The coming jobs crisis

Well, if you are reading this, you must be among the few persons who view this as an issue and are genuinely worried about it. Most persons simply block out the fact that a huge job crisis is awaiting us - and it’s only a few years away. It will happen in our lifetime.

Thus far, automation and technology related job cuts have majorly been in the blue-collar worker segment - manufacturing, construction and the sort. What happens when automation spreads to white-collar jobs? Harvard Business School's UPS Foundation Professor James Heskett asks these questions in his recent post.

At some point, computers can do enough to displace an entire profession like travel agents or bank tellers - then a large number of people lose their jobs and there's a lot of discussion around it. This is usually part of a long-term trend of more and more lowly jobs getting displaced, but so far, they have been small enough that the displaced people were a small fraction of the whole marketplace; they had some pain, found new jobs and life moved on. They were able to move from a routine job in one to industry to a routine job in another.  Are people going to be able to continue to find new jobs? Let’s have a look at some sectors that may or may not be impacted by this in the near future.

Banking & Finance

We are heading into a world where ubiquitous mobile computing, exponential growth in data, and continuous advances in machine learning and Artificial Intelligence will transform finance into an always-on industry. What was once a sit-down conversation between a client and their personal private banker might now be accessible through a mobile app to broad audiences, 24/7. An insurance company can incorporate far more data — from credit scores to behaviour — when it decides how risky a customer is. Think services like Uber, where paying is simple within the app. Imagine that kind of seamlessness coming to other transactions like getting a mortgage.

Technology will also continue freeing up human financial advisors from mundane tasks so that they can focus on providing uniquely human value, like coaching and mentoring. Branches and associated staff costs make up about 65% of the total retail cost base of a larger bank. Much of these jobs are at risk from automation. Branch teller jobs are particularly threatened. The number of U.S. branch tellers has declined by 15% since peaking in 2007 and these losses will accelerate because some two-thirds of bank employees are doing processing work that could eventually be automated.

Journalism

Gathering information; interviewing people; answering who, what when, where, why, and how; and writing the results. It's the daily grind for journalists. But make the information machine readable and you have the potential for disruption.

Associated Press has run an experiment of automatically creating corporate earnings reports since June 2014 with software from Automated Insights and data from Zacks Investment Research. After working through problems at the outset, the process is virtually error-free, which likely beats what humans would do. AP's sports department is using automation to generate reports for events with small audiences. The organization says it frees up staff to do more important things, helping stretch media budgets. Given the sometimes questionable level of writing demonstrated by college graduates and "the hurdle machines have to cross to out-perform humans with college degrees isn't that high." But at one time junior reporters would have done the duller work and learned basics of their craft. In less than a year, the potential pool has become smaller.

Online and Social Marketers

It doesn’t take a human to understand how to create a message that can motivate someone to make a purchase. There are already algorithms there which can determine email subject lines and understand which will get the best response. Software can reach into its database and understand all the variations of a message and create wording that will have the necessary output, working through thousands of combinations to come up with the best version.

There's also the rapidly-developing field of programmatic ad buying. Instead of having people choose where to place ads in magazines, software focuses online, using billions of pieces of information about potential subjects and targeting ads on the best prospects in real time.

Anaesthesiologists, Surgeons, and Diagnosticians

You might think that doctors represented the ultimate in hands-on expertise that had to be local, but that isn't the case. Johnson & Johnson's Sedasys system, already FDA approved, can automate delivery of low-level anaesthesia in applications like colonoscopies at the fraction of the cost of a dedicated anaesthesiologist. A doctor can supervise multiple machines at the same time to keep the human element.

Surgeons already use automated systems to aid in low-invasive procedures. Right now, the doctor is in charge, but eventually machines might do simpler procedures themselves. There have already been demonstrations of how a robotic system could potentially remove tumours from tissue. There is also at least one hair transplant robot on the market, allowing one surgeon to oversee multiple procedures at the same time.

Law Firm Associates

In large lawsuits, the discovery process can involve literally millions of documents. Reviewing such materials was traditionally one of the lower-level tasks lawyers or paralegals could face. But now, new software systems can do the job.

These systems use syntactic analysis and keyword recognition to comb through emails, texts, databases, and scanned documents to find those that one party in a lawsuit would be obliged to turn over to the other through the legal discovery process. It's also conceivable in the near future that a legally-trained (IBM) Watson might be able to construct a system with a vast store of cases and precedent and create drafts of briefs -- the sort of research and writing work generally handled by associates in law firms.

Conclusion

So who is right: the pessimists (many of them techie types), who say this time is different and machines really will take all the jobs, or the optimists (mostly economists and historians), who insist that in the end technology always creates more jobs than it destroys? The truth probably lies somewhere in between. AI will not cause mass unemployment, but it will speed up the existing trend of computer-related automation, disrupting labour markets just as technological change has done before, and requiring workers to learn new skills more quickly than in the past.

This will probably be a difficult transition – more difficult than ever before – but it won’t yet be a sharp break for employment. Whichever side of the argument you stand on, almost everyone agrees that companies and governments will need to make it easier for workers to acquire new skills and switch jobs as needed.