The anticipated recovery has not brought the unemployment rate down significantly in the US and most advanced countries. The reason is that many manufacturers are driving to improve productivity through increased spending on automation because it is cheaper, and requires fewer people. So, regardless of how the economy fares, employment will not return to previous levels.
Two hundred years ago, 70% of American workers lived on farms. Automation eliminated all but 1% of their jobs, replacing them with machines. But, the industrial revolution created hundreds of millions of new jobs in entirely new industries. The erstwhile farmers started working in the factories that produced automobiles, appliances, televisions and other new-age industrial products. Successive new occupations replaced old types of work. Most people were working at jobs that farmers of the 1800s could not have imagined.
Today, that scenario is being repeated. 70% of today’s occupations will steadily be replaced by automation. It is just a matter of time. This next wave of automation is centered around artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, cheap sensors, and the pervasive Internet.
Fast emerging intelligent automation will consolidate advances in already automated industries and steadily affect all types of jobs. Robots able to lift large loads without getting tired will replace humans in all types of manufacturing, warehouse and repetitive work. Fruit and vegetable picking will be robotised – because new machines will be cheaper, more effective and less troublesome than humans.
There is already extensive artificial intelligence in many machines, though it may not be called that. Any job dealing with lots of paperwork will be taken over by machines, including a lot of medical routines. Even surgery will become increasingly robotic – not because it is cheaper, but because machines are more effective and reliable, and can do more than most human doctors.
All routine information intensive activities will become automated – doctors, lawyers, architects, reporters, even computer programmers. The switch to intelligent machines will be everywhere. It has already begun.
To better understand the impact of technology on jobs, the Associated Press analysed employment data from 20 countries and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, and workers who are competing with smarter machines. They found that almost all the jobs disappearing are in industries that pay middle-class wages, ranging from $38 000 to $68 000. These are jobs that are the backbone of the middle-class in the developed countries of Europe, North America and Asia.
In the United States, half of the 7,5 million jobs lost during the Great Recession paid middle-class wages; the numbers are even grimmer in Europe. A total of 7,6 million mid-level jobs disappeared in those countries from January 2008 through June 2012. Those jobs were replaced, in most cases, by machines and software that can do the same work better and cheaper.
The questions remain: Where will new middle-class employment emerge? Or, will the middle-class simply disappear?
Everything connected via smartphones and tablets
For several years now, we have discussed the Pervasive Internet and the Internet of Things (IoT), a world where nearly everything will be connected to everything else. In the past, this was just an idea. But now, it is starting to emerge almost everywhere. It is becoming reality.
More and more connected things are accessible via smartphones and tablets. This is because hardware intelligence by itself is useless without being connected for display and control by the user. Connected gadgets can be modified, programmed and used to display and control most of the variables in the environment. The hardware used to be a standalone device. But it becomes vastly more useful when connected.
These smart connections are expanding rapidly in the realm of smart health and personal sensors. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) the pavilion for the smart/connected health area was huge – body sensor products gathered information that was displayed with smartphone apps. The hardware was more than just hardware.
This is where most technology applications are headed. Because of the rapid worldwide adoption of smartphones and tablets, they function as the device to display, interact and record almost everything. The hardware is made smarter through the connections and applications that add value.
The addition of intelligence to vehicles has already started happening and within just a few years from now, cars will contain more than 50% more smarts than they did just five years ago. As we have discussed, the cars of the future will indeed be able to drive themselves.
Similar changes are also happening in other aspects of our lives, in factories, transportation, school systems, stadiums and other public venues. Embedded processing is everywhere.
The pieces of the technology puzzle are coming together to accommodate the Pervasive Internet sooner than most people expect. Just as the Internet phenomenon happened not so long ago and caught like wildfire, the Internet of Things (IoT) will touch every aspect of our lives.
Are you ready for it?
Jim Pinto is an industry analyst and commentator, writer, technology futurist and angel investor. His popular e-mail newsletter, JimPinto.com eNews, is widely read (with direct circulation of about 7000 and web-readership of two to three times that number). His areas of interest are technology futures, marketing and business strategies for a fast-changing environment, and industrial automation with a slant towards technology trends.
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