What Human Jobs do Robots have?
Robots in some states are taking over different human jobs starting at manufacturing to having an office or clerk job. As reading the different sources and starting to read on one job description a robot took over lead to robots taking over other human jobs as well.
Man versus machine: 9 human jobs that have been taken over by robots By Jamie Harris, October 10,2018.
As the news article states Technology has reshaped the workplace and caused some jobs to disappear. The rapid improvements in technology have transformed how we work, and in most cases have made our jobs easier. But It’s having another effect too – removing the need for a human worker altogether (Harris,2018).
A report released in November 2017 by McKinsey Global Institute found that up too 800 million global workers will lose their jobs to new technology by 2030. The findings add to a study carried out by Deloitte, The big Four accountancy firm, and the University of Oxford in 2014, which predicted that 35% of the jobs we do today in the UK could go to robots by 2034. Reading about this report, UK is just as much in risk as the US for robots taking over human jobs.
The 9 jobs that have been taken over by robots are a switchboard operator, bowling alley pinsetter, lift operator, film projectionist, knocker-upper, bridge toll collector, check-out cashier, railway station ticket seller, and factory worker. Because of technological intervention enabling machines to take on the repetitive heavy labor, the number of factory workers in manufacturing has fallen sharply. Only a few human staff members are required to keep an eye on working robots and carry out maintenance. “There not always better” Elon Musk realized robots weren’t always better when he had to bring human workers back when the robots couldn’t keep up with demand after replacing his human workers with robots.
In the news article “Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk- and your job” By Zoe Corbyn, February 2015, It could be said that the job of a bridge toll collector was invented in San Francisco. In 1968, the Golden Gate Bridge became the worlds first major bridge to start employing people to take tolls. The bridge went electronic in 2013. With the small band of collectors, 17 people were deployed or retired and nine found themselves out of work. The software that did it was a clear cut case of what economists call technological unemployment. License Plate recognition technology took over. Technology can now do many more things that used to be unique to people. Places like taxi sharing companies like UBER is in on the act- its has just announced it will open a robotics research facility to work on building self-driving cars.
Robotics Research Facility is an opening by UBER in Pittsburg to build self-driving cars (John Biggs). Uber Driver-on-Demand service is building a robotics research lab to “kickstart autonomous taxi fleet development”. Sources affiliated with tech crunch tells them that Uber is hiring more then fifty senior scientists from Carnegie Mellon as well as from the National Robotics Engineering Center, a CMU affiliated research entity. Uber will be developing the core technology, the vehicles, and associated infrastructure. They have hired a number of employees and made moves to outfit them with the software.
The upshot of this will be many people losing jobs to software and machines, says Silicon Valley- based futurist Martin Ford, whose book “The rise of the robots”. Ford forecasts significant unemployment and rising inequality unless radical changes are made. Based on past history, standard economic wisdom holds that technology creates as many jobs as it destroys and makes people better off by making goods and services cheaper. Nearly half of almost 2,000 experts recently surveyed by the pew centre said technology will have displaced more jobs than it creates by 2025. “Robots aren’t just in factories threatening blue-collar workers”, Ford says. “It is really now anyone who sits in front of a desk doing any kind of job that involves manipulating information- especially if it is more routine and formulaic”. For an example Ford cites New York based startup work fusion, which sells software to businesses to automate big projects that would previously have been done by office workers, such as updating company records or extracting specific information from internet websites. The software divides the job into micro-tasks, automates the repetitive bit then recruits freelance workers through crowdfunding platforms for tasks that require thinking. “As the freelance workers do their jobs they are, in effect, training the system to replace them. That’s a pretty good preview of what the future looks like”.
Routine jobs such as payroll clerk(cognitive) and assembly line workers(manual) are most dramatically falling away as for non-routine jobs such as financial analyst(cognitive) and chambermaid(manual) are not so simple and are repetitive in ways that can be easily programmed have held up better. These are skills that are most affected and are categorized by routine or non-routine or whether they are cognitive or manual. There are robots that are now programmed to do some non-routine manual tasks and have skills such as medical diagnosis and legal analysis.
In the United States there are many people and families living and trying to survive with no job due to many reasons such as no childcare for their children to work or even a disability to people that do work at minimum wage just to make ends meet. It is difficult now with the economy we live in to survive day by day, just imagine if robots fully took over all human jobs they poverty people will be living in. Job loss predictions were at high risk as there were an earlier study of the US, which has more manufacturing, suggested 47% of jobs were at risk because of automation. Peoples jobs that involve three types of tasks- originality, social intelligence and interacting with complex objects in unstructured environments were less likely to become automated because them tasks come naturally to us but is hard for robots. Low skilled and office jobs such as sales and services, bank and post office clerks, manufacturing and telemarketers were either most at risk or at the highest risks.
In 2010 researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, programmed a robot to fold a pile of towels. The robot costs $400,000, 25 minutes a towel, with the most time spent working out how to grasp it. With that being said I do not agree with robots taking over human jobs. The society is letting go their employees to replace them with one $400,000 robot. The money being spent for one robot is enough to pay their employers for the upcoming years at a company guaranteeing a job to be done as for a robot will work at its own pace and may not be able to multi task like human. Is it really worth letting go of human workers and leaving them with no job?
REFERENCES
(Harris, 2018) http://home.bt.com/tech-gadgets/future-tech/9-jobs-overtaken-by-robots-11364003046052
(Corbyn, 2015) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/09/robots-manual-jobs-now-people-skills-take-over-your-job
(Biggs, n.d.)https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/02/uber-opening-robotics-research-facility-in-pittsburgh-to-build-self-driving-cars/