More robotics and artificial intelligence in the workplace doesn’t have to destroy your job.
If you were beginning a career in computer programming in 2007, there were good times ahead: robust salary growth, the construction of the app ecosystem and economy, and the meteoric rise of social media. But if you happened across that August’s issue of Business Week magazine, you might have been discouraged. It predicted that the career most likely to suffer from job losses in the United States was … computer programmer.
“They didn’t get it slightly wrong,” explains Roy Bahat, the head of venture-capital firm Bloomberg Beta in San Francisco, California. “They got it 180 degrees wrong.” Bahat might have had that misstep in mind when he co-authored a 2017 report on how work might change over the next 10–20 years. The report imagines four scenarios, in which there will either be more work or less, and work will either become fragmented or not. But it takes care not to pick winning or losing professions.
Other studies, however, continue to try. Computer programmers are now deemed to be relatively safe, but different professions are now in the crosshairs, such as truck-driver. The International Transport Forum says there are about 5.6 million drivers of heavy trucks across the United States and Europe. But at least half-a-dozen start-ups and several established corporations are currently developing trucks that drive themselves. Some of them plan to put these autonomous trucks on the road within two years.
In May 2017, the International Transport Forum warned that more than 2 million truck drivers could find themselves redundant by 2030. But not everyone is so pessimistic. Between June and September 2018, several reports into US trucking estimated lower job losses of hundreds of thousands or even fewer over the next decade. In February, ride-hailing company Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group even suggested that autonomous technologies could actually produce a net increase in trucking jobs — a result one economist derided as “not serious”. Uber has now abandoned its plans for self-driving trucks, focusing instead on passenger transportation.
Discussions of the wider labour force yield a similar diversity of predictions. Earlier this year, the MIT Technology Review assembled 18 reports on the effects of automation on labour that predicted everything from a gain of nearly 1 billion jobs globally by 2030 to a loss of 2 billion. The reports focused on automation technologies that are likely to emerge in the coming decades. (An artificial general intelligence capable of putting its mind to any number of tasks could change the whole concept of work, but it remains in the realm of science fiction for now.)
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Credits to: Michael Segal
Date of Publication: November 28, 2018
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07501-y
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