Study indicates Robots could replace 80% of Jobs

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Colin Lewis

Blogger Reference Link http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics 

In a few decades, twenty or thirty years — or sooner – robots and their associated technology will be as ubiquitous as mobile phones are today, at least that is the prediction of Bill Gates; and we would be hard-pressed to find a roboticist, automation expert or economist who could present a strong case against this. The Robotics Revolution promises a host of benefits that are compelling (especially in health care) and imaginative, but it may also come at a significant price.


The Pareto Principle of Prediction
We find ourselves faced with an intractable paradox: On the one hand technology advances increase productivity and wellbeing, and on the other hand it often reinforces inequalities.
A new study due to be published in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Skills and Training by Stuart Elliot visiting analyst at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), who incidentally is on leave from the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council, indicates that technology could replace ‘workers for 80 percent of current jobs.’
In his study Elliot relies on advances in speech, reasoning capabilities and movement capabilities to illustrate how robots and technology can replace jobs. I am in agreement with the general thoughts of the study, although I believe speech recognition is now far more advanced than Elliot states. This element alone will lead to a reduction in many jobs, such as translation over the next five years.
Elliot is not the first to claim that robotics and technology will have such a profound impact on employment or inequality. Michael Hammer, a former MIT professor and prime mover in the restructuring of the workplace in the 1990’s estimated that up to 80 percent of those engaged in middle management tasks were susceptible to elimination due to automation.
In the book Average is Over Professor Tyler Cowen also predicts a hollowed-out labor market, devoid of middle-skill, middle-wage jobs, where 80% or more of our citizens will be unable to prosper. They will become a permanent underclass, unable to improve their lot.
This ‘underclass’ may be happening sooner than Cowen predicted. While there are ‘short term’ adjustments in the employment numbers, the majority are in the low-paying sectors, 73% of ‘new’ jobs are in the bottom of the wage pyramid and temporary employment positions rather than permanent.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that among the most rapidly growing occupational categories over the next ten years will be “healthcare support occupations” (nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants) and “food preparation and serving workers” – overwhelmingly low-wage jobs.
As recent as last month the FT reported that: “New technologies are transforming the structure of the US economy but creating only modest numbers of jobs, according to the biggest official survey of businesses, conducted only once every five years.”
In the book Race Against The Machine the authors state: “Digital technologies change rapidly, but organizations and skills aren’t keeping pace. As a result, millions of people are being left behind. Their incomes and jobs are being destroyed, leaving them worse off.”
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, Google’s Eric Schmidt warned that the problem of new technologies substantially changing and replacing jobs will be “the defining one” for the next two or three decades.


Thinking machines
Increasingly, machines are providing not only the brawn but the brains, too, and that raises the question of where humans fit into this picture. Earlier this year, Jörg Asmussen State Secretary in the German Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs emphasized this trend when he said:

“Digitization, or the “second machine age” (as in the title of the best seller by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee), has only just begun. It is in the process of relieving and ultimately replacing first our physical and then our intellectual labor. This trend will be a threat to brainworkers such as accountants and stock-market traders. And check-out clerks at supermarkets will also soon be a thing of the past.”

Echoing this, Randall Parker, Professor of Economics at East Carolina University, recently wrote:

“Robots and other automated equipment have increased factory automation so much that factories are a dwindling source of all jobs. The next big target for automation has been and continues to be office work.”

In the US manufacturing sector there was a solid increase in sales of 8 percent between 2007 and 2012 but with significant falling employment, the industry shed 2.1m jobs and its payroll dropped $20 billion.
Approximately one out of 25 workers in Japan is a robot, this is in part due to a growing elderly population and declining birthrates, which mean a shrinking workforce, but it is also a fact that global business seeks to drive productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness to new heights with robotics.
This time is different, or maybe not


In his seminal book, The Enlightened Economy, Joel Mokyr argued that: “in Britain the high quality of workmanship available to support innovation, local and imported, helped create the Industrial Revolution.” Dig a little further and Mokyr refers to: “the top 3 to 5 percent of the labor force in terms of skills: engineers, mechanics, millwrights, chemists, clock and instrument makers, skilled carpenters and metal workers, wheelwrights, and similar workmen.”
It was a small minority of the working population that had the skills to help advance the Industrial Revolution, others had to learn new skills to adapt to the technology changes. This time is no different. Just as each revolution sets a higher potential level of productivity each revolution requires a new set of skills to overcome the resistance of the old paradigm, which is deeply embedded in the minds and the practices.
Despite the job losses in the US manufacturing sector factories are increasingly employing more skilled engineers to tend complex equipment and at higher wages, Annual payroll per employee in the manufacturing sector rose from $45,818 in 2007 to $52,686 in 2012.


It’s time to act
Robotic hardware, Artificial Intelligence, automated software and connected networks are only going to get more powerful and capable in the future, and have even bigger impact on jobs, skills and the economy.
The message for all of us can be summed up in a quote from Abraham Lincoln’s second address to Congress.
“As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.”
In his paper Elliot raises a very good question: “Even if alternative jobs are available, how will the displaced workers acquire the necessary skills for the new tasks?” This should be a wake up call. All of us must give serious consideration to our future and learn the skills that will give us the best chance of working WITH the machines. I’ll repeat Lincoln’s statement, since that’s the big takeaway. “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and ACT anew.” These are exciting and challenging times…




The above comes from a Blog that is worth examining. Something about it is presented below

About

Robots are becoming an integrated part of daily life. My name is Colin Lewis, a Behavioral Economist and Data Scientist who provides research and advisory services in automation, robotics and artificial intelligence.  

I believe the Robotic Revolution will come within the next few decades and be more transformative than the Industrial Revolution. This blog reviews the changing area of robotics and its impact on our personal and professional life — Technology is meaningless without people.
Whilst there are concerns about technology and automation displacing many from the workplace I have an optimism for the future and believe the attempt to better the world for all humanity is hidden somewhere within the automated robotic economy.
It would be easy to underestimate the degree to which the robot economy is going to make a difference. Fast-paced and disruptive innovation is becoming increasingly institutionalized and ubiquitous — fundamentally changing the way we work, play and communicate. By tracking trends impacted by automation in social, technological, economic, environmental and political arenas I hope to be able to provide a greater understanding of how to take advantage of new technologies to improve our lives. I will do this by researching the impact of behavior, economics and culture on the future whilst exploring the interactions between technology and society… in that respect, this blog is not about describing the world, it’s about exploring ideas.
Robotenomics.com content has featured in the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, O’Reilly Media, Inc Magazine, Business Insider and others. If you wish to know more about my work helping corporations, financial institutions, universities and government to take advantage of data science and the robot economy, send me an email — colin (@) robotenomics.com
Charles Darwin wrote, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
Personal motto: Apophenia – making connections where none previously existed (overcoming the human tendency of seeing patterns where none actually exist).

QE for Jobs

Home » Blog » 2013 » June » 03 » QE for jobs

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Written by Positive Money on . Posted in Bank of England & QE, Campaigns, Updates

 

Could you create jobs with £375 billion to spend?

Since the crisis the Bank of England has created £375 billion of new money in an attempt to get the economy going again. But instead of putting it into the real economy, where it could support businesses, shops and real jobs, they’ve just pumped it into the financial markets.
That’s why the stock market is near its highest ever level, even though there are around 2.5 million people who can’t find jobs at all, and a further 3 million people who can’t get enough hours of employment. [1] Meanwhile over 500,000 people have become dependent on food banks to live. [2]
This is crazy…
This is a crazy approach to fixing a broken economy. If just a fraction of that £375 billion had been spent into the real economy by the government, as new debt-free money, it would have created jobs, allowed us to reduce our debts, and get the economy going again. We have tried to explain this to the government [3], and even the former chairman of the Financial Services Authority, Lord Adair Turner has said that “If [President] Herbert Hoover had known in 1931 that [the policy of creating money and spending it into the economy through government budgets] was possible, the US Great Depression would have been less severe.” [4]

We want to campaign for a better approach

Instead of seeing more money flooding the financial markets, we want to see the power to create money be used for something useful. There’s so much that needs to be done, including:

• Rebuilding the hundreds of school buildings that are not fit for purpose (the government has just borrowed £700million from private banks – who will create the money used to pay for the rebuilding – instead of using their own power to create money).
• Switching the country over to clean and renewable energy so that we don’t become dependent on countries like Qatar for energy imports in the future
• Getting money directly to ordinary people by creating jobs so that they can start to pay down some of their debts

It’s an idea that’s already been mentioned by leading economic commentators in all the mainstream papers. And now even the Treasury is interested – in their latest review of monetary policy [5], they included a section on Adair Turner’s suggestions. So now is the best time for this campaign.
Our campaign (codename “QE for jobs”) would ask for £50 billion to be created by the Bank of England and spent by government with the aim of increasing employment and doing some of the long-term things that are essential for this country.

Here’s the plan:

Over the next 2 years we’re aiming to:
·         get the idea of ‘QE for jobs’ into the mainstream public debate
·         get the main political parties to adopt it into their 2015 manifesto
·         build a large  movement of individuals and groups in support of the campaign
·         get business leaders to write an open letter to George Osborne asking him to carry it out
This doesn’t mean we are changing direction. Our main objective will always be to fully change the way that money is created so that banks can no longer create money and cause the kind of crisis that we’re facing today.[6]
This is a campaign that we think will lead the way to getting the money creation more mainstream. It is a step in the right direction and would mean our reforms are more likely to be implemented. It could also raise our profile and broaden our network along the way.

Can you help us kickstart the campaign?

We’ve speaking to potential partners and there’s a lot of interest in this idea, but we need to have the funds to get the ball rolling.
Currently we have 378 people who donate every month, and this keeps the campaign going. If we can increase that to 430, we’ll be able to focus on this huge opportunity to get a change in the monetary system and have money created in the public interest for the first time in decades.
If you can, please help by donating monthly, either by direct debit or paypal:
Donate now
Why donate to Positive Money?
Compared to most not-for-profits and charities, we’re tiny and don’t have any huge funders to support our work. However, we are tackling one of the root causes of many problems. We depend on the monthly donations of around 350 of the 11,500 people receiving this email, to provide half of all our funding, plus a number of grants from smaller charitable trusts.
Any donations made in June will be DOUBLED…
The James Gibb Stuart Trust, who helped Positive Money to get off the ground, are currently matching any donations set up this month, for the next 12 months. That means if you start donating £10 a month, it’ll be matched with an additional £120 over the next year.
Plus if you donate £10 or more per month – we will send you a free copy of the book Modernising Money.
 If we can raise an extra £1200 a month in donations, this will be doubled by the James Gibb Stuart Trust and we’ll be able to cover a significant amount of our costs for a QE campaign and at least keep Positive Money going until the 2015 election.
Donate now
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[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20509189
[2] http://www.church-poverty.org.uk/foodfuelfinance/walkingthebreadline/report
[3] http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmtreasy/writev/qe/m08.htm
[4] http://www.fsa.gov.uk/static/pubs/speeches/0206-at.pdf - p34.
[5] http://cdn.hm-treasury.gov.uk/ukecon_mon_policy_framework.pdf
[6] http://www.positivemoney.org/about/statement-of-purpose/

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The New Glocal Economy

 

 Blogger Ref Link  http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Jim Lee

 

Ref Resilence Economics

 

 

Over the past few years, it seems like people have been feeling pulled in all directions.  Businesses have learned how to do more with fewer people.
In many industries, we have seen the disappearance of jobs, the workplace, and the workweek.  Work happens anytime and from anywhere.  Yet, other businesses are comparatively unchanged. Why is this?  We currently have two separate economies running in parallel – the digital and the physical.    
One of my friends is now telecommuting from Malaysia to the University of Wisconsin.  Another is a software developer who set up shop in Buenos Aires, simply because it features a lower cost of living and a better lifestyle.
Meanwhile, even basic language barriers are gradually disappearing.  Anyone who posts a design project on CrowdSpring may get dozens of proposals from around the world.  Some of the more entrepreneurial freelancers are now using online tools such as Google Translator.  This enables them to communicate with buyers and do business in a way that was simply not possible five years ago.
Customer service jobs were outsourced overseas a long time ago.  Over the next decade, expect more of the knowledge professions to follow.  Telemedicine may mean that your family doctor is calling in from Hyderabad.  Accounting is another profession that may soon find itself being relocated overseas.
While the digital economy has been going global, there are signs that the physical economy will become more localized over the coming decade.
Let’s take a look at a few reasons why this might be happening:
Cost.  Asian economics expert Joergen Oerstroem Moeller notes that European companies are “gradually discovering that transport costs erode the competitive advantages of outsourcing to China.”
Shipping from Asia made more sense when gasoline was cheaper than bottled water.  This is no longer the case.  British retailer Marks & Spencer is planning to shorten the length of its supply chain by only shipping products within its own hemisphere.  The company believes this may save GBP 175 million in costs annually.
Technology.  New technologies such as 3D printing and scanning have the potential to move production to the masses.  Instead of shipping to the other side of the globe, some types of manufacturing may move to the desktop, just like the printing industry did two decades ago.
We are just a few years away from being able to scan simple objects (such as repair parts) and then “faxing” them to customers who can print those parts on site – effectively minimizing delivery time.
Social Preference.  There has also been in increased interest in buying local artisanal goods when they are available, particularly among Generation Xers and Millenials.   For example, the rising popularity of the slow food movement has given new life to many traditional family farms.  The USDA now reports that there are over 7,800 farmers markets in the U.S.
Meanwhile, these trends are further supported by emerging social technologies, such as time banking and local currencies.
So, while the digital economy happens “anytime, anywhere”, parts of physical economy may evolve more slowly.  Workplaces that require the maintenance of physical facilities or equipment will continue to need people in traditional jobs, because flexible locations and hours do not work for everything.
Good business values will always remain the same – showing up on time, doing a great job, and being appreciative to customers will never go out of favor.
(Note, this article previously appeared on CSRwire.)

Better Than Human: Why Robots Will — And Must — Take Our Jobs

• By Kevin Kelly  Wired /Gadget Lab
• 12.24.12
• 6:30 AM
•  Edit

Special guest Jimmy Fallon welcomes our new robot overlords.

Photo: Peter Yang

Imagine that 7 out of 10 working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they all do?

It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repairman, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.........

 

...........First, machines will consolidate their gains in already-automated industries. After robots finish replacing assembly line workers, they will replace the workers in warehouses. Speedy bots able to lift 150 pounds all day long will retrieve boxes, sort them, and load them onto trucks. Fruit and vegetable picking will continue to be robotized until no humans pick outside of specialty farms. Pharmacies will feature a single pill-dispensing robot in the back while the pharmacists focus on patient consulting. Next, the more dexterous chores of cleaning in offices and schools will be taken over by late-night robots, starting with easy-to-do floors and windows and eventually getting to toilets. The highway legs of long-haul trucking routes will be driven by robots embedded in truck cabs.

All the while, robots will continue their migration into white-collar work. We already have artificial intelligence in many of our machines; we just don’t call it that. Witness one piece of software by Narrative Science (profiled in issue 20.05) that can write newspaper stories about sports games directly from the games’ stats or generate a synopsis of a company’s stock performance each day from bits of text around the web. Any job dealing with reams of paperwork will be taken over by bots, including much of medicine. Even those areas of medicine not defined by paperwork, such as surgery, are becoming increasingly robotic. The rote tasks of any information-intensive job can be automated. It doesn’t matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, architect, reporter, or even programmer: The robot takeover will be epic.

And it has already begun.

Baxter is an early example of a new class of industrial robots created to work alongside humans.

Here’s why we’re at the inflection point: Machines are acquiring smarts.

We have preconceptions about how an intelligent robot should look and act, and these can blind us to what is already happening around us. To demand that artificial intelligence be humanlike is the same flawed logic as demanding that artificial flying be birdlike, with flapping wings. Robots will think different. To see how far artificial intelligence has penetrated our lives, we need to shed the idea that they will be humanlike.

Consider Baxter, a revolutionary new workbot from Rethink Robotics. Designed by Rodney Brooks, the former MIT professor who invented the best-selling Roomba vacuum cleaner and its descendants, Baxter is an early example of a new class of industrial robots created to work alongside humans. Baxter does not look impressive. It’s got big strong arms and a flatscreen display like many industrial bots. And Baxter’s hands perform repetitive manual tasks, just as factory robots do. But it’s different in three significant ways.

First, it can look around and indicate where it is looking by shifting the cartoon eyes on its head. It can perceive humans working near it and avoid injuring them. And workers can see whether it sees them. Previous industrial robots couldn’t do this, which means that working robots have to be physically segregated from humans. The typical factory robot is imprisoned within a chain-link fence or caged in a glass case. They are simply too dangerous to be around, because they are oblivious to others. This isolation prevents such robots from working in a small shop, where isolation is not practical. Optimally, workers should be able to get materials to and from the robot or to tweak its controls by hand throughout the workday; isolation makes that difficult. Baxter, however, is aware. Using force-feedback technology to feel if it is colliding with a person or another bot, it is courteous. You can plug it into a wall socket in your garage and easily work right next to it.

Second, anyone can train Baxter. It is not as fast, strong, or precise as other industrial robots, but it is smarter. To train the bot you simply grab its arms and guide them in the correct motions and sequence. It’s a kind of “watch me do this” routine. Baxter learns the procedure and then repeats it. Any worker is capable of this show-and-tell; you don’t even have to be literate. Previous workbots required highly educated engineers and crack programmers to write thousands of lines of code (and then debug them) in order to instruct the robot in the simplest change of task. The code has to be loaded in batch mode, i.e., in large, infrequent batches, because the robot cannot be reprogrammed while it is being used. Turns out the real cost of the typical industrial robot is not its hardware but its operation. Industrial robots cost $100,000-plus to purchase but can require four times that amount over a lifespan to program, train, and maintain. The costs pile up until the average lifetime bill for an industrial robot is half a million dollars or more.

The third difference, then, is that Baxter is cheap. Priced at $22,000, it’s in a different league compared with the $500,000 total bill of its predecessors. It is as if those established robots, with their batch-mode programming, are the mainframe computers of the robot world, and Baxter is the first PC robot. It is likely to be dismissed as a hobbyist toy, missing key features like sub-millimeter precision, and not serious enough. But as with the PC, and unlike the mainframe, the user can interact with it directly, immediately, without waiting for experts to mediate—and use it for nonserious, even frivolous things. It’s cheap enough that small-time manufacturers can afford one to package up their wares or custom paint their product or run their 3-D printing machine. Or you could staff up a factory that makes iPhones.

Photo: Peter Yang

Baxter was invented in a century-old brick building near the Charles River in Boston. In 1895 the building was a manufacturing marvel in the very center of the new manufacturing world. It even generated its own electricity. For a hundred years the factories inside its walls changed the world around us. Now the capabilities of Baxter and the approaching cascade of superior robot workers spur Brooks to speculate on how these robots will shift manufacturing in a disruption greater than the last revolution. Looking out his office window at the former industrial neighborhood, he says, “Right now we think of manufacturing as happening in China. But as manufacturing costs sink because of robots, the costs of transportation become a far greater factor than the cost of production. Nearby will be cheap. So we’ll get this network of locally franchised factories, where most things will be made within 5 miles of where they are needed.”

That may be true of making stuff, but a lot of jobs left in the world for humans are service jobs. I ask Brooks to walk with me through a local McDonald’s and point out the jobs that his kind of robots can replace. He demurs and suggests it might be 30 years before robots will cook for us. “In a fast food place you’re not doing the same task very long. You’re always changing things on the fly, so you need special solutions. We are not trying to sell a specific solution. We are building a general-purpose machine that other workers can set up themselves and work alongside.” And once we can cowork with robots right next to us, it’s inevitable that our tasks will bleed together, and soon our old work will become theirs—and our new work will become something we can hardly imagine.

To understand how robot replacement will happen, it’s useful to break down our relationship with robots into four categories, as summed up in this chart:

The rows indicate whether robots will take over existing jobs or make new ones, and the columns indicate whether these jobs seem (at first) like jobs for humans or for machines.

Let’s begin with quadrant A: jobs humans can do but robots can do even better. Humans can weave cotton cloth with great effort, but automated looms make perfect cloth, by the mile, for a few cents. The only reason to buy handmade cloth today is because you want the imperfections humans introduce. We no longer value irregularities while traveling 70 miles per hour, though—so the fewer humans who touch our car as it is being made, the better.

And yet for more complicated chores, we still tend to believe computers and robots can’t be trusted. That’s why we’ve been slow to acknowledge how they’ve mastered some conceptual routines, in some cases even surpassing their mastery of physical routines. A computerized brain known as the autopilot can fly a 787 jet unaided, but irrationally we place human pilots in the cockpit to babysit the autopilot “just in case.” In the 1990s, computerized mortgage appraisals replaced human appraisers wholesale. Much tax preparation has gone to computers, as well as routine x-ray analysis and pretrial evidence-gathering—all once done by highly paid smart people. We’ve accepted utter reliability in robot manufacturing; soon we’ll accept it in robotic intelligence and service.

Next is quadrant B: jobs that humans can’t do but robots can. A trivial example: Humans have trouble making a single brass screw unassisted, but automation can produce a thousand exact ones per hour. Without automation, we could not make a single computer chip—a job that requires degrees of precision, control, and unwavering attention that our animal bodies don’t possess. Likewise no human, indeed no group of humans, no matter their education, can quickly search through all the web pages in the world to uncover the one page revealing the price of eggs in Katmandu yesterday. Every time you click on the search button you are employing a robot to do something we as a species are unable to do alone.

While the displacement of formerly human jobs gets all the headlines, the greatest benefits bestowed by robots and automation come from their occupation of jobs we are unable to do. We don’t have the attention span to inspect every square millimeter of every CAT scan looking for cancer cells. We don’t have the millisecond reflexes needed to inflate molten glass into the shape of a bottle. We don’t have an infallible memory to keep track of every pitch in Major League Baseball and calculate the probability of the next pitch in real time.

We aren’t giving “good jobs” to robots. Most of the time we are giving them jobs we could never do. Without them, these jobs would remain undone.

Now let’s consider quadrant C, the new jobs created by automation—including the jobs that we did not know we wanted done. This is the greatest genius of the robot takeover: With the assistance of robots and computerized intelligence, we already can do things we never imagined doing 150 years ago. We can remove a tumor in our gut through our navel, make a talking-picture video of our wedding, drive a cart on Mars, print a pattern on fabric that a friend mailed to us through the air. We are doing, and are sometimes paid for doing, a million new activities that would have dazzled and shocked the farmers of 1850. These new accomplishments are not merely chores that were difficult before. Rather they are dreams that are created chiefly by the capabilities of the machines that can do them. They are jobs the machines make up.

Before we invented automobiles, air-conditioning, flatscreen video displays, and animated cartoons, no one living in ancient Rome wished they could watch cartoons while riding to Athens in climate-controlled comfort. Two hundred years ago not a single citizen of Shanghai would have told you that they would buy a tiny slab that allowed them to talk to faraway friends before they would buy indoor plumbing. Crafty AIs embedded in first-person-shooter games have given millions of teenage boys the urge, the need, to become professional game designers—a dream that no boy in Victorian times ever had. In a very real way our inventions assign us our jobs. Each successful bit of automation generates new occupations—occupations we would not have fantasized about without the prompting of the automation.

To reiterate, the bulk of new tasks created by automation are tasks only other automation can handle. Now that we have search engines like Google, we set the servant upon a thousand new errands. Google, can you tell me where my phone is? Google, can you match the people suffering depression with the doctors selling pills? Google, can you predict when the next viral epidemic will erupt? Technology is indiscriminate this way, piling up possibilities and options for both humans and machines.

It is a safe bet that the highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.

 

Finally, that leaves us with quadrant D, the jobs that only humans can do—at first. The one thing humans can do that robots can’t (at least for a long while) is to decide what it is that humans want to do. This is not a trivial trick; our desires are inspired by our previous inventions, making this a circular question.

When robots and automation do our most basic work, making it relatively easy for us to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, then we are free to ask, “What are humans for?” Industrialization did more than just extend the average human lifespan. It led a greater percentage of the population to decide that humans were meant to be ballerinas, full-time musicians, mathematicians, athletes, fashion designers, yoga masters, fan-fiction authors, and folks with one-of-a kind titles on their business cards. With the help of our machines, we could take up these roles; but of course, over time, the machines will do these as well. We’ll then be empowered to dream up yet more answers to the question “What should we do?” It will be many generations before a robot can answer that.

This postindustrial economy will keep expanding, even though most of the work is done by bots, because part of your task tomorrow will be to find, make, and complete new things to do, new things that will later become repetitive jobs for the robots. In the coming years robot-driven cars and trucks will become ubiquitous; this automation will spawn the new human occupation of trip optimizer, a person who tweaks the traffic system for optimal energy and time usage. Routine robo-surgery will necessitate the new skills of keeping machines sterile. When automatic self-tracking of all your activities becomes the normal thing to do, a new breed of professional analysts will arise to help you make sense of the data. And of course we will need a whole army of robot nannies, dedicated to keeping your personal bots up and running. Each of these new vocations will in turn be taken over by robots later.

The real revolution erupts when everyone has personal workbots, the descendants of Baxter, at their beck and call. Imagine you run a small organic farm. Your fleet of worker bots do all the weeding, pest control, and harvesting of produce, as directed by an overseer bot, embodied by a mesh of probes in the soil. One day your task might be to research which variety of heirloom tomato to plant; the next day it might be to update your custom labels. The bots perform everything else that can be measured.

Right now it seems unthinkable: We can’t imagine a bot that can assemble a stack of ingredients into a gift or manufacture spare parts for our lawn mower or fabricate materials for our new kitchen. We can’t imagine our nephews and nieces running a dozen workbots in their garage, churning out inverters for their friend’s electric-vehicle startup. We can’t imagine our children becoming appliance designers, making custom batches of liquid-nitrogen dessert machines to sell to the millionaires in China. But that’s what personal robot automation will enable.

Everyone will have access to a personal robot, but simply owning one will not guarantee success. Rather, success will go to those who innovate in the organization, optimization, and customization of the process of getting work done with bots and machines. Geographical clusters of production will matter, not for any differential in labor costs but because of the differential in human expertise. It’s human-robot symbiosis. Our human assignment will be to keep making jobs for robots—and that is a task that will never be finished. So we will always have at least that one “job.”

In the coming years our relationships with robots will become ever more complex. But already a recurring pattern is emerging. No matter what your current job or your salary, you will progress through these Seven Stages of Robot Replacement, again and again:

• 1. A robot/computer cannot possibly do the tasks I do.
  [Later.]
• 2. OK, it can do a lot of them, but it can’t do everything I do.
  [Later.]
• 3. OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often.
  [Later.]
• 4. OK, it operates flawlessly on routine stuff, but I need to train it for new tasks.
  [Later.]
• 5. OK, it can have my old boring job, because it’s obvious that was not a job that humans were meant to do.
  [Later.]
• 6. Wow, now that robots are doing my old job, my new job is much more fun and pays more!
  [Later.]
• 7. I am so glad a robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do now.

This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that seems like drudgery will be done by robots.

We need to let robots take over. They will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can. They will do jobs we can’t do at all. They will do jobs we never imagined even needed to be done. And they will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were.

Let the robots take the jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters.

Kevin Kelly (kk.org) is senior maverick of Wired and the author, most recently, of What Technology Wants.

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The Debt-Based Economy

We believe that the way money is created is at the root of the economic, political and environmental problems we are facing today. Ref Positive Money  http://www.positivemoney.org.uk/

VIDEO: The Consequences of Letting Banks Create Money

Are banks really the powerhouse of the UK economy? Or could they be some of the most heavily-subsidised businesses in the world? What do banks really cost?

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The Consequences of Debt-Based Money...

Debt

Why is there so much debt? Because almost every pound in the economy has to be created by a bank and lent to us. There has to be as much debt as there is money, and the more we borrow, the more money there will be. It’s actually impossible for the public to reduce their total debt as long as banks are allowed to create money as debt.

Find Out Why

House Prices

Most of the hundreds of billions that banks created over the last decade was created to buy houses. All this money has pushed house prices through the roof, with a three-fold increase in just over 10 years. This means that any first time buyer today will need to work an extra 11 years just to have a place to live. Who benefits from high house prices? The banks…

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Jobs & Unemployment

When banks create new money and pump it into the economy through personal loans and credit cards it causes a ‘boom’ that creates jobs. But because the boom is all fuelled by debt, sooner or later it causes the crash that results in millions losing their jobs. As long as banks control the money supply, we’ll have an unstable ‘manic depressive’ economy…

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Higher Taxes

Your taxes are higher because government has given the power to create money to banks. This means that the government has lost out on over £2 Trillion of revenue – and that means we’ve paid an extra £2 trillion in taxes. Paying the banks for the right to use money.

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Banking Vs Democracy

The TV news cameras point at Parliament, but doesn't the real power lie with the banks in the City of London? Banks distribute more money than the government, with no accountability to their customers. If we want to save our democracy then we need to reform the banks…

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Environment

The current banking system fuels environmental breakdown by forcing unsustainable economic growth. By channeling our money into short term investments aimed to sustain exponential growth the environment is reduced to an economic externality.

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Inequality

The debt-based money system redistributes wealth from the poor to the rich, from the regions to London, and from the real economy to the financial sector.

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Inflation

When banks make loans they create new money for those who have taken out the loan. This pushes up the prices of everything we buy and makes life more expensive.

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Subsidising Banks

Are banks really the powerhouse of the UK economy? Or could they be some of the most heavily-subsidised businesses in the world? What do banks really cost?

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