If you think your boss is a stiff now, just wait five years for AI to take over
If you think your boss is a stiff now, just wait five
years
By Catey Hill, Marketwatch December 16, 2015 | 11:32am
Robots are after your boss’ job.
Managers spend much of their day working on tasks that
robots will do better in the future, according to a survey released Wednesday
by Accenture Strategy, the strategy arm of the global professional services
company.
More than 8 in 10 managers say they spend a significant
part of their day planning and coordinating work, 65% solving problems and related
tasks, 52% monitoring and reporting performance and 45% analyzing and sharing
information, according to the survey, which questioned 1,700 managers across 17
industries.
But in roughly five to 10 years, intelligent machines
will likely be able to do many of these tasks more effectively than humans,
says Bob Thomas, the managing director of Accenture Strategy. “We are entering
a different kind of technological era,” he says — one in which robots play a
much bigger role at work.
Already, robots do many jobs — often lower-level, manual
tasks — better than humans, including stocking shelves and farming. “Advanced
robots are gaining enhanced senses and dexterity, allowing them to perform a
broader scope of manual tasks,” write the authors of the 2013 study from Oxford
University entitled “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to
Computerisation.”
“Some types of jobs will go away, but others will be
created,” says Thomas. The Oxford study notes that “most workers in
transportation and logistics occupations, together with the bulk of office and
administrative support workers, and labor in production occupations, are at
risk” and adds that a surprisingly high number of jobs in the service industry
are at risk as well. And while some managers’ jobs are at risk (though many
will simply shift to doing tasks like higher-order reasoning that robots are
less well equipped to do, the Accenture study showed), lower skilled, low-wage
workers are even more at risk, experts say.
What’s more, as they become faster, smarter and cheaper,
we can expect robots to do more jobs than humans, even those in management, now
do, experts say. In roughly the next two decades, robots might take nearly 50%
of jobs currently in existence in the US, Oxford’s Future of Employment study,
which examined 702 occupations, found. A report by the Bank of England revealed
that 80 million US jobs are in danger of being taken over by automation.
Not surprisingly, many managers feel threatened by robots
— managers in electronics and high tech are most concerned that robots could
threaten their positions (50%), followed by banking managers (49%), managers in
the airline sector (42%) and retail (41%), the Accenture data show– as do many
workers.
But should they be worried? That depends on what their
jobs are.
“Technology may be set to change jobs and wages more
fundamentally than in the past,” says Andrew Haldane, the chief economist and
executive directory of monetary analysis and statistics for the Bank of London.
“Job displacement and creation may come thicker and faster than ever previously
… and gaps between those with and without skills, or with and without jobs, may
widen as never before.”
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