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In these last months, but the issue is not new at all, newspapers in Italy are pointing to a growing concern on job losses, as result of an increasing automation that is also becoming smarter and that is now overflowing from the factory assembly lines to percolate the whole working space. The icon of this expanding automation are the Robots.
As a matter of fact, you just need to “google” (by the way, how many people are still visiting the library to harvest information? What happened to the librarian job?) to see data that are concerning, mostly because the impact of automation is reaching jobs that would seem to have nothing to do with robots. Take the CB Insight study on the number of jobs being threatened by automation in the US:
Automated in the next 10 years:
- Cooks and servers: 4,3 million
- Cleaners: 3,8 million
- Movers and warehouse workers: 2,4 million
Automated in the next 15 years:
- Retail salesperson: 4,6 million
Automated in the next 15 years:
- Truck drivers: 1,8 million
- Construction laborers: 1,2 million
- Nurses and health aides: 6,9 million
For each of these professions there are, today, robots that can carry out those tasks:
- Restaurants with robots cooking hamburgers and robot-waiters
- Roomba robots to clean your home floors
- Robots in Amazon warehouses to pick up products from shelves and take them to a packaging robot that will deliver them to a truck heading to our home.
The first robot assisted malls are reality in Japan and in South Korea, with robots welcoming clients and walking with them as shopping assistants, robots in hotel chain, in several Countries now, including Italy and US, to serve as concierge.
Truck platoons drive on northern Sweden roads (with several reindeers and very few cars) and in the Arizona desert stretches of land, in India robots (industrial 3D printers) are building/printing whole villages. In several hospitals robots are picking up drugs from the hospital warehouse and deliver them to the patient bedpost.
Progress in artificial intelligence are scaring: they are making robots ever more flexible, enabling learning (and even self learning), empowering them to take decisions, to operate in teams and mingle with human workers, carrying out ever more complex tasks, some which were considered human turf – future proof just a decade ago.
Well, today we know that no profession is future proof, that is solely a human turf. We also know that a few professions can no longer exist without robot, like neurosurgery and astronaut (to name but two extreme cases), for “qualitative” reasons, i.e. it is impossible for a human surgeon to have the micrometre precision required in brain surgery or for a human astronaut to glide a shuttle in the re-enter path to Earth. Others require robots for “quantitative” reasons, like checking the video clip uploaded on YouTube, there are 300 hours-worth of video uploaded every single minute on YouTube. At the same time new jobs are being created, like the 10,000 hiring Google is making to assess ethical issues related to content.
The world of manufacturing and distribution (logistics) is under a dramatic upheaval, robots and more broadly automation are a crucial component of the transformation, from raw materials (robots are now the only workers in mines, and that is good given the poor working conditions in those places) to retail where products are just a click away. My click from the computer on my desk or from my phone as I ride a bus activates a robot hundreds of miles away that will move to get the product from the warehouse shelf to mail it to me.
More and more, my click activates a number of robots that will build the product to fit my requirements and other robots, possibly in different companies will take care of adding functions, packaging, and mailing it to me. Just wait a few more years and the product might be delivered to my porch by a drone.
Obviously, a changing world requires an evolving understanding from our part, we need to be prepared to something new and different. This is where education steps in, no longer confined to the first part of life but continuing throughout all professional life to stay in synch with the world. This is why the EIT is investing in professional education, and the EIT Digital that fosters the digital transformation is at the leading edge of continuous education through its Professional School.
Talking about education one might wonder if we have the capability to learn what we ned to learn! If you look at results on the average IQ of people in different professions you would discover, that shouldn’t come as a surprise, that cleaners have a top IQ that is lower than the top IQ of computer scientists or neurosurgeons. However, and this might surprise you, looking at those results you discover that a good 90% of cleaners have an IQ that is equivalent to the one of computer scientists and neurosurgeons meaning that the difference in capabilities is just the result of a difference in education. Through education we can enable anybody, statistically speaking, to face the ever-complex systems awaiting us in the coming decades.
Any Country cannot afford not investing in autonomous systems and artificial intelligence. But this investment should be flanked by investment in human intelligence, in education. It is only through this second form of investment that we can ensure robots (and artificial intelligence) will remain a tool in our hands, augmenting our capability rather than a replacement of our hands and of ourselves.
