The impact of advancing automation on our daily lives did not go unnoticed for most of us. Especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, we experienced changes in traditional business models and got used to living through our screens. Nowadays, it almost feels natural to place your food order through online bots instead of with actual workers standing behind a counter. However, even though the rise of automation came with many benefits and facilitated processes in various ways, we must stay aware of the threats that come with all these rapid technology advancements. One of such threats is robots taking over our job market by replacing white collar and professional service positions.
Over the past couple of years, we already witnessed automation taking over the maintenance, agriculture, construction, mining and manufacturing industries. As a result, many workers operating in the manual labor market got replaced by lower cost alternatives such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Robotic Process Automation (RPA). The market size of R.P.A was valued at $1.57 billion in 2020 and is expected to have an annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.8% from 2021 to 2028 (Mackie, 2021). This growth implies that not solely manual labor workers should be in fear of their jobs, but also those people operating in the professional service market. Whether you have a college degree or not, if bot software or robots can be programmed to perform a specific job, this endangers your position.
Robots infiltrating our workforce however does not occur in a steady pace as it concentrates especially in bad, economic times. If humans become too expensive for companies to employ, they tend to replace them by technology to avoid rapidly declining revenues. According to McKinsey & Company, there will be a displacement of 45 American workers by 2030. This number clearly indicates that technology has revolutionized every sector everyone can become a victim of automation.
But how do we cope with these rapid changes and secure ourselves of a worthwhile job? Clearly it has become inevitable to learn how to deal with AI and prepare for technological innovations continuously entering the market. We must think forward and understand which jobs bring new opportunities in the future and how we can take advantage of these opportunities.
Mackie, C. (2021). Beware Professional Services Workers: Robots Are Coming For Your Job Too!. Retrieved 6 October 2021, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/calvinmackie/2021/09/30/beware-professional-services-workers-robots-are-coming-for-your-job-too/?sh=58dde9175237
Hi Loys,
Great blog! I think the topic has been relevant for a couple of years now but will only increase in relevance in the coming future. In terms of positive influence on society, do you think the productivity and accuracy of robots will create new markets and with that new jobs for people to take in?
Kind regards,
Nassim
Hi Loys, interesting post. The goal of companies its to produce more at lower cost. since the first industrial revolution cost improvement has been achieved thanks to technology improvement. Today the most relevant technology that is going to revolutionize many industries is the Artificial Intelligence. I believe that is an inevitable step of the evolution of the production process. Instead of opposing the change we should start to embrace it because the innovation process can’t be stopped. AI probably will replace many workers but is it also going to create many opportunities. AI can help to solve problems that are affecting many industries. For example in the truck transportation industry in 2018, in the US only, approximately 51,000 additional truck drivers were needed to fulfill the demand. AI combined with autonomous driving can help to solve this problems.
Hi Loys,
Interesting read! In my job as a business analyst involved in robotization of processes, we often get this question: are you automating someones job away. Although technically through – one of the purposes of robotization and digitization in general is to gain efficiencys, we notice that in general colleagues are happy with the end results of robotization. In general, robots are better in repetitive and logic-based tasks, where humans add their value to companies by interpreting and analyzing of information, and human interaction. This is what we promote as the “soft benefits” robotization: increased employee satisfaction – as employees can focus on more value adding tasks – and of course the more known efficiency gains, such as less likely to make mistakes due to fatigueness, 24/7 availability, lower costs per hour, etc.
As a conclusion, I would like to think of it the following way: if I would do a job that I knew could have been done easier by a computer, I would feel rather useless and prefer to have the computer do it for me.
And maybe, in future eras, that is the direction society will go: that we as humans do have to perform less tasks ourselves. I think the problem is not so much that we will be automated away in that scenario, but: how will the power shift, if only a small fraction of people on this planet is required on the job market?
Hope this added some insight,
Nino
Great blog Loys! I think every generation has seem major changes in the job markets. Trends come and evolve with the times. The current trend of our generation is automation, AI, robots, and as future members of the job market we need to upskill and remain relevant if we don’t want to lose our jobs. However, I do think there will always be a need for humans we just need to figure out in what capacity and how to prepare for that.