, medical practices, clinics, hospitals, nursing homes and hospices do more than just run tests, render diagnoses and perform procedures. They provide total patient care.
Technology promises to improve their efficiency and accuracy — and we certainly need to figure out ways to keep rising healthcare costs in check — but total care requires human input, intervention, adaptability and empathy Robotics and AI could very well become the transistor of the 21st century — the foundation for lots of new products, services, industries and career paths that are inconceivable today. And let’s not ignore the demographic fact that low birth rates in Japan, Germany, Russia, Brazil and other industrialised countries signal a big labour shortage in future — translating to $10-trillion of lost GDP over the next couple of decades, according to a recent Boston Consulting Group report. In his recent keynote address at Cloud World Tokyo, Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison noted that Japan in particular saw robots as a solution to its labour problems, not as a contributor.
The employment challenge ahead is less about surviving under the cold reign of robots and more about two other factors: improving education and training to prepare people for tomorrow’s economy, reworking the tax and regulatory codes with an eye toward promoting growth and job creation. Perhaps our robotic overlords will be able to help us there.
We Are Fossasia Stay Connected With Us On Twitter . . . ! ! !
Source : thestatesman
However, in the 2015 jobs narrative, the villain is the robot, an adversary that literally doesn’t have a heart. Robots and their artificially intelligent kin, we’re told, will eventually replace everyone from package deliverers, retail store greeters, airport baggage handlers and truck drivers to novelists, airline pilots, accountants and doctors.
A rigorous 2013 University of Oxford study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A Osborne argues that advances in computers, automation and Artificial Intelligence will put 47 per cent of US jobs at risk. But the prevailing pessimism reflects a fundamental lack of imagination.
People are extrapolating the technological advances they foresee to a static version of tomorrow’s economy and fail to imagine the possibilities that those advances could create. When Bell Labs scientists invented the transistor in the 1940s, did most people imagine the myriad products, services, vendors, vendor ecosystems, offshoot industries and hundreds of millions of jobs that it would spawn? Or did they just see computers replacing jobs at abacus and typewriter manufacturers as the transistor was commercialised? Today’s employment pessimists remind me of English scholar Thomas Malthus, who predicted two centuries ago that population growth would soon overwhelm man’s ability to subsist, let alone prosper.
Malthus, though, failed to envisage the productivity acceleration of the coming industrial and technological revolutions. Likewise, the pessimists of today cannot possibly know the nature of jobs that will be created. Forbes writer John Tamny raises a critical point in a recent post on this subject, “It’s in poorer countries that the nature of work is static. In rich ones, we constantly innovate away the toil of the past in favour of more prosperous work forms that are less back-breaking and consume less of our time.”
This progress means that we, as a collective labour force, can spend fewer hours digging ditches, filing forms and more time doing work that really improves other people’s lives: treating and curing diseases, creating new sources of renewable energy, improving education, growing food more productively, raising financial capital to start and expand businesses. That deep disruption won’t be a trivial matter; it’s not to be dismissed. But let’s not be so quick to kiss off most of today’s jobs either. When we look towards even an AI-dominated future, we tend to underestimate the value and power of human presence, emotion, creativity and flexibility.
It’s as if we think musicians, teachers, counsellors, caregivers, coaches, clergy, trial lawyers, architects, writers, business strategists and entrepreneurs are only imperfect droids to be replaced with perfect (and less costly) ones.
People bring a lot to the workplace through their very humanity. Intelligent machines (like ones today that do predictive data analytics) are more likely to complement human activity and decision-making. Take healthcare for example, medical practices, clinics, hospitals, nursing homes and hospices do more than just run tests, render diagnoses and perform procedures. They provide total patient care.
Technology promises to improve their efficiency and accuracy — and we certainly need to figure out ways to keep rising healthcare costs in check — but total care requires human input, intervention, adaptability and empathy Robotics and AI could very well become the transistor of the 21st century — the foundation for lots of new products, services, industries and career paths that are inconceivable today. And let’s not ignore the demographic fact that low birth rates in Japan, Germany, Russia, Brazil and other industrialised countries signal a big labour shortage in future — translating to $10-trillion of lost GDP over the next couple of decades, according to a recent Boston Consulting Group report. In his recent keynote address at Cloud World Tokyo, Oracle chairman and CTO Larry Ellison noted that Japan in particular saw robots as a solution to its labour problems, not as a contributor.
The employment challenge ahead is less about surviving under the cold reign of robots and more about two other factors: improving education and training to prepare people for tomorrow’s economy, reworking the tax and regulatory codes with an eye toward promoting growth and job creation. Perhaps our robotic overlords will be able to help us there.
We Are Fossasia Stay Connected With Us On Twitter . . . ! ! !
Source : thestatesman
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