Fitz Ezra E. - The robots are coming!: the future of jobs in the age of automation

Ever since a study by the University of Oxford predicted that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence over the next fifteen to twenty years, I havent been able to stop thinking about the future of work. How many people will become unemployed because of the increasing automation of jobs? This is not a new phenomenon, but never before has it developed at such a fast pace. Technology has been killing jobs since the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. But up to now, humans have always managed to create more jobs than those that were wiped out by technology. The question now is, can we continue creating more jobs than we are eliminating?

The media bring us one example after another of how technological disruption often creates new companies, though at the cost of decimating others that employed many more people. The Eastman Kodak Company, an icon of the photographic industry that employed 140,000 people, was pushed into bankruptcy in 2012 by Instagram, a start-up with just 13 employees that knew how to beat Kodak to the punch when it came to digital photography. Blockbuster, the giant movie rental chain that employed 60,000 people around the world, went bankrupt shortly before that because it could not compete with Netflix, another start-up with 30 employees that started shipping movies directly to peoples homes. During its golden age, General Motors had a staff of some 618,000 workers, whereas now their number is down to 202,000. Whats more, the car company is now being threatened by Tesla and Google, which are ahead in the development of self-driven cars and employ 30,000 and 55,000 people, respectively. Will GMs employees suffer the same fate as those at Kodak and Blockbuster?

Growing numbers of jobs are disappearing. We see this every day in our lives. In the very recent past, weve witnessed the gradual extinction of elevator attendants, telephone operators, factory workers, and garbage collectors who swept the streets with brooms in their hands, all of whom are being replaced by machines. In the United States, parking lot attendants and their collection booths are vanishing fast, as are airline tellers and their check-in desks at airports. At many restaurants in Japan, conveyor belts have taken the place of servers, and a number of sushi restaurants have replaced their chefs with robots. Today its not just people performing manual labor who are seeing their jobs threatened, but also white-collar workers such as journalists, travel agents, real estate salesmen, bankers, insurance agents, accountants, lawyers, and doctors. Virtually no profession is safe: all are feeling the impactat least somewhatfrom the automation of work.

My own profession, journalism, is among the most threatened. The Washington Post is already publishing election stories written by robots, and almost all major American newspapers publish sports scores and stock market figures generated by smart machines. Journalists will have to ride the wave of this new reality and reinvent ourselves, or we will soon find ourselves out of the game. And the same thing will happen in almost every other profession.