The Rise of Automation: How Robots Are Reshaping the Workforce

The Evolution of Human Labor

For millennia, humans have relied on hunting and gathering for survival. But our inherent laziness combined with intelligence led us to create tools to make work easier. From sticks to plows to tractors, we've transformed food production from an all-hands endeavor to one that requires very few people, yet produces abundance.

This pattern of using technology to reduce human effort extends far beyond agriculture. For thousands of years, we've been developing tools to minimize physical labor of all kinds. These "mechanical muscles" are stronger, more reliable, and less prone to fatigue than human muscles. This has been largely positive, freeing up human time and energy for specialization and improving living standards across the board.

The Rise of Mechanical Minds

Just as mechanical muscles reduced demand for human physical labor, we're now seeing mechanical minds reduce demand for human mental labor. This represents a new economic revolution. While it may seem like we've been through similar transitions before, this time is fundamentally different.

Old vs. New Automation

When we think of automation, we often picture large, specialized, expensive, and fairly unintelligent robots - the kind used in car manufacturing plants. This older form of automation, while disruptive, was limited in its applications due to high costs and inflexibility.

The new wave of automation is exemplified by robots like Baxter. Unlike its predecessors, Baxter:

• Can see its environment
• Learns tasks by watching humans perform them
• Costs less than the average annual salary of a human worker
• Is not pre-programmed for a single task, but can perform a variety of general tasks

This shift towards general-purpose, affordable robots mirrors the evolution of computers. Just as cheap, versatile computers became essential for nearly everything, general-purpose robots are poised to transform countless industries.

The Economics of Robot Labor

Even if a robot like Baxter operates at only a fraction of human speed, it can still be cost-effective when it's a hundred times cheaper to run. Baxter consumes only pennies worth of electricity per hour, compared to human workers earning minimum wage.

We've already seen less sophisticated robots replace jobs in modern retail stores. Where 30 humans once worked, now a single person oversees 30 robotic cash registers. This pattern is set to repeat across many sectors.

Transportation Revolution: The Rise of "Autos"

Self-driving cars, or "autos," represent one of the most visible and imminent disruptions. These vehicles have already logged hundreds of thousands of miles on California roads without human intervention. The question isn't if they'll replace human drivers, but how quickly.

Self-driving technology doesn't need to be perfect, just better than humans. Considering that human error causes 40,000 deaths annually in the US alone, the bar for improvement is unfortunately low.

But calling these vehicles "cars" undersells their potential, much like calling early automobiles "horseless carriages." Let's consider them as "autos" - solutions for moving things from point A to point B. Small autos can work in warehouses, while massive ones can operate in open-pit mines.

The transportation sector in the US alone employs about 3 million people. Extrapolating globally, we're looking at perhaps 70 million jobs at risk. These jobs won't disappear overnight, but the economic incentives for companies to adopt this technology are enormous.

For many transportation companies, human labor accounts for about a third of total costs. This includes not just wages, but also costs associated with human limitations like sleep requirements, accidents, and human error. Insurance companies are likely to favor this transition, as perfect drivers who never cause accidents are ideal from their perspective.

White-Collar Automation

It's easy to look at developments like self-driving vehicles and think that as long as technology eliminates low-skill jobs we don't want humans doing anyway, people will simply move into more specialized, higher-education roles. But even white-collar work isn't safe from automation.

If your job involves sitting at a screen, typing, and clicking, robots are coming for your job too. Software robots are intangible, faster, and much cheaper than physical robots. And because white-collar jobs tend to be more expensive from a company's perspective, the incentive to automate them is even greater than for low-skill jobs.

Automation engineers - skilled programmers whose entire job is to replace your job with a software robot - are at the forefront of this transition. While you might think that even the smartest automation engineer couldn't create a robot to do your specific job, the cutting edge of programming isn't smart programmers coding robots, but smart programmers coding robots that teach themselves how to do things the programmer could never teach them to do.

Examples of White-Collar Automation

1. Stock Trading: The stock market is largely no longer a human job. It's mostly self-taught robots trading stocks with other self-taught robots. These aren't robots executing orders according to human-directed strategies, but robots deciding what to buy and sell on their own. As a result, the floor of the New York Stock Exchange is no longer filled with human traders - it's largely a TV studio.

2. Journalism: If you've picked up a newspaper recently, you've likely read an article written by a robot. There are now companies that teach robots to write anything from sports articles and product specifications to quarterly earnings reports.

3. Legal Work: While it's easy to imagine lawyers primarily engaged in dramatic courtroom battles, most legal work involves drafting documents, predicting case outcomes, and discovery - reviewing boxes of papers to find relevant information. Much of this can be automated. Discovery, in particular, is already no longer a human job in many law firms. This isn't because there's less paperwork to sift through - there's more than ever - but because intelligent search robots can examine millions of emails, memos, and records in hours instead of weeks, outperforming their human counterparts not just in cost and speed, but crucially, in accuracy.

The Automation of Professions

Even highly skilled professions aren't immune to the march of automation. IBM's Watson, famous for defeating human champions on Jeopardy!, is now focused on becoming the world's best doctor. It's already providing consultations for lung cancer treatments at Sloan Kettering.

As with self-driving cars, robot doctors don't need to be perfect - they just need to make fewer mistakes than humans. Given the alarming frequency and severity of misdiagnoses by human doctors, and the limitations of human knowledge in dealing with complex medical histories and drug interactions, there's significant room for improvement.

While human doctors can improve through experience, robot doctors can learn from the experiences of every other robot doctor, instantly incorporate the latest medical research, and monitor the outcomes of all their patients worldwide, finding correlations impossible to deduce any other way.

Creative Work and Automation

Many people assume that creative jobs are safe from automation, but this may be an overly optimistic view. While creativity might seem magical, it's not. The mind is a complex machine - perhaps the most complex in the universe - but that hasn't stopped us from trying to replicate it.

There's a theory that just as mechanical muscles allowed us to move into mental work, mechanical minds will allow us to move into creative work. But even if we assume the human mind is creative in some magical way (which it isn't, but for the sake of argument), creativity isn't what most jobs depend on.

The number of writers, poets, directors, actors, and artists who can support themselves through their work represents a tiny fraction of the workforce. And because these jobs depend on popularity, they will always represent a small percentage of the population.

Moreover, even creative tasks are beginning to be automated. The background music you might be hearing while reading this article was composed by a robot named Emily Howell, capable of creating an infinite number of unique compositions. In blind tests, people can't distinguish between her work and that of human composers.

The Scale and Speed of Change

It's crucial to understand that this isn't science fiction - these robots are here now. There's an alarming amount of automation already at work in laboratories and warehouses around the world.

While we've been through economic revolutions before, the robot revolution is different. Horses aren't unemployed now because they got lazy as a species - there's little work a horse can do that pays for its housing and food. Many humans may find themselves in the same position, not because they've done anything wrong, but because the economy has no need for their labor.

If you think modern jobs will save us, consider this final point: In 1776, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics tracked only a handful of jobs. Now there are hundreds, but the modern ones don't represent a large portion of the workforce. Looking at a list of jobs ranked by the number of people who perform them is sobering. Transportation-related jobs top the list, and examining the rest, we find that nearly all of these jobs existed in some form a hundred years ago, and almost all are easy targets for automation.

We don't need to wait for every barista or office worker to lose their job before this becomes a problem. During the Great Depression, unemployment reached 25%. The jobs we've discussed today alone have the potential to push unemployment above this figure in the near future.

Conclusion: Planning for an Automated Future

This isn't about the horror of automation, but its inevitability. Automation is a means of creating abundance with minimal effort. We need to start planning now for what we'll do when a significant portion of the population is unemployable through no fault of their own.

What will we do in a future where, for most jobs, humans need not apply?

Article created from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU