Abort mission: why robotization does not threaten jobs
Self-checkouts are increasing at supermarkets, and the need for cashier salespeople is decreasing. People are rapidly losing their jobs. Is it time to panic?
The phrase “the future is here” has never sounded so scary. People love technology, but not when a new multifunctional robot replaces them at work.
At the same time, the robot does not require a salary, lunch, vacation, or rest.
People study the lists of professions of the future, change their qualifications, and move to IT, check the chance of replacing themselves at work soon. But is it worth panicking?
In the 19th century, they were seized by a real panic — there were more and more cars with internal combustion engines on the streets, threatening the existence of a popular profession of horse-drawn carriage driver.
However, some professions were replaced by others, people adapted, and nothing extraordinary happened.
On the other hand, there has been an incredible number of changes that have changed the approach to the production of goods and services forever. Technology has forced people to leave their usual jobs, but it has also created new jobs and entire industries.
The current situation is not new to humanity, so before we panic, we should analyze the statistics and facts.
No one knows exactly what’s going on
MIT Technology Review has created a table according to which the future with works is rather vague. No one has an accurate prediction of how many jobs will be destroyed or created by technology before 2035.
McKinsey predicts that almost a billion jobs will disappear by 2030. Who should we believe, and whether we should believe at all, is a big question. MIT’s conclusion is: “We have no idea how many jobs will be lost on the march of technological progress.
In order not to lose a job now, experts from the World Economic Forum advise developing priority skills that modern people should possess.
The ability to solve problems comprehensively is in the first place. Critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and creativity are things that robots have not yet learned. These traits are unique to humans.
The jobs don’t disappear. They change.
Yuriy Lazebnikov, managing partner of TECHIIA holding:
“Robots are not people and cannot replace people completely, because they only perform specific tasks — the components of the work process.
This does not force people to change their work or specialization, but only affects the approach to task fulfillment and workforce productivity.
According to research by McKinsey Global Institute, it is possible to automate 50% of work tasks and 30% of actions in six out of ten professions, for example, the work of junior lawyers to collect and systematize information, search for precedents.
However, the analysis of materials and preparation of the case must still be done by the person.”
Valerii Pekar, Ukrainian entrepreneur and business school lecturer:
“First of all, office planktons may lose their jobs, which is tens of millions of people in developed countries only.
At the same time, the cost of replacing such workers with software is thousands of times less than replacing a loader with a robot.”
People should prepare themselves for new jobs and learn new skills.
The World Economic Forum estimates that 80% of professions will disappear before today’s first graders graduate.
Of course, people will not lose their jobs quickly and unexpectedly, and a person is still writing this text. Even with rapid developments, by 2030, only 14% of full-time workers (375 million) will probably change jobs.
The Goldman Sachs report for 2017 says that robotic cars will replace 300 thousand drivers annually. With one proviso: they will not start doing so until 25 years from now. There is enough time for both drivers and the economy to adapt to the changes.
“For robotization to come massively to Ukraine, it must be economically beneficial for entrepreneurs. For example, in Ukraine, the monthly salary of a cashier in a supermarket is 250–400 dollars, while in the US, it is more than 1,000 dollars.
Also, a U.S. cashier usually knows much more about his rights, has a larger social security package, and is not so easy to get him to work overtime. Therefore, it is advantageous for the owner of a small supermarket in the U.S. to put a self-checkout — it can work 24/7, will NOT ask for a day off, vacation, and wage increases.
However, the store owner, for example, in Bila Tserkva, will not even think about it. It is easier for him to pay $250 a month to his cashier and ask him to work for 10 hours a day.
With this model of the economy, the Ukrainian cashier may not worry: he will have a job for the next 20–30 years,” explains Yuriy Lazebnikov.
High level of panic against low-performance levels
Productivity is a measure of the economy’s cost per hour of human labor. It would seem that on the wave of automation, plants and factories would have to work more efficiently with fewer people.
In the example of the USA, where technological progress is moving faster in the world, we can conclude that this theory does not work. In the postwar period of economic prosperity, from 1947 to 1973, productivity grew by 3% annually, from 2007 by 1.2%, and from 2015 to 2017 — only 0.6%.
That’s not what would happen if robots started replacing people in masses.
But are there any places where robots have ultimately won? Okay, people have lost some jobs in production forever. This is mostly about hard, monotonous, or dangerous work.
“Dark factories” is a great example. Wikipedia describes so-called Lights-out manufacturing more as a methodology or even a philosophy of production than a separate process. These plants and factories are fully automated and do not require human presence, and because robots do not need lighting, it’s turned off.
This helps to optimize the use of resources and meet the demand for some products. Human labor in “dark industries” is used only for raw material delivery, a preventive inspection of robots, and obtaining the finished product.
The Japanese company FANUK has been practicing “Lights-out manufacturing” since 2001. Their robots create other robots — 50 pieces per day. Moreover, not only the lights are off, but also the air conditioning is off, and the equipment only requires inspection every 30 days.
Another example is Philips, which manufactures electric razors in the Netherlands. Production is fully automated, with 128 robots and only nine people monitoring the quality of the products.
Despite this, there would have to be an incredible turnover because people would move from profession to profession. But the opposite is true: stability is incredibly high.
According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, the level of personnel loss by companies in the United States is at a historic low. The following fact also evidences the level of robotization problems: during 2016, Americans spent $11.3 billion on robotics and $66.7 billion on robotics and 66.7 billion dollars on pets.
The more robots we have, the more we need them
Harvard economist James Bessen said that from 1950 to 2010 in the US automation has completely replaced only one profession — elevator operators. From the whole list of jobs that should have disappeared through robotization, most still exist: 232 from 271.
ATMs are a great example of how slow the replacement of people with technology is. They first started to be used in the 1970s, and only gained popularity in the 1990s.
Now there are 400 thousand ATMs in the US. They should replace many bank employees, but their number was only growing during 2000–2010. The availability of ATMs made it cheaper to open bank branches and led to an increase in the number of branches and the number of employees.
Self-checkouts have also replaced cashiers. In this case, people were divided into two camps. The first was accustomed to live communication with the person serving them and do not like to scan and pack food themselves.
The second, on the contrary, want to get rid of the human factor, hate queues, and joyfully use self-checkouts. This is evidenced by comments under the BBC post on Facebook.
That’s why supermarkets do not dare to replace all cashiers with self-service cash registers and, at the same time, can not but put at least a few of them in each store to please both sides.
Also, self-service cash registers help avoid problems with a lack of space in the store, finding cashiers and counterfeit bills. However, the reasons for setting up a self-checkout in Ukraine and the United States, for example, are different. If they are trying to save money on hiring workers, a self-checkout has to work off its cost.
Can a store without human cashiers make more money? Yes. The psychological factor works: many customers choose robo-cashiers not only because of speed but also because the names of some products are difficult to pronounce.
In an interview with Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business School associate professor Ryan Buell noted one study of a liquor store. The market has moved from traditional cashiers to the self-service cabin and found out that the market share of hard to pronounce products has increased by 8.4%.
Bowel also cites another interesting example regarding ordering pizza by phone and through a website. When ordering on the site, customers choose more calorie products and give 14% more accurate orders than when talking to an employee.
Robopocalypse won’t happen. There will be digitization
In addition to difficult and dangerous out-of-office jobs where physical endurance is required, robotization can also affect “white collars.”
This is proved by examples of programs that take on the usual office functions such as writing texts, checking documents, filling out forms, and tables.
Deloitte, for example, already uses a special platform that checks documents more accurately and faster than people.
Michael Chui, from McKinsey, who specializes in the impact of technology on business, writes that data collection, processing, office support, processing financial and other transactions are supposed jobs, though not physical. It will probably be more and more done by machines, not by people.
Who’s perfectly safe for now?
People of creative professions with complex tasks are safe for now. It’s hard to automate their work.
Cognitive technologies (that is, automation plus artificial intelligence, is so-called intelligent automation) are very imperfect even in developed countries. For example, artificial intelligence can detect lung cancer better than doctors, but it cannot cure it.
With this in mind, we can assume that people who work in factories and lawyers, who check contracts more slowly than the program, should turn into specialists in creative professions or scientists.
However, the truth is that the robotization and replacement of people with robots will be so uneven and gradual that it will only change some of the familiar jobs, and people who have lost them will move one level higher.
