Pt 2 - How automation is transforming the global economy

In an earlier article, we discussed how automation has already clawed its grip in Manufacturing, Transportation and the service sector, but however, disruption by innovation was most expected in these sectors as they were over buried with redundant tasks which can be easily trained to a machine.

In the continued article, we will discuss new sectors which were unseen to the threat of automation but are already under the woes of it; most felt in the west.

1) Law

Consider the legal profession. Many of the tasks currently performed by lawyers, paralegals, and legal secretaries are pretty formulaic. Whether they’re preparing real estate contracts, rental agreements, divorce settlements or wills, these tasks usually involve taking a boilerplate legal document, slightly adapting it to the needs of the client and filling in the blanks with the correct information. With the help of algorithmic software, online legal platforms like RocketLawyer, LegalZoom, and LawDepot can do this work automatically by just asking clients a few simple questions.

More sophisticated tasks are also beginning to be automated. In 2016, BakerHostetler, one of the largest law firms in the United States, “hired” a robotic lawyer named Ross. Powered by IBM’s Watson supercomputer, Ross can sift through thousands of legal documents in hundreds of databases and make independent decisions about which ones would be most useful to winning a particular case.

As a result of automation, 31,000 law-related jobs have been lost in the United Kingdom alone, and another 114,000 will probably disappear in the next two decades. Meanwhile, in the United States, two out of three lawyers could either lose their jobs or see them radically changed in the next 15 years. For example, instead of writing legal documents themselves, human lawyers will just be proofreading and editing documents written by robots like Ross.

This is all troubling news if you’re working in the legal profession – but there’s a bright side if you’re a consumer. In the past, only affluent people could afford legal services, such as writing prenuptial agreements. Automation will lower the costs of these services, making them accessible to lower-income people.

2) Banking

The more banking is conducted online with the help of algorithms, the less the industry needs human workers.

Nowadays, when you need to do your banking, it’s possible to go for years without ever having to visit a physical branch of your bank. You can update your information and carry out transfers online, and you can deposit and withdraw money from an ATM.

Now, remember the meaning of the acronym ATM: Automated Teller Machine. The tasks that are performed by an ATM used to be the exclusive job of human tellers. Those tellers still exist, of course, but in lower numbers today than in yesteryear, thanks to ATMs.

In other words, automation has already been present in the commercial banking industry for quite some time, and it’s going to continue gaining steam in the years ahead. To understand why it’s helpful to recall the reasons that banks exist in the first place.

This is a bit of an oversimplification, but one of their essential jobs is to handle money. Now, modern societies are increasingly becoming “cashless” as more and more financial transactions are conducted electronically through credit cards and the like. As the modern economy moves away from physical money (cash), it also moves away from needing physical places to deal with that money (bank branches). Many companies in the banking industry are taking note of this fact and ditching physical banks altogether. The result: entirely virtual banks, such as Schwab.com and Robinhood.com, which are largely run by automated computing systems powered by sophisticated algorithms.

You don’t need to be a number-crunching banker to figure out that fewer bank branches equal fewer banking jobs. Indeed, in the developed world, up to 50 percent of all bank branches and their employees could be gone within the next decade.

Meanwhile, large investment banks like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are also becoming automated. They’re putting their services online and replacing their human financial analysts with algorithms. Indeed, JPMorgan Chase has become so invested in this objective that as of 2015, it employs more software engineers and programmers than either Facebook or Twitter – 9,000 out of its 33,000 total employees!

The banks’ algorithms are extremely powerful. In just seconds, they can make financial calculations and projections that used to take human analysts hundreds of hours. Within the next decade, they could replace between one-third and one-half of all workers in the financial sector.

3) Healthcare

Automated technologies will take over the role of monitoring our health, diagnosing and treating diseases.

Have you ever felt sick and Googled your symptoms? Then, like millions of people, you’ve already experienced one of the ways in which automation will transform the future of healthcare.

Before online search engines and virtual assistants like Alexa, you probably would have seen your doctor about your symptoms. Now you can find information about their causes and remedies by simply typing a few words into your search bar or saying, “Hey, Alexa, how do I perform CPR?”

Alexa will already give you precise instructions on how to do things like that, and in the coming years, virtual assistants will become even more sophisticated – capable of answering just about any question you’d ask your family doctor.

Meanwhile, we’ll be able to continuously monitor, analyze and improve our health with a variety of sensors and apps built into our smartwatches, cellphones, rings, and clothing, along with microchips implanted in our skin. All of these technologies have already been developed to one degree or another. You can monitor your heart rate with a Fitbit, use a cellphone app to diagnose whether a suspicious skin spot is cancerous or not and even wear a posture-improving device that will give you a little electric shock every time you slouch.

These are just a taste of things to come. In the near future, as these technologies evolve and proliferate, we’ll be able to track automatically nearly every aspect of our health and self-diagnose nearly every common ailment. And for diagnosing more serious diseases, many hospitals are already using supercomputers like IBM’s Watson.

As for medical treatments, once again, the robots are coming – or rather, they’re already here. The Israeli company Mazor Robotics has developed an automated robotic surgeon that’s conducted 25,000 spinal surgeries in the United States. Meanwhile, an American company called Microbot Medical is developing nano-bots. These robots are so tiny that they can swim through the narrow tunnels of your urethra, blood vessels and even the vascular tubes in your brain, cleaning them up and repairing damage as they go. For example, they could remove the plaque from your coronary arteries, which would reduce your risk of having a heart attack.

In healthcare and other industries, many future jobs will involve providing support to automated systems.

ith so many innovative medical technologies already here and even more on the horizon, healthcare is going to be just as revolutionized by automation as the other industries we’ve looked at. Up to 80 percent of the work currently done by human doctors could soon be performed by automated systems. But that doesn’t mean that 80 percent of doctors are about to be put out of work. As with the legal profession, it just means that more routine tasks – like doing check-ups and conducting tests – are going to be automated. That will free up doctors to do other, more interesting work.

A lot of it will involve playing a support role – essentially acting as a human mediator between patients and the various automated systems that will diagnose their ailments. Let’s say one of those systems detects that you’re genetically predisposed to a certain disease, like Alzheimer’s or diabetes.

With that knowledge, you’ll probably want to know how the disease will impact your health. How alarmed should you be about your chances of developing it? With such questions, you’ll want a human doctor to explain things in language that’s easy to understand. In other words, doctors will still have jobs to do: counseling patients and helping them understand the diagnoses delivered by automated systems.

Similar robot-support roles will exist in other industries as well. For example, technicians will still be needed to check and repair the sensors of the industrial robots that operate the automated factories of the future. Mechanics will still be needed to fix self-driving vehicles. Human financial advisors will still be needed to answer the more unique questions that people might have about their banking services. And flesh-and-blood lawyers will probably still be desired by higher-income clients, who want (and can afford) more of “human touch.”

Other industries won’t be so lucky, however. For example, remember those touch-screen ordering devices that are showing up in fast-food restaurants? Well, one of the main motivations behind their implementation isn’t just to cut labor costs. It turns out that given a choice between ordering from one of the devices or talking to a person behind the counter, most customers (especially younger ones) prefer the devices. They don’t want a human touch!

More interesting insights on how automation is impacting Journalism, Entertainment, and Education in the next article - link to it.

Read about the impact and progress of automation in Manufacturing, Transporation, and Service in the previous article - Part 1

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