As the global population is rising, the demand for products and services is also increasing. Especially in fast growing economies, like China. For example, the demand for clothing is expected to rise due to the migration into the middle class and they are starting to see their clothing as an expression of themselves (Keller et al, 2014). 75% of sales in the luxury goods segment will come from Chinese customers by 2020 (Keller et al, 2014).
This example is just to give you an idea of how much we need to start producing to keep up with the rising demand. In the past years machines have been taking over jobs in all kinds of industries. Automation and robotics took over jobs in production lines, chatbots started to do the work of customer service employees and 3d printing started to take over the assembly lines. Ofcourse these innovations help greatly in terms of speed, efficiency and accuracy. Furthermore they also create jobs in different sectors like IT, but according to Rotman (2013), these technologies are destroying jobs faster than creating them, which contributes to inequality and stagnating growth in the median income.
This can be illustrated in the following graph, displaying productivity and employment. the lines have been closely together in the years between the second world war and 2000, afterwards the gap has been becoming larger by the year, this is also called ‘The great decoupling’ (Rotman, 2013).
Jack Ma, Alibaba’s CEO also said in a video that people should be taught things that differentiate us from machines, like music, sports and art. This to make sure that humans remain different from machines and are irreplaceable by any machine. This is because in the past 200 years, humanity has been learning things that are knowledge based, instead of the soft parts mentioned by Jack Ma. We simply cannot teach our kids to compete with machines, because they are smarter, every time.
Sources:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/succeeding-in-tomorrows-global-fashion-market
Hi Paul, thanks for this article!
I’ve always been a bit skeptical of the ‘machines are taking over our jobs’ phrase, since people have been saying this since the industrial revolution, more than 200 years ago. I understand the fear, but I think that many jobs that exist nowadays, couldn’t have been imagined 50 years ago. In 50 years, there will probably be jobs that we can’t think of at the moment.
Many jobs that currently exist, are already not purely productive in the traditional sense. Jobs are often aimed at entertainment or leisure (media, tourism, sports, games, music, art, etc.). With this in mind I think that Jack Ma is absolutely right, but that this change from productivity to creativity is already happening.
At the same time, I think it’s important for governments, companies and institutions to really think about the role of automation. How dependent do we want to become of artificial intelligence? How do we make sure that we keep in control over the ways machines work?
I do think that somewhere on the way in the coming years, we will work towards some sort of system with a universal basic income, where people have the option to work ‘productively’ or to be more into creative activities.
Hi Paul,
This is a very nice post, which I just had to comment on. I really like the idea of leaving the traditional learning behind us and following education in more creative fields, which are unique and differentiate us from machines. Maybe soon I will be able to convince people that a career in the reggae industry is my true purpose in life.
On a more serous note. Indeed We have already seen that today’s Artificial intelligence and machine learning implications can outperform human task. They provide major advantages in perception (speech and image recognition) and cognition and problem solving (Brynjolfsson and Mcafee, 2017). However it is also known that these technologies should not replace human activities, but rather the integration of these technologies with human activities will provide more value than either separately. In addition to this machines only provide solutions. People will always be needed to provide problems and opportunities (Brynjolfsson and Mcafee, 2017).
I do agree with Jack Ma that we should focus our education more on fields like sport, art and music. However at this moment I think it is more important to focus our teachings more on fields which go hand in hand with technology. We should focus education more on management, entrepreneurship and leadership (Brynjolfsson and Mcafee, 2017). These are indeed fields which differentiate us from machines. I think these are more immediate fields than sport, art and music. I even believe we can extract more value from those fields when machines and humans are working together.
Again great post!
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Source
Brynjolfsson, E., & Mcafee, A. (2017). The Business of Artificial Intelligence. Assessed on 19 oktober 2018, from https://hbr.org/cover-story/2017/07/the-business-of-artificial-intelligence
Hi Paul, nice article about technologies taking jobs!
I agree that we should not prepair kids for jobs from which we already know that they have to compete with machines, but if we don’t teach our kids, do we have people that will be able to teach those jobs to the the machines? If we only rely on machines for certain tasks, we will loose the ability to perform those tasks on our own. In my opinion we need more specialisation, so that those people on their turn can teach new techniques to machines and to monitor how they perform at those tasks.
Next to that, I think we have to change our education system to learn kids skills that promise to be relevant in the future. Indeed technology is taking jobs, but on the other hand there is for years already a shortage on IT staff. If we train more towards the right skills to work together with machines, I think we can counter the amount of unemployed humans by machines taking their jobs. Currently more and more elementary schools are teaching young children programming, which I think is a great trend.