Will Technology Replace Your Job?

Will robots and artificial intelligence kill our jobs? Which jobs are most threatened by machines? The future is quite dark...

Each century brings its share of innovations, condemning professions and creating new ones. The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter already called this in the last century “creative destruction”: The arrival of cars at the beginning of the last century made the work of a cab maker obsolete, but created the work of a car manufacturer.

But at present, the automation debate must take into account the rise of artificial intelligence. These new generation robots are able to perform ever more complex tasks and are able to learn through deep learning. This method earlier this year allowed a Google artificial intelligence called AlphaGo to beat the world Go champion Lee Sedol, a task considered even more difficult than beating world chess champions.

Robots haven't just landed in the world of work: they're developing their skills, climbing the corporate ladder, getting cheaper, boasting impressive productivity rates, and increasingly jostling their counterparts. humans. So, will new technologies create mass unemployment, while robots take jobs away from humans? Or will the jobs occupied by robots create others for humans?

Machines at the BMW factory in Leipzig, Germany. Where are the humans – Photo credit Wikimedia – BMW Werk Leipzig

An old debate

This concern is not new. It goes back at least as far as the Luddite movement in England in the early 19th century, where new technologies caused fear about the inevitable changes they brought. The movement pitted traditional artisans in cotton processing against employers and factory workers using mechanized looms. This ended with the passage of a law establishing the death penalty for the destruction of machines. In a few decades, many traditional trades disappeared.

The industrial revolution that followed is the origin of unprecedented progress for humanity: a drastic improvement in agricultural output, and thus in the quality of food, a reduction in the cost of production of many consumer goods, an acceleration of passenger and freight transport, the appearance of public lighting, medical advances, etc.

Fourth industrial revolution

The great industrial revolutions have therefore succeeded one another, and the third, which is based in particular on new digital technologies, will see the world GDP multiply by 50 between 1960 and 2010. Technological progress allows exponential growth. The fourth industrial revolution then arrives to create an intelligent industry and endorse the democratization of robots and artificial intelligence.

Until now, when certain professions gradually disappear, others often come to take their place. Better, “technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed according to 140 years of data,” said a study conducted by economists at Deloitte, in 2015. But this observation has changed since then. Today, there are clear signs that we have to worry about our jobs.

The Beginnings of the End of Employment

Today, what if machines become so smart that they no longer need unskilled labor to operate? That's the question economists Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University posed in 2012 in a paper titled Smart Machines and Long Term Misery. After all, “smart machines now collect our money at highway tolls, cash our groceries at the supermarket, take our blood pressure, show us our way (GPS), answer the phone, print our documents, deliver our messages, read our books, guard our homes, fly our planes, kill our enemies (drones) and the list goes on…” Their conclusion can be summed up as follows: If the cab and the taxi both needed a driver, the advent of the car autonomous will make it possible to do without it.

An autonomous car, the Google Car, could well replace taxi drivers – Google photo credit

Many recent and successive studies all converge on the same results: 40% to 60% of existing jobs could be automated over the next few decades.

The firm Roland Berger transposed this study to France and it emerges that 3 million jobs could be eliminated because of robots by 2025. Another research carried out by the consulting firm McKinsey goes in this direction since “45% of jobs could be automated with already existing technologies”. According to this same firm, 60% of jobs could be automated to a minimum height of 30%.

In 2014, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT estimated in their book The Second Machine Age that productivity is growing, but not being followed by employment. According to them, the internet revolution and the development of artificial intelligence should gradually lead to a replacement of humans by robots.

Which Jobs are Most at Risk?

Currently, jobs that are less creative and involve repetitive tasks are most at risk of machine automation. That said, all trades are concerned.

A few recent examples within different companies show that really all types of trades can be affected. Whether it's Foxconn factory workers who assemble iPhones, Uber drivers, journalists, McDonald's employees, or truck drivers, jobs as diverse as they are can be threatened.

Employees of fast-food chains demonstrate following the development, by the company Momentum Machines, of a robot capable of making a burger in less than 10 seconds. Investors estimate that it will eventually cost less than the minimum cost of $15 per hour in the United States.

The BBC site also offers software (in English) that allows you to know the probability that your job (current or desired) has to be automated over the next twenty years.

Also, the McKinsey study, cited above, brings together in the form of an interactive graph, data from the Office of Labor and Statistics. If these figures relate to the American labor market, it is interesting to note the employment sectors that are highlighted, and thus identify the trades least exposed to automation, and conversely, the trades most at risk. even to be replaced by robots.

It is therefore easier to cite the least threatened jobs

From this table, it appears that it is the most qualified jobs that are the least threatened. There are three areas of the world of work that will be complicated to be replaced by machines:

1. Professions that require strong “social intelligence”, i.e. an ability to pay attention to others, to negotiate, and to persuade: psychologists, public relations officers, teachers, events professionals, etc.

2. Professions that appeal to emotions and creativity: architects, artists, consultants, researchers, designers, etc.

3. Professions requiring a high level of manipulation and perception: doctors, surgeons, etc.
The real question is what job will you do tomorrow?

Researchers estimate that 60% of the jobs of tomorrow do not yet exist. Remember, twenty years ago, who could have imagined the jobs that exist today following the rise of the Internet? Certainly, these jobs will not cover the number of jobs cut, neither in terms of skills nor geographical distribution. 

After Robots

If we consider that the arrival of robots will eliminate more jobs than it will create, the most trained people, those who understand the challenges of new technologies and adapt quickly will be the big winners of the “ second economy”. This term was coined by Brian Arthur to talk about the current deep transformation of the economy, digital. It is an economy that can function almost without human intervention.

Thus, this “second economy” will leave out the less trained, and who bring a lower added value. These people would be progressively excluded from the labor market as the automated and connected economy prospers.

The current social model, whose funding is based on work, needs to be rethought. What if fewer and fewer people are working? How can the economy run if fewer and fewer people have enough to live on?

But if the future is as bleak as studies and analyses predict, then it will be necessary to go through training, since the most threatened professions are those which require little or no training. In the long term, the idea of introducing universal income could make it possible to limit the number of “left behind”. We could see the emergence of “new jobs” a little more noticeably (freelance, collaborative economy, etc.).