Will Automation make human work obsolete?

If you think about it, many of the great inventions of the last 200 years were designed to replace human labor. Tractors were developed to substitute mechanical power for human physical toil. Assembly lines were engineered to replace inconsistent human handiwork with machine perfection. Computers were programmed to swap out error-prone, inconsistent human calculation with digital perfection. These inventions have worked. We no longer dig ditches by hand, pound tools out of wrought iron or do bookkeeping using actual books.

Robots now build cars and power mechanical diggers and other “dumb” jobs. What will surprise you is how quickly “mechanical minds” are making human brain labor less in demand. Still think robots can’t do your job?

Automation and robotics will eventually take over most of the tasks, especially the labor expensive ones, as computing gets smarter.

Talk of robots making humans obsolete is generally a topic that is still laughed off as science fiction by most, but this video could get you to rethink the future of human work. It lays out a compelling case for why almost half of those currently in the work force could struggle to find work once automation takes over in the near future.

Stay updated on Telegram with latest updates from Google Home/Gemini  ecosystem.

Unlike “the singularity,” in which artificial intelligence takes over the planet in rapid and dramatic fashion, this paints a picture, backed up by statistics and current developments, indicating that the true singularity will occur gradually, with software and automations slowly erasing human jobs before we realize what’s really happening.

The analogy here is the horse and buggy in the 1900s versus the modern day car. The horse, viewed by many historians as one of the central tools aiding the advancement of human society for hundreds of years, is a perfect example of how quickly human workers can and will be rendered obsolete in favor of machine automation.

The usual idea is that the jobs that the robots will leave for humans will be those that require thought and knowledge. But according to this, the machine takeover won’t be limited to physical labor but will permeate areas such legal, medical advice and even creative arts like music, painting and writing. Toward the end, it speculates that up to 45% of the current workforce could disappear due to automation.

The analysis, peppered with examples like the development of Google Self-Driving Car Project and IBM’s Watson, is indeed thought-provoking and, in some ways, terrifying. This will fundamentally challenge your thinking as to what’s next for these robots? The point is, it’s no more a question of If, but when?

What this means for the future of work and the challenges that automation does and does not pose for our society?

Despite a century of creating machines to do our work for us, the proportion of adults in the US with a job has consistently gone up for the past 125 years. Why hasn’t human labor become redundant and our skills obsolete? Economist David Autor addresses the question of why there are still so many jobs and comes up with a surprising, hopeful answer.

There are actually two fundamental economic principles at stake. One has to do with human genius and creativity. The other has to do with human insatiability.

Stay updated on Google News with the latest updates from Google Home/Gemini ecosystem.

First of these, the O-ring principle, and it determines the type of work that we do.
Most of the work that we do requires a multiplicity of skills, and brains and brawn, technical expertise and intuitive mastery, perspiration and inspiration. In general, automating some subset of those tasks doesn’t make the other ones unnecessary. In fact, it makes them more important. It increases their economic value. In much of the work that we do, we are the O-rings.

The second principle is the never-get-enough principle, and it determines how many jobs there actually are.
O-ring, says the jobs that people do will be important. They can’t be done by machines, but they still need to be done. But that doesn’t tell, how many jobs there will need to be. If you think about it, isn’t it kind of self-evident that once we get sufficiently productive at something, we’ve basically worked our way out of a job? In 1900, 40 percent of all US employment was on farms. Today, it’s less than 2%. Why are there so few farmers today? It’s not because we’re eating less.

Our endless inventiveness and bottomless desires means that, there’s always new work to do.

A century of productivity growth in farming means that now, a couple of million farmers can feed a nation of 320 million. That’s amazing progress, but it also means there are only so many O-ring jobs left in farming. So clearly, technology can eliminate jobs. As automation frees our time, increases the scope of what is possible, we invent new products, new ideas, new services that command our attention, occupy our time and spur consumption.

While automation does replace jobs, the “reinstatement effect” – people finding new, often better, jobs to do – outweighs job losses.

The fear of robots comes from a scarcity mindset – there are only x jobs, and every robot means x-1 jobs for humans. But that’s a wrong way of thinking about the situation. We use technology to automate away our shitty jobs, and in the process, create more, better, and more fulfilling jobs elsewhere. Just like, we figured out how to grow more food. Just like I’m getting paid to sit in a room and write about robots instead of working on a farm. When AI takes my job, I’ll find something even better to do.

Interested in learning more about the Google Gemini  and Smart Home? Subscribe to WAV newsletter via Email.

There’s always this fear that the new technology will take our jobs. AI, Robots. Instead, our quality of life continues to improve and humans find new, more uniquely human and fulfilling work. As our tools improve, technology magnifies our leverage and increases the importance of our expertise and our judgment and our creativity.

How will we adjust to that change in job availability and skill sets? How best do we prepare ourselves & kids for this future?