Robots to replace almost half of jobs over next 20 years: expert
Robots to replace almost half of jobs over next 20 years:
expert
Date March 23, 2015 - 5:00PM 208 reading now
By Jorge Branco
Forty-seven per cent of jobs in the US will be overtaken
by computers in the next decade or two, according to research.
Robots and computer programs could almost wipe out human
workers in jobs from cooks to truck drivers, a visiting researcher has warned.
Driverless cars and even burger-flipping robots are among
the technological advancements gunning for low-skilled jobs across dozens of
industries.
University of Oxford Associate Professor in machine
learning Michael Osborne has examined the characteristics of 702 occupations in
the US, predicting 47 per cent will be overtaken by computers in the next
decade or two.
Those most at-risk jobs are in accommodation and food
services (87 per cent of workers at high risk of being replaced),
transportation and warehousing (75 per cent) and real estate (67 per cent).
By contrast, only about 10 per cent of workers in the
information sector, software developers and higher level management were at
risk of automation.
Professor Osborne said machines and computers still
struggled with creativity, social intelligence and the manipulation of complex
objects, making jobs with high requirements in these areas less vulnerable to
robotisation.
"What unites all those bottlenecks [in computer
ability] is kind of a deep reservoir of tacit knowledge humans possess that's
not readily reproducible in software," he said.
"For example, in order to be creative, you need to
understand the creative values of the society in which you find yourself.
"It's very easy to design an algorithm that
endlessly churns out paintings or pieces of music but it's very difficult to
get that algorithm to distinguish between good pieces of music and bad pieces
of music."
While the results, which Professor Osborne had been
reproduced with similar results in the UK and Scandinavia, are bad news for
individuals, they don't necessarily predict a sky-rocketing unemployment rate
as machines take over the workforce.
History is full of examples of machines replacing
workers.
At the start of the 20th century about 40 per cent of US
workers were in agriculture. That's now about two per cent but the unemployment
rate has remained relatively steady.
The invention of the car savaged jobs in the horse
transport industry but gave rise to tourism and all the jobs that come with it.
In the early 19th century the Luddites rioted against
labour-replacing machinery in the English textile industry, coining a name for
someone resistant to change.
"These people weren't irrational. There were genuine
risks to their jobs," Professor Osborne said.
"And while overall in the end unemployment wasn't
affected, there certainly were very severe negative consequences for those
workers in the short term.
"I think the story here is fairly similar actually
that in the end, yes we may see new forms of work generated but it's not clear
that the kind of people who are put out of work, which I said ought to be those
at the low-skilled end of the spectrum, are necessarily going to be those that
move into those new forms of work."
Technology will need to become more user-friendly and
create new kinds of jobs given there would always be a resistance to its
adoption, Professor Osborne said.
But Hollywood's imagery of terminators and other self-aware
robots wreaking havoc was not a healthy narrative to consider, he said.
"In the long term yes, we will see machines that may
be potentially so intelligent as to have goals that aren't consistent with our
own and there might be consequences of that," he said.
"But I think in the near term the larger question is
that of employment really, and how people's work might be affected by
increasing automation."
Professor Osborne is in Brisbane to speak about the
future of work at the Queensland University of Technology on Tuesday.
He said many newly created industries such as software
development and big data analysis weren't creating as many jobs as thought but
renewable energy industries were booming in the US and said Australian
governments should be fostering similar innovation.
"There's not a single silver bullet solution to this
issue but investing in those new industries is certainly an important
plank," he said.
Comments
Post a Comment