What Happens to Us?
How will automation affect employment
Every day we hear more and more about the capabilities of artificial intelligence and automation. When we go to the grocery store, we see fewer staff operating registers. Step inside one of Amazons™ warehouses, and you will find Sparrow, Amazon’s latest warehouse robot. This robot leverages computer vision and AI to accurately recognize and process millions of items.
Another example is Kroger™ in Franklin, Tennessee. This store has decided to join its competitors such as Wal-Mart™ and Dollar General™ in eliminating cashiers altogether at select locations in favor of self-checkout. This particular Kroger location was selected due to the rate of customers that were already using self-checkout instead of the traditional check-out aisle.
Kroger states that this fast and friendly experience “allows” their customers to be responsible for scanning and bagging their own items. According to Catalina, a shopper intelligence firm, self-check-out lanes now make up 38% of all check-out lanes in the United States.
To understand what jobs will be affected by automation we need to look at some raw data on what jobs are at the highest risk of being lost. According to GITNUXMARKETDATA, as many as 30% of jobs will be replaced by automation, especially the boring and repetitive ones.
One of the job markets that will be hit the hardest by automation is an industry that I am very close to and have been embedded in for almost two decades. The culinary industry. This industry is predicted to have a 60% job loss due to automation. However, I believe that it will be more difficult to automate a food service kitchen (replacing chefs with robots) than it will be to automate a food production facility (replacing assembly workers with robots). As we see with Amazon, it is fairly simple to automate a warehouse or assembly line.
If it is this easy to automate or replace employees with intelligent robotics and self-checkout scanners, as in the two industries mentioned above, then what other jobs could fall to automation?
For example, until the advent of machines that could assist us with jobs like excavation, this kind of work was performed by manual labor. Nowadays when we need to install sewer mains or perform other large digging jobs, we no longer use loads of human labor, we just bring in a backhoe or two and get to work. Machines have been able to significantly reduce the amount of laborers that are needed on a job site.
China is leading the way in the industrial automation game with 14 million robots in existence, this makes China the number one country in manufacturing automation. Considering that 36 million American jobs could be affected by automation and up to 70% of their job functions able to be performed by machines using current technology we have to ask ourselves what happens to us?
That does seem to be the question, at least it’s the question I always end up asking. What is our plan for when most of our job functions are automated?
According to Brookings, our most important challenge is to improve the quality of education and training as it pertains to AI. To become complementary to AI workers must gain more 21st-century skills. These skills include communication, complex analytical problem solving as well as a boost in creativity, this is something that some analytical folks just don’t have very much of.
It will be up to and currently should be the responsibility of K-12 and postsecondary schools to begin teaching these types of skills. As workers are being displaced they will need to retrain to be capable of performing new tasks as well as some workers needing to be upskilled or re-skilled altogether.
We will need to provide the highest quality training for our in-demand economic sectors, such as health care, advanced manufacturing, and retail logistics. This type of training will help to improve the earnings of less-educated or displaced workers. As far as workers re-entering the workforce, this will be a whole new ball game.
Re-training and re-skilling employees to work alongside automation is great for those who are capable and willing to do so, but what do we do with individuals that are incapable of working with AI and automation or just don’t want to? How do we pay people that just aren’t cut out for this type of work?
Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposed a universal basic income or UBI of 1,000 dollars per adult per month. Ok, that’s a start but we all know that isn’t enough to live on, right? This proposal has continued to gain momentum over the last few years but I think that this would be a temporary solution to a more long-term problem.
Don’t get me wrong here, I am very excited to be living at this time, it must be similar in a way to have been alive during the Industrial Revolution, but this time it is the technological revolution. My views on the future are somewhere between, this is awesome let the takeover begin, and oh god what are we going to do?
Automation will have its ups and downs just like any other kind of new industry or technology. There will be bumps that will need to be smoothed out. Some think that this is the beginning of the end as we may at some point lose our humanity. I don’t think that will happen until we become one with the machines.
I do think that no matter what advancements we make technologically, the human spirit will prevail, after all, we have made it through thousands of years of war, famine, climate changes, and various pandemics. We are a resilient species built for adaptability but tend to forget that we are capable of the impossible and need to be reminded of this. The future will test us in ways we can only imagine, and that may just be what we need.
I am skeptical that "upskilling" and "re-skilling" will work in the short term given how the closing of mines and factories in Britain resulted in a generation of men out-of-work and their children having to work local low-paying jobs or move to cities for "email jobs". A lot of the jobs that replaced the skilled labour were in entertainment and leisure, mainly shopping, cafes, and restaurants, especially in the north. If those sectors becomes automated, which would involve turning kitchens into assembly line style workplaces, then a huge portion of the workers would be out of work for a long time. The saving grace is that a lot of cafes and restaurants, at least in my are area, are independents. They may not employ a lot of people but they can't afford automation either, at least not yet.
Interestingly, the supermarket Booths, a high-end British chain, has ditched all it's self-checkouts (which are everywhere in Britain now and have been for years) in favour of staffed tills due to customer demand. Now this is a small chain with a well-to-do clientele and I suspect that will influence what will be automated and what won't. In the future we will pay a premium to have "the human touch" when going to shops, restaurants, etc.
I agree 100% with the sentiment that it'll be way tougher to replace cooks than to replace line workers, although there could be some exceptions. I can't remember if we talked about this, but one of the salad chains (Sweetgreen, maybe?) announced they would roll out a salad bot - basically, just to replace the position on the line that assembles ingredients and mixes them together. Some of the more limited line positions will probably go sooner rather than later, but the more complex jobs are still many years off.