I predict that the rate of automation will actually slow down, because we have been picking the low-hanging fruit first. We will NEVER be at a point where even 50% of our citizens are unemployed due to automation. I’d be surprised if we saw the unemployment rate drop by more than a few percentage points because of automation.
I have been having this debate since the 1980’s in college. The robot apocalypse was always 10-20 years away. And 35 years later, it still is…
Humans have general intelligence and judgement. AI’s do not. They can do very specific things very well, but they can’t improvise or adapt in a general way.
There seems to be a misconception that workers are just drones mindlessly carrying out the plans set down from on high. That information flow in a company goes one way - from the planners and the deciders on top, down to the worker bees. If those bees could all be replaced by robots, we couldn’t need jobs any more.
But that’s not the way organizations actually work. Information flows two ways. Decisions get made on top, then when they are implemented there is a feedback loop where the workers either adapt to flaws in the plan (there are ALWAYS flaws in grand plans), or they tell their supervisors what can or can’t be done, and the plan is modified accordingly. Sometimes they actually find better ways to do things, because the planners don’t know what they know, and the process gets improved.
If you want to see what happens when the ‘worker bees’ just mindlessly follow the plan regardless of whether it makes sense, watch what happens to any organization when its workers go on a ‘work to rule’ strike. Even with a corporation, the day-to-day activities are far too difficult to perfectly plan, and managers absolutely require that people be able to modify things that don’t work or report them back. Robots won’t do that. Robots always ‘work to rule’.
I have visited many factories, and looked at many production plans. None of them actually match what’s going on on the factory floor. There are always little exceptions, things missed by the planners, that the workers are smart enough to work around. One of the hardest things about automation is covering the last 1% of exceptions that prevent humans from being taken out of the loop. Elon Musk tried to build a ‘dark’ factory that was just robots. He failed. He then admitted that automation is far harder than he thought it would be - especially for complex products.
Take the example of truck driver -a favourite candidate for a job that will go away soon. After all, when driving is automated, who needs human truckers?
Except truck drivers do a LOT more than drive the truck. They are responsible for making sure loads are loaded in order, secured properly, and correct. They act as agents for the trucking company, or are self-employed. They are security for the load, they learn to detect incipient problems with the truck. They deal with emergencies, and have to handle situations like road accidents where police are controlling traffic with visual indications. Sometimes they have to go off-plan, like when they get to a customer’s site and the load isn’t ready, or a vehicle is blocking the loading docks.
I could go on and on. A million little decisions requiring judgement. The ability to improvise when necessary. These types of characteristics are crucial in many jobs, even if 90% of the time the job is rote. It’s the times when it’s not that automation will fail you.
Also, you have to look at the environment around the truckers. Before you can automate you need fully digitized processes. You need common databases. You need commonality in loading systems, and probably new systems for allowing automated vehicles to handle things like construction zones, accident zones, road damage and the rest. An ad-hoc, patchwork system cannot be automated. But it can be run by people. A lot of our systems today are like that. Container shipping did that - they standardized processes to allow for automating of loading and unloading. Containers are all uniform in size, attach points, etc. It took decades to get to that level of standardization. And even now, lots of people work on those loading docks.
Will will see a LOT more automation. But we will also see demand for more workers. That’s been the pattern ever since the Luddites tried to shut down automated weaving, and there’s nothing fundamentally different about automation today - except that now the people being effected have social media to complain about it, and the jobs under threat now are the jobs held by influential people instead of, say, millions of agricultural workers.
Or as the saying goes, if immigrants were primarily made up of competition for politicians and lawyers, the borders would be closed tighter than a drum. Automation was good so long as it was destroying the jobs of farmers and assembly line workers, but now that it’s coming for the accountants, lawyers, professors and other intellectuals, suddenly it’s a major crisis.
; but he rarely has to invent new techniques on the spot like, say, a software engineer, a particle physicist or a chef has to. Both plumber and surgeon take the majority their solutions to problems from a pre-learned, pre-trained toolbox, applying whichever one will/should fit their immediate circumstances.