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Automation ↔ Jobs


Automation ↔ Jobs

 

(On a Lighter Note!)
The often debated question is will excessive automation result in greater unemployment. There have been a lots of opinion on both sides of the natural threshold, with the optimistic opinion being that “automation has always been there and what has been observed that depending on the situation people very quickly up-skilled them selves and found employment” and the pessimistic opinion being “automation is going to result in a great number of people being unemployed”. The truth probably laying somewhere in between! Automation is surely going to have an effect on people but it might not he as bad as it is being pictured! Likely Scenario (shallow view)!
Less Likely → All jobs taken over by Machines | AI | automation
More Likely → Most jobs assisted by Machine | AI | Automation
Most Likely → The jobs that humans really want to outsource to machines!
A quick look around shows that jobs can be classified into one of these few buckets
  • Teaching → coaching → tutoring
  • Exploration → Scientific → Inventions → planning → design
  • Transportation → Food, people (train | taxi | ship | airplane)
  • Cleanliness | Maintenance → Home help – cleaning
  • Food → Agriculture, distribution, preparation
  • Health → doctor, nursing, operations, health check
  • Build → living spaces, infrastructure
  • Entertainment → plays, music, movies, games
  • Security → nation, personal, cyber, policing
  • Finance → Wealth creation
  • Environment → Welfare, earth|moon|Mars, people
and it is something that we can also classify as being (a) repetitive, (b) need based, (c) new, (d) dangerous, (e) fun (f) tiring or manual and (g) that requiring empathy.
Clearly not all the jobs that humans do today are going to be taken away by machines.
Most likely, the current jobs that are repetitive, systematic, mundane are the ones that are easier for a machine to be taught | learn so that the machine can perform and hence invariably are the ones at stake (take-it-by-machine). And then there are jobs that are dangerous, tiring which humans might want to willing offload it to machine without a second thought. So the kind of jobs that are at stake, which we will see go from humans to machine are of the type repetitive, systematic, mundane, dangerous, tiring (give-it-to-machine).
Now what percentage of the current set of jobs that we do are in this “take-it-by-machine” and “give-it-to-machine” is something that is a matter of statistics which I did not care to check, but my guess is it is a large percentage depending on which part of the (developing, developed, under developed) world you are from. From the developed country perspective the human from the developing economy are the machine or automating (humanoid!) that we are talking about. So in some sense automation is already taking away jobs, it is not difficult to sense that the “economics of the job” is the aspect that is moving jobs from developed to developing shores.
Point to be noted is that there might be jobs that machines can do (meaning humans can train a machine to do the job) but they will only be taken away by machines if they can do it faster and it costs less to operate them. Automation is going to get human jobs only when they can do it correctly (error free leaning!) and economically (cost lesser than the cost incurred when a human does the job).
What is the cost of a machine to do a job? Well it includes intellectual property cost + electricity to run the algorithm + infrastructure to maintain the machine + development cost + machine maintenance cost + people cost of people who look after this job doing machine. As a consequence automation is going to go get the human job only if they can do it economically. Remember that a true businessman will usually look beyond short term. So machine will replace if and only if they are economic over a long period of time.
I believe most machine will turn out to be more expensive than human in the long run (proof?). So the only jobs that will get taken by the machines (in all probability) are the ones that the humans want to willingly give it away, the ones that are dangerous, tiring etc.

To Think About
  • What if humans could “feed directly” on solar energy – would we still care about jobs?
  • What work that I do today that I would like to outsource to a machine?
    • If there was a clause “once outsourced you can not undo it” would I still outsource it?
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