Future Update: AI and Robots Replacing Human Workers at an Astounding Rate!

I've written about hamburger flipping robots, touchscreen automated menus for restaurants, tomato picking robots and all sorts of new technological contraptions in the past six months and it all adds up to something. It adds up to the undeniable fact that we must constantly be striving to improve our skills because in the coming age of robot workers we will need to have a clear competitive advantage. The need for human labor is dwindling so becoming an expert on something is going to be a big step up in terms of gaining and keeping employment in future years and decades.

There is no doubt that automation has displaced workers in many occupations. Machines are now more responsible than ever in both manufacturing and routine office jobs.

New research finds that employment growth in high-paying jobs has slowed since the year 2000, and that this has been particularly true for jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). One possible explanation is that rapid advances in artificial intelligence and robotics are making it possible for a wider range of technically demanding jobs to get automated.

Even knowledge workers have something to fear when it comes to being replaced by robots. This data is surprisingly worrying. It is hard to say what types of skills are valuable and what skills are not. The key it seems is to become a sort of renaissance figure with skills that overlap across many subjects and disciplines.

While there is much current attention on technology displacing workers in the near future, this type of disruption is not new. There is a long history of technology altering the way things are produced and having significant impacts on employment. In 1900, for instance, 41 percent of the U.S. labor force was employed in agriculture. Thanks to the development of a broad range of agricultural technologies, by 2000 only 2 percent of the U.S. labor force worked in agriculture (see this study for a review).

Obviously agriculture has changed a lot in regard to employment opportunities. Huge machines do the work that it used to take legions of human labor to achieve. Maintaining an adequate food supply has been simplified or made to be more complex depending on how you look at it. Science and math skills have outpaced the need to learn how to work with the land, to cultivate and interact with nature to harvest an adequate food supply.

Automation has become increasingly common in U.S. manufacturing. The U.S. lost more than 5 million jobs in manufacturing since the year 2000 despite steady output growth, a sign that robots are replacing human labor.

The days of the late 1800s and early 1900s where workers piled into factories to perform all sorts of repetitive labor are long over. Now machines perform the work of many in carrying out the repetitive tasks of the factory production line.

Technology has also been displacing workers in occupations beyond those that depend on manual labor. In the 1990s, computers replaced and changed jobs requiring routine tasks such as bookkeeping and clerical work. Yet computers also made higher skilled workers more productive, leading to a “hollowing out” of the labor market and increased polarization and inequality. (See this study.)

Computer skills are needed more than ever for the time being until AI has advanced enough to the point where systems can teach themselves various tasks and then assign virtual workers to perform them. This is one of the last frontiers that scientists are feverishly trying to conquer. Computer engineers are always striving to design the next piece of hardware that can supercharge an industry that is already moving at lightspeed. Software engineers are constantly striving to improve upon their last API or automation program fast at work to accomplish the task of essentially replacing themselves with an algorithm that can do what they do for them.

What is relatively new is that, since 2000, there appears to be a slowdown in higher-paying, skilled jobs and that technological change could be playing a role in this shift. After two decades of expansion, growth in the share of workers employed in high-skill “cognitive” occupations (those classified as managerial, professional, and technical categories by the U.S. Census) slowed down. In my research, I find that the changing trend is driven by a decline in the share of jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics — the so-called STEM fields — which shrank by a total of 0.12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force between 2000 and 2012, after growing by 1.33 percentage points over the previous two decades.

Could we be seeing a pontential opportunity with this information. Are social skills, creative abilities, teamwork skills and problem solving skills becoming more valuable again? Should we be looking at areas untouched by machinery, technology and automation to develop new skills around. The answer is a resounding 'YES.'

Jobs requiring social skills have experienced strong relative employment and wage growth. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. The greatest relative growth was experienced by jobs that require both high math and high social skills, which grew by 7.2 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force.

Clearly developing strong math and social skills can still result in a high paying job and secure employment. This is ironic considering how we rarely focus on building real genuine social skills because lets be honest, facebook doesn't count.

All of this adds up to the fact that over the last three decades, jobs that many STEM occupations that require high math skill but very little social skills have fared poorly when compared to the high demand for people that have high social and math-intensive skills because this group has seen strong wage growth over the past decades.

According to my sources, there is growing demand for workers who are flexible and adaptable and who are skilled at working in team-based settings. All of these skills are still difficult to automate.

So what does this all mean? It seems obvious that we need to continue making an effort to improve our social and math skills. We must focus on building strong communities and finding a way to provide value to each others lives. After all, as far as I know the human spirit and soul cannot be automated, well not yet at least...

Source:

AI and robots are displacing science and tech workers. The question is: How quickly? - PBS

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