From the pages of In Business magazine.
Legend has it that John Henry, a “steel-driving man,” once battled head to head with a steam-powered rock drilling machine to see which was superior, man or machine. Henry won, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Upon winning his race against the revolutionary technology, Henry dropped dead, his heart giving out from stress.
There are a lot of lessons we could take away from this folk tale, but the one that seems most salient for our times is that it’s better to work with machines rather than against them. Of course, that hasn’t stopped people from worrying ever since the Industrial Revolution that machines will “steal” their jobs.
However, fearing technology does little to hold it back. Just look at the example of the Luddites, a group of 19th century English textile workers who so feared the possibility of textile machinery replacing laborers that they took to breaking into factories and destroying the machines. Eventually, their rebellion was put down by force and then by law. You can’t stand in the way of progress.
Today, the perceived threat to jobs comes in the form of more advanced machinery, robots, and artificial intelligence (AI) that can work tirelessly and “think” like a human. It can be easy for real-life concerns to turn into science-fiction fears, especially when some of the near-future workforce predictions sound so dire.
A two-year study from McKinsey Global Institute suggests that by 2030, intelligent agents and robots could replace as much as 30 percent of the world’s current human labor. McKinsey postulates that, depending upon various adoption scenarios, automation will displace between 400 and 800 million jobs by 2030, requiring as many as 375 million people to switch job categories entirely.
Additionally, McKinsey Global Institute notes 512 U.S. counties are at the high end of the displacement by automation spectrum. These counties are home to 20.3 million people, where more than 25 percent of workers could be displaced. The vast majority — 429 counties — are rural areas. In contrast, urban areas with more diversified economies and workers with higher educational attainment, such as Washington, D.C. and Durham, North Carolina, are predicted to have just over 20 percent of their workforces displaced by automation.
The fact is, all of our jobs are becoming increasingly more automated. Some occupations might become almost completely automated. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Many workers already realize this.
A recent study by Oracle and Future Workplace reveals that workers are “excited” and “optimistic” about new technologies in the office. New technologies, according to respondents, will help them master new skills (36 percent), gain more free time (36 percent), and expand their current role so that it’s more strategic (28 percent).
If anyone needs to be worried about their job security, it might be those in management. According to the same Oracle and Future Workplace study, 64 percent of those surveyed said they’d trust a robot more than they’d trust their manager.
However, “I think the case that AI is going to eat jobs is very hard to make,” says Byron Reese, tech entrepreneur, futurist, and author of The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity, who has previously spoken at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) Innovation Day in Madison. “Some employment will be disrupted by AI, but people have always adjusted and advanced. An order-taker won’t become a geneticist, of course, but the real question is: Can everybody do a job that may be a little harder than the job they now have?”
Making adjustments
The human ability to control fire, the invention of the wheel, development of language, and the advent of agriculture over countless millennia were all tech transitions in their time, often leading to the rise of civilizations, notes Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council.
“Within the past 250 years or so, technological transitions have included the shift from animal power to steam power, the assembly line, the electrification of industry, the petroleum age, and the coming of the internet,” says Still. “The shift to steam power was accomplished over a few decades, all the while creating more jobs and better jobs than were lost. Other transitions were similarly brief, and more jobs — not fewer — were invariably the result.”
Some jobs are being phased out by robotics, but newer and often better jobs are being created, adds Still. “Demographics throughout the Western world suggest there are fewer available workers. Robotics, along with related tools such as artificial intelligence, will help to fill the gap. Piece-picking robots for warehouses and order fulfillment robots are expected to be a part of a surging industrial robot market.”
Reese concurs. “The biggest technological trends in the last 250 years didn’t bump the unemployment figures. I don’t have any reason to believe that what is happening now with AI and other developments is any more or any less likely to costs jobs overall than what has happened in the past.”
That’s something with which Buckley Brinkman, executive director/CEO of the Wisconsin Center for Manufacturing and Productivity, wholeheartedly agrees.
“I think that this technology could mean that we have fewer jobs in the economy going forward, but it would be the first time in history that technology created fewer jobs rather than more,” says Brinkman. “Go all the way back — every time new technology is introduced, the need for workers has increased rather than decreased.
“We’re arguing a bit of a historical issue,” Brinkman adds. “We’re arguing the last war rather than the next one. I think we’ve already seen the hollowing out of a lot of the middle class, mainly because there are very few ways that you can earn a family-supporting income with a strong back and a good alarm clock anymore. Instead, these jobs continue to evolve and if you aren’t keeping up with the curve of technology and how it applies on the factory floor, then you’re behind the game.”
Brinkman believes Wisconsin already does a pretty good job of that, notably because employers have begun to realize it’s not as easy as it was a decade ago to replace workers with eroding skills. So, while Bill may not have the necessary skills, a possible replacement named Sue is no longer looking for a job, Brinkman notes. Therefore, companies have concluded that it’s a lot more cost effective to redeploy employees rather than cut them loose because there’s no one at the door to replace them.
“The companies that look ahead are definitely doing that,” explains Brinkman. “If you’re sitting there saying I’m bringing in this robot so that I can replace three workers and then cutting the workers loose, that’s a little short-sighted if you have a growing company. In fact, the leading companies are actually using their employees to do the research on what technology to engage, where to engage it, and the investment model behind it — the ROI. I think that’s pretty cool.”
An ounce of preparation
“We are nowhere near the time where robots can think like humans,” says Jim Goodnight, a former statistics professor at North Carolina State University and now the head of the SAS Institute, who is considered by many to be the Godfather of AI. “That is an era far into the future. In today’s world humans are [still] needed to train these machines to recognize images and analyze data.”
This is an area that Nick Myers, founder and CEO of RedFox AI in Madison, is familiar with. RedFox AI works with medium to enterprise-level brands to leverage the power of AI and voice-assistant technologies like Alexa and Google Assistant.
“The state of AI right now is a very interesting one,” explains Myers. “We are at a point where we finally have access to enough data to be able to train AI models to accomplish specific tasks extremely well. [However,] we are nowhere near human-level intelligence with machines that we have seen in pop culture such as the HAL 9000, Skynet, and that crazy AI from I, Robot.”
Myers notes that yes, machines and AI will inevitably outmode jobs. Any job that currently works directly with large quantities of data — finance/accounting, data analytics/scientists, health care, etc. — are all at risk of having AI and machines do it better. However, with lost jobs, new jobs will come into existence that we don’t even know that we need yet.
According to a recent study from the World Economic Forum, automation is expected to displace 75 million jobs but create 133 million new jobs. Myers has a presentation, “AI: An End to Work As We Know It,” in which he stresses to people that the best way to prepare for this next transition into a new age of technology, AI, and automation is to self-educate and analyze which skills are needed to insulate themselves from the inevitable.
“AI isn’t going to destroy every job as we know it,” states Myers. “It is going to augment a lot of current work and make it possible for us to finally focus on meaningful tasks and work that actually matters versus having to focus our energy in menial tasks that don’t yield the greatest return.”
When it comes to any new technology, education should always be at the forefront, notes Myers. Companies have a habit of falling into “shiny object syndrome,” he explains, where they see a new piece of technology or a new software as a service (SaaS) platform that they think they need to deploy right away. However, the greatest pitfall is when companies deploying some of these new technologies do so without understanding what the technology is and why it matters — and more specifically not understanding what problem, if any, they are trying to solve by deploying the technology.
“With this in mind, education is the most important thing that companies can invest in today to begin helping their senior leadership and employees understand what these technologies are, how they work, and how the technology can solve real problems that can be tracked and measured,” says Myers.
In conjunction with this, there is also going to be a massive skills gap in the coming decade between skilled workers who understand how to work with these technologies and those who have fallen behind, cautions Myers. A Deloitte report estimates that the growing skills gap could leave 2.4 million positions unfilled between 2018 and 2028 with a potential economic impact of $2.5 trillion. In order to survive in the new age, companies will have to address this growing problem, and in order stay employable, employees are going to need to either learn how to adjust in a world fueled by these technologies or learn new skills to be able to work with them directly.
Myers explains that some of the learning curve could be reduced as younger professionals, who implicitly trust AI over a human, rise through the workforce.
“Katie McMahon from SoundHound recently coined the term ‘Generation V’ which stands for Generation Voice,” says Myers. “The youngest generation of today will not know a world where Alexa or Google Assistant didn’t exist to help them accomplish tasks in their daily lives. Voice is actively reshaping the development of these younger generations and is going to have a massive societal and socioeconomic impact across the board. As voice assistants continue to become more human-like and are able to become more ubiquitous in our daily lives helping us to accomplish more and more tasks, I think we will enter an age where we inevitably trust the technology more than other human beings.
“Humans are flawed and can make mistakes, adds Myers. “In a world where data is everything and AI and voice are ubiquitous, it will be very rare for [AI] to make mistakes as often as human beings.”
In the end, perhaps that’s where we might see the greatest impact from AI on the workforce — rather than humans learning from our own mistakes, we’ll be learning from our mistake-free machines instead.
Imagine the possibilities.
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