The 21st century has seen numerous changes in how human beings lived their lives on this planet. One significant life change that is swiftly unfolding in front of our eyes is that we have to deal with a new stakeholder in the job sector.
This stakeholder is not a fellow human being but is our creation, commonly referred to as autonomous machines, artificial intelligence (AI), and robots.
Japanese telecom giant Softbank's humanoid robot or greeting robot Pepper gives guidance to ... [+]
COVID-19, which surfaced on the face of our planet in December of 2019, has resulted in a massive job loss all over the globe. In the United States alone over 22.6 million people lost their jobs in 2020.
In February of 2021, the International Labor Organization (ILO) Monitor reported that the pandemic-related lockdowns cost us 114 million job losses in just one year. In other words, the pandemic took away 8.8 % of global working hours from us, which is equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs.
According to the World Economic Forum, the economic impact of these lost working hours in just one year was $3.7 trillion in lost labor income. With the COVID-19 vaccines rollout, businesses and manufacturing sectors have gradually reopened. However, once the pandemic is over, several lost jobs may never come back to human beings.
With intelligent machines on the horizon and with an industrial focus on enhancing productivity and lowering costs in the post-pandemic era, artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous robots are destined to win this bid of the future job market.
29 January 2021, Saxony, Dresden: A robot works on an ID.3. Production of the electric model has ... [+]
The World Economic Forum has already predicted that smart machines will take over 85 million jobs by 2025. We might see even more scary pictures of human job losses within a decade.
Currently, machines constitute 30 % of our workforce while the rest of the 70 percent of the jobs still lie with human beings. By 2025, it is predicted to exceed 50 %.
According to a study conducted by MIT and Boston universities’ professors, adding one robot to a geographic area reduces employment in that area by six workers in the United States alone.
The same study pointed out that by 2020 automaker industry in the United States was employing 38 % of existing industrial robots.
Among other manufacturing industries in North America, the Electronics industry relies on 15 % of robots. The Plastic and Chemical industry employs 10 % robots to enhance productivity and lower manufacturing costs.
This trend is just the beginning, not the end, of our ever-evolving technologically sophisticated world.
In fact, with China’s involvement in the cost-effective manufacturing of industrial-scale autonomous machines, the cost of replacing human jobs with industrial robots will decrease dramatically in the coming years. Such a scenario will result in the popularity and adoption of autonomous robots even among the small-scale manufacturing units.
In this photo taken on February 6, 2019, Indian teacher Pooja Prashant Sankhe writes on the board ... [+]
Thanks to the remarkable progress in technology, both embodied and disembodied versions of robots can perform the most sophisticated and complex tasks, which were once considered the exclusive domain of human beings.
These tasks range from domestic needs of human beings such as vacuum cleaning and mopping of floors to asking your virtual assistants, such as Alexa or Google Home, to turn on/off your lights with simplistic verbal commands. We can categorize such machines as domestic robots. Domestic robots pose little to no threat to our potential job market.
However, at the same time, other expensive and more complex versions of autonomous machines and robots are involved in running the wheels of our corporate and service sectors. We can categorize them as industrial robots.
TOPSHOT - A prong extending from the CIRA-03 remote-controlled robot prototype approaches the mouth ... [+]
For example, robots in the healthcare sector are involved in several aspects of patient care—ranging from performing surgeries, delivering drugs to patients, disinfecting hospitals—to taking the vitals of their creators. One can see many university campuses in the United States, such as the George Mason University, are already replacing human beings with food delivery robots during campus closures to contain the spread of COVID-19.
Likewise, giant corporations such as Walmart have already given mopping and cleaning tasks to these gigantic, unmanned machines, which operate as and whenever needed to maintain hygiene and cleanliness, particularly during the pandemic.
Amazon has already successfully tested, and in some cases has launched, package delivery drones, which is a far more efficient and quicker way to gratify online shoppers, depending upon the size and weight of the packages.
Self-driving vehicles, essentially fast-paced robots that resemble cars on the roads, are already making taxi, Uber, and Lyft drivers nervous. We will soon witness self-driving vehicles carrying us around whenever we call Uber or Lyft.
In these changing times, we must realize that these new trends are not merely a shift in our approach and attitudes towards machines, but, in fact, a significant economic revolution is already underway.
Future jobs and employment may not look the same as we had been witnessing for the last 100 years. To stay relevant and still get employed in this rapidly changing world, we must learn new knowledge and skills that teach us how to collaborate and work with machines as partners, not as masters.
ATHENS, Feb. 15, 2020 -- A staff member teaches a boy how to interact with a robot at the "City of ... [+]
Historically, machines have been trying to understand us, but this dynamic is changing fast. Now we need to learn and understand machines to share the future workforce between us and “them” (autonomous machines). And if we fail to act fast, it can turn out to be a severe economic loss for hundreds and thousands of human beings in the workforce, since robots can easily replace most of our existing skillsets.
