A Robot Ate My Job!

The World Economic Forum recently over Davos for its annual pow wow. On the agenda were all kinds of delights, including some discussion of technological unemployment down to software and robots displacing human labour due to their increasing cheapness relative to human labour.

Should we all be worried? Well, it depends what line of work you're in. According to a piece on the WEF website those folks doing low-skilled jobs are at greater risk than those doing more-skilled work. Basically it breaks down to; how easily can a machine undertake a task to a customer's satisfaction?

That will be easier with lower-skilled work because it's relative repetitive and usually the boundaries of the work tasks are narrow. That means there is a process with set steps and a very simple workflow for dealing with different possibilities, and that the number of those possibilities is fairly limited. The narrower those bounds, the more easily the task can be automated.

This isn't a discussion of productivity, but rather of the difference in cost to a business of employing humans versus employing robots and software. Costs associated with human labour include payroll and employment taxes like healthcare mandates and social security, while robot and software costs will be the purchase of the goods and/or services that are the robots and software themselves from their vendors plus technical support and maintenance.

There is another cost not elaborated above. Due to incompetence humans or robots may under-perform to a degree sufficient that it puts off even long-time customers and costs the business a great deal of revenue. The trade off between human work and automation is right here. Will customers be sufficiently worse off with an automated system that they go to a competitor that uses humans for the task in question?

This could potentially scupper many automation initiatives as businesses throw money after cost-saving automation only to see their revenues fall faster than their costs. Whoopsy!

Rather bizarrely the piece reads in places like something from Salon or Mother Jones - with mention of automation being only good for the rich - and seems to be intended to alarm considering the 5 million jobs figure which will supposedly be automated away by 2020. The thing is, however, that 5 million shared between the entire OECD plus BRICS is nothing, considering the labour markets of these dozens of countries employ over 1 billion people.

The author does acknowledge an earlier piece from Business Insider that was far less hyperbolic about the likely change to the jobs landscape over the years to 2020;

WEF said in its report, entitled "The Future of Jobs," which was published on Monday, that while skills and jobs displacement will affect every industry and geographical region, these job losses can be offset by employment growth in other areas.

There is no doubt that robots and software will eventually do the vast majority of the important tasks currently undertaken by humans, but time-scales are impossible to confirm because nobody knows how long it will take to write algorithms that can account for the possible combinations of tasks taken in by any given role.

It is likely that, in fact, facets of jobs will be automated away rather than whole roles, and so the number of, say, data entry clerks will decrease but the data entry clerks will continue to exist using fewer people to achieve the same result due to process automation. This will go on and on throughout the 21st Century until nearly everything we do for ourselves today has been automated away.

When? I don't know. Worse, I have no informed idea, only a vague inkling that it'll be somewhere between 2075 and 2200. Enjoy the wait!