What the Next 10 Years of Automation Means for Job Market

After decades of subtle developments that largely went unnoticed by much of the working world, artificial intelligence (AI) has taken center stage in the last 2-3 years as a “hot” technology.

From Google’s surge of acquisitions (DeepMind, Boston Dynamics, etc.), to increased venture capital attention, to the safety concerns of Elon Musk and Bill Gates about potentially super-intelligent AI, the field is undeniably back in the spotlight.
One of the most pressing concerns for those of us in the working world is the effect of automation on job security — in both blue-collar and white-collar work.

Though more far-out considerations are difficult to predict, many experienced computer science researchers feel reasonably comfortable speaking about AI’s influence in the coming 5-10 years. With so much potentially unfounded speculation about how automation might influence the nature and demand for human work, I decided to ask six artificial intelligence PhDs about their informed perspectives on how AI might impact the job market in the coming decade. Their answers didn’t share much commonality in terms of industry, but they did share a common thread: The expanded or strengthened use of existing algorithms.

One wide swath of jobs that may be most easily automated are likely to be jobs that involve narrow and repetitive manipulation or assessment of data. Irfan Essa at Georgia Tech focuses his research on machine vision, a domain that has developed markedly in the last 10 years. “Many fields were AI could be applied have been in ‘aggregation mode’ for quite some time, and now we’re finally getting to a point of sense-making,” says Essa.

While identifying human faces, or categorizing web images (identifying animals, landmarks, objects) was once the arduous job of human beings, many of these tasks can now be automated by trained neural networks (Google’s Peter Norvig explains this process rather well).

Visual data is far from being the only area of narrowly focused intelligence that might be under siege. Martin Ford (author of the well-received book Rise of the Robots) mentions that in the coming 10 years, we’re likely to see more automated job displacement in white-collar jobs rather than blue-collar. There is ongoing debate as to whether or not technological advancements inherently create more job market opportunities than they destroy.

Daniel Berleant agrees, stating the current difficulties of “mobility is undeniably a rather difficult technical problem, and computers are more likely to manipulate data better than humans than they are to take over most manual labor jobs, at least for the time being.” Despite the impressive developments in bipedal robots in the last 10 years, people with dexterous physical jobs such as moving furniture or carrying plates in a busy restaurant aren’t likely to be automated out of a job anytime soon.  (Although there is now a robot hotel and café in Japan).

Some researchers believe that the same might be said of narrow data assessment, not just data manipulation. Andras Kornai states, “IBM is moving Watson into the medical field — I expect the same thing to happen in the legal area.” Though it may be possible that machine learning will aid in the detection of cancer or other maladies in medical imaging, these technologies don’t seem likely to put doctors out of a job.

Long story short, if a large portion of your time at work involves tinkering with spreadsheets, there is likely to be software that will perform your job faster and cheaper than human labor. Marc Andreessen put this in intelligible terms in his “software eating the world” WSJ interview, and it’s worth understanding if you plan on being employed in 2025. However, the influence of AI in the coming decade may imply an expansion beyond the “narrow” focuses that it’s best known for (i.e., analyzing images, beating silly humans at chess, etc.), and some of the AI experts I’ve interviewed seem to think that people are becoming comfortable handing over that control.

Among other sectors, the immediate impact on the job market for motor vehicle operation would be hit the hardest. “There are a million cab drivers in the United States alone — that might be a million people without a job” says Kornai. In addition to direct unemployment for folks in truck driving or taxi driving positions, there also could be a drastic decrease in demand for car ownership if cars can be ubiquitously accessed for transportation with the push of a button on an app.

Car manufacturers might be fighting over a much smaller market of individuals who still wish for a car of their own — or they would battle over who’s autonomous fleets are employed in the most cities. Manufacturing demand for vehicles seems destined to decline sharply under these circumstances.

What does seem clear is that there are important current automation and AI trends with existing algorithms and technologies that are likely to only have a greater job-market influence in the coming decade, and they are worth keeping an eye on. Maybe machine vision can help us with that.
Techcrunch: http://tcrn.ch/1NqNaps