IEEE Future Directions
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The idea that robots are killing job is easy to understand. A robot comes and it can replace you by doing the same things you used to do, without stopping, without complaining and without distraction at a constant quality. You may get sick and the robot may break down but it is usually quicker to fix a robot than to “fix” you. Besides, a spare robots can take over in a matter of hours, minutes, seconds…
The sole barrier is the cost of the robot versus your cost and the balance is rapidly shifting towards the robot.
Yet, statistics comparing the introduction of robots in industrial processes (manufacturing) in the US do not show a correlation between increment in the number of robots and loss of jobs, quite the contrary. The increase in production efficiency brought by robotization of manufacturing goes hand in hand with a decrease of unemployent rate.
Clearly the situation, and the analyes that would be required, is much more complex. It is obvious that many robots are replacing workers. It is not obvious that the loss of jobs is matched by new job creation nor that the people losing their job to a robot can find a job among the new ones created.
At macro level we might say that the capital intensive introduction of robots in manufacturing can be justified by the increase in production, which in turns requires increase sale and a market able to afford the buying. This is part of a virtuous spiral: production growth, market growth, wealth (GDP) growth.
In general we see that robots are not the real job killers. What kills jobs the most is the transformation of the value chains.
Different sectors are likely to see different penetration of robots and different substitutions of workers with robots (see graph).
Think about the ecommerce. True, Amazon warehouses are highly robotised and require far less human jobs than a warehouse of the past, but the real job loss is in the retail sector as the value chain is transformed and people are no longer going to stores to buy goods.
How can one respond to that? Well, one needs to transform the retail sector by creating new reasons, and a new perceived value, for customers to go shopping in malls and in stores. Recently Apple made a point by “reinventing” the store experience. Their stores are profitable and they foster on line shopping as well. Their stores employ some 80,000 Apple employees (in the US since 2008) and an estimated 450,000 jobs have been created in the US supplier market plus an additional 1,530,000 jobs created in the Apple stores ecosystem. That is 2 million jobs in retail created by reinventing the store, just in the US.
