BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Is AI Going To Be A Jobs Killer? New Reports About The Future Of Work

Following
This article is more than 4 years old.

Getty

Amazon announced last week that it will spend $700 million to train about 100,000 workers in the US by 2025, helping them move into more highly skilled jobs. The New York Times observed that with this program Amazon is acknowledging that ”advances in automation technology will handle many tasks now done by people.”

The number of jobs which AI and machines will displace in the future has been the subject of numerous studies and surveys and op-eds and policy papers since 2013, when a pair of Oxford academics, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, estimated that 47% of American jobs are at high risk of automation by the mid-2030s. Here are a few more recent examples of what has become a popular number-crunching (automated, computerized, AI-driven) exercise:

McKinsey Global Institute: between 40 million and 160 million women worldwide may need to transition between occupations by 2030, often into higher-skilled roles. Clerical work, done by secretaries, schedulers and bookkeepers, is an area especially susceptible to automation, and 72% of those jobs in advanced economies are held by women.

Oxford Economics: up to 20 million manufacturing jobs worldwide will be lost to robots by 2030.

McKinsey Global Institute: at the high end of the displacement by automation spectrum are 512 US counties, home to 20.3 million people, where more than 25% of workers could be displaced. The vast majority (429 counties) are rural areas in the Americana and distressed Americana segments. In contrast, urban areas with more diversified economies and workers with higher educational attainment, such as Washington, DC, and Durham, NC, might feel somewhat less severe effects from automation; just over 20% of their workforces are likely to be displaced.

But other reports provide a more positive take:

World Economic Forum: automation will displace 75 million jobs but generate 133 million new ones worldwide by 2022.

Gartner: AI-related job creation will reach two million net-new jobs in 2025.

McKinsey Global Institute: worldwide, with sufficient economic growth, innovation, and investment, there can be enough new job creation to offset the impact of automation, although in some advanced economies additional investments will be needed to reduce the risk of job shortages. In the US, there will be net positive job growth through 2030.

By way of explaining the more positive take on the future of work, a recent Forrester report (Future of Work) argues that “automation is not a singular trend,” and that future scenarios are influenced by the varying fortunes of a number of trends such as the gig economy, the destruction of industry boundaries, and the increasing desire for privacy and transparency. “You can argue that automation will open the aperture to new, previously unthinkable business opportunities as well as be the necessary engine to execute on business strategy,” says Forrester.

Dismissing “apocalyptic scenarios that endanger fear,” Forrester outlines its recommendations in terms of government policy (understand faster technology’s impact), economic planning (maximize opportunity while minimizing impact on local jobs), business planning (good-by graceful planning cycles, hello disruptive forces), and leadership planning (learn to manage humans and machines).  Most important, for individuals: “As much as companies must become learning institutions, so must employees become learners — learning core skills, adapting to new working models, and understanding what it means to be ready and fit for the future, maximizing their Robotics Quotient.”

Still, Forrester predicts job losses of 29% by 2030 with only 13% job creation to compensate. These kind of estimates indeed endanger fear as we can see in recent surveys of individuals and business executives. For example:

Boston Consulting Group:  67% of Chinese executives and 50% of US executives expect a reduction in the number of employees over the next 5 years due to advanced robotics (global survey of more than 1,300 executives and operations managers).

ZipRecruiter: One in five job seekers (one in three for those between the ages of 18 and 22) fear they will one day lose their job to AI (survey of more than 11,000 job seekers in the US).

A recent Gallup and Northeastern University online survey of 4,394 Americans, 3,049 Canadians and 3,208 U.K. adults found mixed attitudes towards AI, reflecting the mix of apocalyptic and human-friendly scenarios outlined above:

  • There is a general, pessimistic attitude about the impact of AI adoption on the overall economy, but adults in the U.S., U.K. and Canada remain optimistic about their own jobs.
  • Seven in ten Americans, six in ten Canadians, and six in ten U.K. residents believe the advent of artificial intelligence will eliminate more jobs than it creates.
  • When asked to assess the impact that artificial intelligence “will have on how people work and live in the next 10 years,” large majorities said the consequences will be “very” or “mostly” positive (72% in Canada, 70% in U.K., 67% in U.S.).
  • When asked about the best skills to withstand artificial intelligence, six in 10 respondents in Canada and the U.K. believe teamwork, communication, creativity, and critical thinking are most important in the new era of automation; whereas Americans are split 50-50 between those “soft” skills and technical skills like math, science, coding, and working with data.

It may well be that in this, as well as in other surveys, many respondents did not understand or were not familiar with “AI.” Says the Gallup/Northeastern report: “Despite frequent media reporting concerning AI in all three countries, adults in these nations are still confused about exactly what the technology is.”

That human intelligence tends to fail where semantics and exact meanings are involved is a fact plaguing not just surveys but also number-crunching models, future scenarios, the media, and their audiences. The Economist reports that the above-mentioned Mr. Frey, whose 2013 paper has been cited in more than 4,000 other academic papers, now says that “’Lots of people actually think I believe that half of all jobs are going to be automated in a decade or two,’… leaving half the population unemployed. That is, Mr Frey stresses, ‘definitely not what the paper says.’”

What does it say? Only that the 47% of American jobs that falls into the “high risk” category, compared with other professions, are the most vulnerable to automation. The Economist: “’We make no attempt to estimate how many jobs will actually be automated,’ the authors write. That, they underscore, will depend on many other things, such as cost, regulatory concerns, political pressure and social resistance.”

My very human intelligence fails to see the difference between a prediction that says that close to half of all jobs are high-risk and vulnerable to automation and a prediction that says that close to half of all jobs are actually going to be automated away.

This may or may not be a good example of people jumping to (the wrong) conclusions, but these highly intelligent academic nuances—and meaningless spreadsheet manipulation exercises (The Economist reports that the classification of high-risk jobs was done by a machine learning model developed by Mr. Frey’s, as if this gives it more credibility)—may explain why people have lost their confidence in higher education. The major conclusion of the Gallup/Northeastern survey is

Perhaps most surprisingly, most of the adults in all three countries would not look to higher education for the additional skills and training they would require in response to AI adoption. A majority of the public in all three countries believes large businesses and government are not “doing enough to address the need for career-long learning and training.”

Only 3% in the United States, 10% in the U.K., and 12% in Canada “strongly agree” that universities in their countries are preparing graduates for success in the current workforce. And if their skills become outdated, then strong majorities in all three countries would prefer to be educated by an employer rather than by a university, according to the Gallup/Northeastern survey.

Amazon (and other employers) to the rescue?

In the meantime, while we get trained in future-friendly skills and learn to understand better “AI” (and hopefully take apocalyptic scenarios, on any subject, with a grain of salt—or a better understanding of statistics, sampling, and model development and assumptions), here’s what happening today:

A December 2018 Dun & Bradstreet survey of AI World Conference and Expo attendees found that 40% percent of respondents' organizations are adding more jobs as a result of deploying AI within their business and only 8% are cutting jobs due to AI implementation.

Mining data from more than 50 million job postings, ZipRecruiter found that AI created three times as many jobs as it destroyed in 2018. The fastest growing jobs AI has created from 2017 to 2018 include Senior Data Scientist with an annual growth of 340% (resulting in average salaries of $257,000 according to Burtch Works), Mobile Application Developer (186%) and SEO Specialist (180%). AI is creating “a surge in new career opportunities,” says the ZipRecruiter report.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedInCheck out my website