Robots replacing human labor isn’t a future, it’s happening right now and will happen within your business some time over the next five years. Of course we all think that professions will be safe, but actually some of them are the least safe. A car repair mechanic may have a safer job than a lawyer or doctor.
First a few headlines. Foxconn, the unknown name in China that employs 110,000 people to manufacture the latest trendy iPhones and Samsung phones, has just replaced 60,000 people with assembly robots. That is the same as many of our largest multi-nationals just laying off their entire workforce. Similarly Adidas will be indirectly making thousands of workers in Southeast Asia less busy by moving production back to Germany – but this time the factories will be full of robots. In fact Adidas will be building a number of factories of this nature so that customers can create their own shoe designs, to be delivered a few days later. The whole industry of sweat-shops in various emerging economies is in for a wholesale change – robots in, and people out. In fact the genre of robots has its own name – sewbots. Other industries will be similarly affected.
Traditionally such events could be smugly ignored by business managers and professionals of all types, but this is no longer the case. Lawyers for example will find that an ‘artificial-intelligence attorney’ created using IBM’s Watson technology is already in use. Law firm Baker and Hostetler in the US will be using ‘ROSS’ in its bankruptcy division. ROSS reads and draws inferences from existing law to answer questions about specific cases. Will it speed up work? Yes of course. Will it mean fewer lawyers are needed? – you bet. Teachers are already being aided by AI, and students in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing did not realize that one of the assistants named Jill Watson’ was an AI program.
The investment community is investing heavily in artificial intelligence and robotics applications. Thousands of new startups address every conceivable business application, and offer capabilities that are already superior to those of humans. AI will identify the best sales prospects with an accuracy that beats even the best salesperson.
All of this does of course raise the obvious question – if people have no work, what is the point of making stuff if they cannot afford to buy it? This is why notions such as Universal Basic Income are being discussed. People get a certain base level of income even if they do not work. To borrow a line from Hotel California (by The Eagles) – “this could be heaven, or this could be hell”. It all depends on how government handle it