Is China risking unrest by accelerating towards industrial robotization?

According to the World Bank, up to half of the United States’ jobs are at risk of automation. Outspoken people, from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking, have harped about the potential for AI to decimate middle class jobs.

Unfortunately, the prognosis is far worse in other countries.

Whereas 35% of jobs in the U.K. and 47% of jobs in the U.S. are at risk of automation, India, China, and Ethiopia must contend with a full 69%, 77%, an 85% of their jobs marked as ‘at risk,’ respectively. But should the latter group of countries be concerned?

Unfortunately, yes. Paradoxically, populations in countries with red-hot economic growth may also be the most impacted by automation. China’s growth rate was 6.9 percent in 2015, while Ethiopia has averaged 10.8 percent from 2004 to 2015, with a large proportion of job growth coming in the form of rote work, which is easier to automate.

High growth also provides companies with the capital to redesign their entire workforce in the span of just a few years.

Chinese companies, in particular, are feeling increasing pressure towards doing exactly that: Average quality of life is rising for the Chinese worker, and higher wages have had an impact on profits. Additionally, the loss of human life from safety lapses or poor work conditions only accelerates the trend.

For example, in May, a single Foxconn factory in the city of Kunshan migrated from a mostly human workforce, to one more reliant on industrial robots. This culled 60,000 jobs, taking this single factory from 110,000 employees to a mere 50,000. And it is just one of hundreds of factories doing the same.

In fact, China is driving the adoption of industrial robots worldwide:

And, so far, we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the adoption of industrial robots outside of the four most heavily robotized countries: South Korea, Singapore, Japan and Germany. The trend is a global one:

There are few reasons to believe this will slow down.

China may be driving the growth of industrial robots, but is it still far less robotized than either Europe or the U.S. In 2015, there were 92 robotic units per 10,000 workers in Europe, 76 per 10k in the United States, and only 49 per 10k workers in China.

Shifts towards greater automation are especially concerning in the Chinese manufacturing cities where a solid middle class has gained a footing only in the last decade, and where they have tasted a better quality of life — only to quickly lose it. If China does not build out a good-enough safety net, re-education of migrant workers, or other job opportunities, this may be a recipe for unrest.

Industrial technology often comes hand-in-hand with productivity increases and benefits for the population as jobs require greater skill and higher wages. The same can be said for industrialization in China, where incredible hubs of job creation and expertise have been built in only a couple of decades. But moving towards automation faster than the population can react risks removing the human benefit and individual economic well-being that typically comes from such gains in productivity.

For countries further on the industrial ‘periphery,’ in Southeast Asia or Africa, extreme capital inequality may lead the business class to start off with robot-driven factories from the get-go. In fact, they may be forced to do so in order for their products to compete at a global level.

In such cases, we may not even see unrest, but rather a breakdown of linkages between popular economic empowerment and overall economic growth.