Our current workplace is becoming increasingly digital and automated. Employees fear that robots will eventually overtake their jobs, as was the case with manufacturing and is currently happening with administrative tasks (BCG, 2015). But is this really the case? Are we heading towards a future in which all jobs will be automated and performed by a robotic worker? In this blog I want to share my opinion on the debacle about automation in the future workforce.

Fear of losing a job has always been present in the background, but one paper, written by Frey and Osborne (2013) about the future of innovation and employment, caused a lot of fear among the current workforce a couple of years ago. The authors claimed that half of the current jobs will be automated in the near future. For many people this will, of course, be very frightening to hear about. However, is this really the case? According to OECD (2013), who wrote an article in direct response to Frey and Osborne, only 9 percent of all jobs could be fully automated. This difference is explained by the fact that Frey and Osborne included all jobs in their percentages no matter if they would be fully automated in the future or only minor parts would be automated or performed by a robot.

This exact point is, in my opinion, of key importance in the job automation discussion. Naturally, it is unavoidable that certain jobs or parts of it will be automated in the future. A robot is after all cheaper and less prone to errors than a human worker (Romero et al., 2016). The inference should not be made, however, that human workers will not be of value anymore in the future workplace. The majority of the jobs still have to be performed manually. Think of jobs in which cognitive skills are necessary, complex decisions have to be made and where the human touch is a key factor. Jobs in healthcare or strategy-making are very clear examples of where human workers will still be needed in the future. Automation will mostly play a central role in tasks such as processing huge amounts of data, moving information from one place to another or in tasks that are very repetitive.

As a result, it is true that workers will need to learn new skills to be able to interact and collaborate with these robots (BCG, 2015). Nowadays, it is very accessible for employees to teach themselves skills necessary for automating simple tasks. Programs like UiPath and Blue Prism let you build programs that can do the repetitive tasks for you, without knowing anything of programming yourself.  This way employees do not only learn skills that are future proof, but most importantly, can also be part of the evolution of their job in a proactive way. This will, in addition, take away the fear and misconception from employees with which we started the beginning of this blog. Robots and automation will not take over complete jobs, they will only support you with handling certain tasks.

Taking all of the above into account, my opinion is that the future workforce will stay mostly human. It will, however, be optimized and supported by robots and it would be wise for employees to understand the basics of automation to adapt to the changing workplace. How do you see this? Do you think computers and robots will become smart enough to outcompete all human workers?

p.s. In case you are interested in automation and would like to experiment with it yourself, have a look at UiPath, which offers easy to understand automation lessons.

References:

BCG. (2015). Man and machine in industry 4.0. How Will Technology Transform the Industrial Workforce Through 2025? Retrieved from https://www.bcg.com/publications/2015/technology-business-transformation-engineered-products-infrastructure-man-machine-industry-4.aspx on 15-10-2019.

Frey, C., B., & Osborne, M. (2015). Technology at work. The future of employment and innovation.

OECD (2016). The Risk of Automation for Jobs in OECD Countries: A Comparative Analysis. OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Paper. Volume 189.

Romero, D., Bernus, P., Noran, O., Stahre, J., & Fast-Berglund, Å. (2016). The operator 4.0: human cyber-physical systems & adaptive automation towards human-automation symbiosis work systems. In IFIP international conference on advances in production management systems (pp. 677-686). Springer, Cham.