Why People Who Think Their Job Is Safe From AI And Robotics Are Wrong
The only people who will be safe (financially) from AI and robotics are the people who own and build AI and robots. And possibly the robot repair people. Everyone else is in for a rude awakening. We can imagine a day care worker is a job safe from robots because nobody wants their children raised by robots. Unfortunately that won't be enough.
AI and robotics are already revolutionizing entire industries. For example AI is making programmers vastly more productive and allowing non-programmers to create useful software. Manufacturing jobs are increasingly automated, a long time trend that is now seriously accelerating. In creative fields AI-generated images and movies are reducing the need for models, actors and even entire movie studios.
An example of the impact of using AI to do the work of customer service:
High paying jobs are actually the most vulnerable as eliminating them results in higher cost savings for businesses. Wall Street will be decimated as AI will be able to beat most (or all) humans at trading.
What do high paid managers do? No seriously, what do high paid managers do somebody tell me. Make decisions I guess. But AI is already better at making decisions that most managers. And marketing and advertising? AI can do all of that, from concept to slick television commercials.
Human jobs will not disappear entirely, but the number of people needed to do them is dropping and will continue to drop. Click here and check out watch robots can do these days, including a cart-wheel, incredible.
Julia McCoy from FirstMovers.AI talks about "An Army of One", where one employee does the work of an entire team.
Another video where they talk about what AI can do and will be doing more of: augmenting people helping them do more. As some people get more productive, business will need fewer employees:
Here's the kicker: AI and robotics taking over more and more jobs will have a massive ripple effect. Fewer jobs mean more people competing for the remaining positions. This competition isn't limited to automated industries – it spills over into everything. Childcare workers might not be replaced by robots but their wages will fall as displaced workers from other industries flood into the field, desperate for employment. This pattern will be universal. More workers competing for fewer jobs means lower wages for everyone. Even worse, as there are fewer jobs people will have less money to spend, harming the economy, resulting in fewer jobs.
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Yes, yes, automation will drive down the cost of things - but will it be enough? I don’t know, my gut says no. We already live in a society where much of what we do doesn’t all a lot of value.
Take marketing for example, marketing is a net-negative, we are worse off because of marketing. All it does it get in our faces, convince us to buy things of poor quality that we don’t need anyway, and add a lot of cost on top of everything. Marketing sucks. Personally I boycott advertising, I refuse to read it, look at it or listen to it. If I need something I will research it, no ads required.
Our owners will do just fine of course.
Some will argue that technological advances have always created new jobs. I don’t know if that was every really true, definitely not for some time now. The trend for at least the last 40 years has been well-paying jobs being replaced by shittier paying jobs. AI and robotics accelerates this trend greatly. The rich keep getting richer, plus more and more powerful.
The pace at which robot technology is advancing matches that of AI:
One job that is safe: dog walker. Dogs love humans, don't like robots. Maybe we can all become dog walkers, we’re just going to need a lot more dogs.