Editor’s note: The media is becoming more filled each day with stories highlighting the growing number of robots taking over jobs once done by humans. Is the future a jobless ones for you and me with machines taking over? Here’s some interesting insight from an expert in the field of artificial intelligence: A professor at Warwick Business School in the U.K.
Mark Skilton researches digital eco-systems and was an IT strategy consultant for 30 years. His thoughts:
The threat to jobs may not be immediate but if the digital economy continues to grow at its current double digit rate the impact on jobs will occur in three key areas.
Firstly, low and semi-skilled work could be squeezed, impacting on the less well-off members of society. We are already seeing this with retail stores automating checkout tills and stock tracking with RIFD tags plus self-service in ordering and sales enquiries.
Perversely the likes of Uber and Airbnb in making taxi drivers and hotel operators of us all on the face of it is creating new jobs, but in reality it is more a sign of the increasing zero-hours contract workforce and the increase in overqualified graduates chasing fewer jobs and lower pay. This has a direct impact on the Governments’ tax revenues.
Secondly, and less obvious, is the shift and relocation of ‘knowledge’ that smart devices and automated intelligence is driving. Google’s recent restructure into Alphabet, while simplifying the corporate research portfolio, also saw it shift focus to speeding up advances in smart technology, robotics and cars.
Apart from the ‘brain drain’ this creates in countries not able to compete with these huge R&D centric companies, it is more the impact on how wealth and skills will be distributed in the global economy and how Governments must protect their economies and incomes.
A final impact is a new ‘arms race’ to develop artificial intelligence for industries ranging from defense to financial and medical research. This could potentially see complex jobs that were once thought untouchable taken over by computers thanks to emerging creative mathematical research and advanced massive scale supercomputing to model human brain function.
It is not all doom and gloom, I think there are several generations of development yet before the physical world of humans is replaced with cyber alternatives, but it is right to consider the ethical and economic repercussions of this inevitable technological scaling of computing. Putting in place controls now could well help economies make sure robots and computers add growth rather than destroy jobs.
