Don’t worry about robots; new jobs are on its way!
If you’re curious about what the rapid technological developments nowadays mean for the job market, you very likely came across a bunch of worrying technosceptics quoting headlines like ‘robots take over our jobs’ and ‘will doctors be replaced by Artificial Intelligence?’
The fact that those topics are becoming part of peoples daily thinking isn’t that weird though. It seems like a bold statement to argue that humans are in many aspects disabled relative to their digital counterpart, but there are quite some sound arguments in favour of it. First of all, humans are simply to slow and get easily tired. Where a computer can absorb all medical journals or case law over the last decade in just one day, humans read only one article a day on average. Until recently, computers were not able to understand those articles on the same level as humans did. However, the IBM’s Watson Supercomputer beating all it’s human opponents on Jeopardy was the first convincing exhibition proving otherwise.
Our second disability is that we’re only able to see relatively simple patterns. Algorithms, on the other hand, have the superior ability to analyse complex patterns. This was clearly illustrated by Google’s Deepmind AlphaGO, beating the game’s world champion last year. More practical examples are researchers from Stanford that are able to automatically recognize skin diseases with the latest AI-technologies, beating all of its dermatologist opponents in almost every test. Or the Google research report, where they detected cancer trough deep learning mechanisms at the Radboud Medical Center, outperforming pathologists with a 16% higher average accuracy.
But what does this mean for our future jobs? Will humans become redundant indeed? In order to be able to make an ‘educated guess’, we have to use something machines don’t posses: our imagination. Imagine you were an American farmer in the year 1900 and someone from the future (around 100 years later) came along to tell you that instead of 40% of the population, only 2% of the people were farm employees and there wouldn’t be food shortage. And if you then would’ve had to guess what the other 38% were doing, you probably would not have said IT-consultant, truck driver, social media influencer or hacker. The same goes for us nowadays, we don’t know what the job market is going to look like when robots and artificial intelligence really take over the office floors.
The Camelyon Grand Challenge 2016 also showed that pathologists that worked together with AI technology, made less mistakes in diagnosing cancer than each individually. That’s why I argue to bet on human-machine interaction. If we’re able to find the right synergy, we’ll have a whole different job landscape in 100 years, including vacancies for robot walkers. Why would this be bad? We would still be employed and probably work a lot more efficient. We’re only scared today because we can’t imagine the job descriptions of tomorrow.
Autor, D. (2016, September). Will automation take away all our jobs? [Video file]. Retrieved October 9, 2017, from https://www.ted.com/talks/david_autor_why_are_there_still_so_many_jobs#t-1044890
Computer kan kanker beter herkennen dan patholoog. (2017, March 3). Retrieved October 9, 2017, from https://nos.nl/artikel/2161091-computer-kan-kanker-beter-herkennen-dan-patholoog.html
Stumpe, M., & Peng, L. (2017, March 3). [Assisting Pathologists in Detecting Cancer with Deep Learning] [Blog post]. Retrieved October 9, 2017, from https://research.googleblog.com/2017/03/assisting-pathologists-in-detecting.html
Welling, M. (2017, February 25). De AI-dokter. Retrieved October 9, 2017, from https://fd.nl/morgen/1188887/de-ai-dokter
Hello Stephan,
Interesting article! It is an important subject because many people worry about their jobs because of robots. In my opinion it is a good thing that robots can replace some functions and do it more efficiently. However, I believe that robots will replace the “easy” jobs (for example cleaning, garbage pick up, cashiers etc. ) and leave the “hard” part to humans (brains will always be needed). In your article you state that jobs will not disappear because of robots, but I can imagine that people with low education will find it hard to find jobs in the future. In other words, I was wondering if you expect a difference in levels of educations in terms of jobs in the future.
Thank you for this very interesting blog post, I enjoyed reading it!