About 1900 experts surveyed on impact of robotics and AI over next decade:
The vast majority of respondents to the 2014 Future of the Internet canvassing anticipate that robotics and artificial intelligence will permeate wide segments of daily life by 2025, with huge implications for a range of industries such as health care, transport and logistics, customer service, and home maintenance. But even as they are largely consistent in their predictions for the evolution of technology itself, they are deeply divided on how advances in AI and robotics will impact the economic and employment picture over the next decade.
In the late nineteenth/early 20th century the experts were concerned about how big cities were going to deal with the ridiculous amount of horse poop from all of the carriage traffic. Luckily, our fearless engineering forefathers solved that problem.
Technology has changed a lot in the past 100 years and so far Mr. Market and friends have done a reasonable job managing the economy and employment levels with continued technological change. I suspect that this will continue to be true.
On the other hand, horse-drawn carriages were never poised to eliminate entire industries.
Things change. Tech can be wildly unpredictable in its social effects-- ultimately the only truly accurate predication for the future will be made by us, the people who will live in it.
Which were always pretty niche to begin with. Contrast with the large assembly lines that robots have been gradually expanding into for years, all the low-quantity stuff things like Baxter are going overtake, and the large quantity of low-cost labor that can be removed by switching to robots.
Most stuff is already automated to some degree, the rise of robotics systems will only make that speed up. What’s left then is the jobs that require human ingenuity-- a very low percentage today.
But I digress, speculation is pretty much irrelevant. I’m sure the future will hold enough problems without guessing more.
Last month I took a tour of one of Stihl’s manufacturing plants. The biggest things I look away from that tour (comparatively to the P&G chemical plant tour I did a few years ago) was the automation and rare use of PPE. The plant was almost fully automated and even had robots driving around autonomously carrying heavy pallets. With the automation and safety features built in there was no need for safety glasses or ear plugs. Gloves were the only thing that you occasionally saw. The group I was with asked about the automation and what it does for jobs. When Stihl automates something taking the human factor out of it, they retrain that employee to do another job. Stihl’s plant in Virginia Beach has not had a layoff since the early 70’s. Technology has come quite a ways since then and it’s awesome to see a company incorporating that without hurting their employees.
I think we can do a bit better than wild guessing.
What seems clear to me is that automation of large swaths of jobs will, eventually, result in a much smaller job market. No modern economies are, at present, structured to deal with that change. I foresee this being a problem. It is unclear how many economies will function if/when most wealth essentially creates itself.
The potential impact on STEM careers, I don’t know. There’s lots of talk of there being a STEM shortage in the current job market, which would only get worse given increased demand for STEM workers, but it’s not entirely clear if that’s really the case.
Moving the employee to a new position is a nice idea, but in reality that only happens when there is an opening.
I work in the auto-industry and we continue to automate. Robots (big ones) are already at the price point where there is financial payback in a single year if you can replace one operator with one robot. However, robots are also the most difficult machines to repair, and when one breaks it’s rarely as easy replacing some weldments or grinding some spacers.
That’s where robot programmers and technicians come in. These guys hire in to companies like Kuka, ABB, etc, and learn about robots. Then they quit and move into directly servicing those robots. It’s a BIG $ job ($150 / hour is the standard contract rate) if you’re good at it.
So the use of large numbers of robots has in turn created an industry building and servicing those robots.
We also moved to more automated measuring systems - surface finish gaging, CNC machining, Zeiss / LK measurement systems. In turn, each of those require highly trained and specialized outside contracts to build and maintain.