Robots &AI to end manual labour and put half of world out of work in the next 10 to 20 years - global crisis

Robots to end manual labour and put half of world out of work in global crisis

Artificial intelligence will soon be widespread in the workforce

By Lucy Domachowski News Reporter in Yerevan 22:32, 7 OCT 2019 UPDATED15:41, 8 OCT 2019

Current Time 0:05

Robots will make half of the world's workforce redundant in the next 10 to 20 years in a global unemployment crisis, an AI expert has claimed.

 

Top US futurist Martin Ford said automaton will soon be widespread, with all low-skilled jobs replaced by robots.

Ford, who focuses on the impact of AI and robotics on the job market, warned we need to be ready for widespread global unemployment.

He acknowledges the "long record of false alarms," but argues that this time is different.

The pace of automation, he says, is no longer linear, but exponential, like the growth in computing capacity predicted by Moore's Law.

The economy, Ford says, will not have time to create new professions to absorb the tens of millions of workers displaced by automation.

"My primary concern is that as AI and machine learning and robotics advance, a huge fraction of the jobs and tasks currently performed in the economy are going to be susceptible to automation," he told the World Congress on Information Technology in Armenia today.

"Primarily it's going to be those types of roles that are fundamentally routine, repetitive and, to some extent, predictable.

"That could be jobs in factories, but it could also be white collar jobs, the kind of job where you're sitting in front of the computer doing something relatively routine - perhaps producing the same report again and again."

White-collar jobs are also at risk for the first time, Ford says. On Wall Street, the number of financial workers has already plunged by 50,000 since 2000, as computers can process 100,000 transactions in a tenth of a second.

Radiologists may lose their job analysing medical images to a robot counterpart.

"That's a very large percentage of jobs," Ford warned. "In most countries that's half the jobs in the economy."

This march of the robots could lead to mass unemployment crisis as millions of unskilled workers look for alternative employment opportunities.

He added: "It's absolutely true that as these jobs are impacted and lost, more jobs will be created.

"But the question is, will there be enough of those new jobs?

"And, will the nature of the new jobs be such that a lot of the people who lose more routine work are going to have a great deal of difficulty transitioning into those new roles that might require lots of education or creativity or sophisticated people skills.

"Not everyone has those capabilities or can easily acquire those."

The futurist warned this unemployment crisis we're facing could be just around the corner.

"I do think there's potentially a big challenge that is coming at us within the next decade or two," he continued.

"We need to have our eyes open about that.

"We need to think about what we're going to do to meet that challenge."

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/robots-end-manual-labour-put-20533066