Robots will Displace 20 Million Jobs by 2030 just in Manufacturing

Michael K. Spencer

Jul 1, 2019

I write about technological automation nearly every week. A new study, by Oxford Economics, estimates that 8.5% of the worldwide manufacturing workforce could be displaced by robots.

This is not related to the jobs that will be lost in retail, transportation, trucking, finance, healthcare, marketing, journalism, human resources, the legal professional and other domains expected to be disrupted by AI in the next twenty years.

Robots aren’t even software or deep learning.

LinkedIn editors note that while the transition to robot labour generally creates new jobs as fast as it automates them, it can lead to falling wages for human workers, the report says.

Robots ‘to replace up to 20 million factory jobs’ by 2030

2030 used to feel like a long ways off, but time is going fast, it’s already 2019. Robots are getting more sophisticated for industrial, military and smart city use. This includes the role of robots in the home that are still only in their nascent stage of development.

Robots transform how labor works likely in areas such as construction, emergency relief, delivery (drones) and so many other use cases besides just manufacturing and automated factory models.

One woman who works in marketing on LinkedIn says: At some point, when we find ourselves competing with robots for jobs, it will likely be your emotional intelligence (high levels of self-awareness, empathy and listening capabilities combined with low levels of defensiveness, blame and criticism) that will be what gets you hired over someone else.

I actually find this position somewhat simplistic and naive. Many aspects of emotional intelligence will be mastered by AI too, such as detecting emotional cues via facial recognition better than humans can. In the late 2020s and 2030s AI will become a lot smarter in “emotional intelligence” as well. This is why in the future even marketing and sales jobs won’t be secure. Obviously customer service and sales marketing roles in person or remote will be in jeopardy too.

The Hidden Danger of Robots, Low Wages

An interesting point in this study is that robots *create jobs as quickly as they replace them* but that those new roles tend to be less well paid. Robots don’t just automate labor and improve productivity, they will easily increase economic inequality by lowering wages across the board.

When robots hit the Fast Food industry, for example, in order to compete humans will be paid less. It will no longer make sense for managers to use humans instead of robots, due to higher minimum wages rules in various U.S. states.

Up to 20 million manufacturing jobs around the world could be replaced by robots by 2030, according to analysis firm Oxford Economics.

What does this actually mean? According to the BBC:

• Each new industrial robot wipes out 1.6 manufacturing jobs.
• Regions where more people have lower skills, which tend to have weaker economies and higher unemployment rates anyway, are much more vulnerable to the loss of jobs due to robots.
• People displaced from those jobs are likely to find comparable roles in the services sector, which will also experience their own waves of automation.
• Technological automation then impacts the most vulnerable workers, brutalizing unskilled workers.
• Robots will mean a boost to wealth inequality, which is already increasing at alarming rates in an unregulated “winner takes all” capitalism.

In the adoption of robots, places like China and South Korea are far ahead of Western countries. This means China is more likely to profit from this wave of automation as a global economy than is the United States.

Is The Robot Job Apocalypse Real?

For the male professional however, robots hurt the blue-collar workers of a past age. Basically workers who move out of manufacturing tend to get new jobs in transport, construction, maintenance, and office and administration work — which in turn are vulnerable to automation. For millions of men, there won’t be any escape from technological automation. From the factory worker to the truck driver, their jobs won’t likely exist as we know them in 10 or 15 years.

The poorest female professionals are also likely to get disrupted by AI. Retail store cashiers and sales people will be hugely impacted by the retail wave of automation, championed by leaders such as Amazon, Microsoft and others.

Technological automation is met with a lot of skepticism from professional communities who think their jobs are invulnerable. According to the study however, on average, each additional robot installed in those lower-skilled regions could lead to nearly twice as many job losses as those in higher-skilled regions of the same country, exacerbating economic inequality and political polarization, which is growing already, Oxford Economics said.

This means millions of jobs will be long gone and dead, even before workers have time to rally protests.

We’ve seen plenty of predictions that robots are about to put everyone, from factory workers to journalists, out of a job, with white collar work suddenly vulnerable to automation. Study after study have given warnings about this, but industries have more or less continued business as usual. Yet at a certain point the future catches up with the present.

Robots are getting better at doing human jobs. That’s probably good for the economy — but there are some serious downsides, too. Some jobs will be made obsolete. Some robots will keep improving what they can do. Many humans won’t. It’s not difficult to imagine how that plays out on the labor pool during the next four decades especially.

Between 2020 and 2060, the world changes more than ever before as the 4th industrial revolution takes place. Technological automation is just one aspect of how this comes about.

Machines are expected to displace about 20 million manufacturing jobs across the world over the next decade, according to a report released Wednesday by Oxford Economics, a global forecasting and quantitative analysis firm. Is that number conservative or too high? Oxford has made somewhat outrageous claims before.

If we think BigTech are too powerful in 2019, just wait to see what happens as they get more automation-native. While providing convenience and innovating is good for their bottom lines, I don’t agree that more jobs are created immediately than those that are lost.

The new jobs are also for different workers entirely. There is therefore bound to be a lot of pain, especially for low-income professionals who are a bit older who may not be highly adaptive to these changes in the job market or their preferred industry.

Robots are on track to wipe out almost a tenth of the world’s manufacturing jobs with the brunt borne by lower-income areas in developed nations, Oxford Economics says.

The Robots are Coming and Manufacturing Workers will Be Harmed

That’s not a good sign for the impact of robots on equality and developing nations. Wealth inequality has no path to get better, only worse. This should create some social unrest, and rightfully so. Because the robot “makers” will be profiting immensely from this transition. it will literally be like stealing money from the poor and pouring it into the hands of the rich.

Technological automation could be a disaster when it comes to the distribution of wealth in the global economy.

While robots are moving out of the factories and into service industries, it’s still in manufacturing that the report says they will have the most impact, particularly in China where armies of workers could be replaced by machines. The robots are coming, and they will simply get smarter and more efficient over time.

The precarious nature of employment is something that is a constant source of stress for so many. Technology develops and often the human casualty is forgotten. We say, “That’s just the way it is”. We think technology at the intersection of capitalism is a good thing for all. But what if it’s not?

Where service jobs are under threat, they are in industries such as transport or construction rather than the law or journalism and it’s lower-skilled people who may have moved from manufacturing who are vulnerable. After the blue collar wave, the white and pink collar waves of automation are coming, don’t assume its just grunt workers AI, Deep learning and robots will impact(Paywall).

While automation should boost the economy as a whole, it is likely to create greater inequality as employment losses are concentrated in certain industries and countries. The Chinese peasants are highly unlikely to riot. So it happens there first. As the West copies China, America will already be in the midst of a healthcare cost bubble and skill-shortage. That’s the most probable scenario I see coming.

The challenge for governments is how to encourage the innovation that the robots promise while making sure they don’t cause new divides in society. If AOC ever becomes President, she’ll have a lot of robot overlords to contend with.

In just 10 years, the entire Manufacturing sector will most likely be up to 8.5 per cent smaller than “if robots were not remaking the market,” according to the research firm’s report. Those are ramifications that are intense, if not totally disruptive to those workers, their families and wealth inequality for future generations.

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