Business Leaders and the Government must ready the nation’s workforce for the rise of artificial intelligence to ensure companies can ride out the “cliff edges” created by the technological revolution, according to PwC.
The professional services firm said AI had the power to overhaul business models and could leave workers sidelined and companies struggling to adjust, unless preparations are made now.
It said firms and the state must double down on their efforts to improve the education system and help workers re-train to ensure AI delivers the much-heralded boost to the UK economy.
Jon Andrews, PwC’s head of technology and investments, said: “There are different sectors that will be impacted in different ways.
“The vast majority of workers will not see the change happening to them and they will have a very different job by 2030. But some of them you can see coming.”
Experts believe the rise of AI poses a threat to workers across the professions, from staff in fast food restaurants to journalists, accountants and doctors.
About 30 per cent of UK jobs are at high risk of being eradicated by AI by 2030, PwC has estimated.
However, AI will also create new roles for human beings and could drive up productivity and bolster economic growth.
Robotic workers are already prolific among a number of major industries, but experts are divided on what this new robotic age means for the job prospects of future humans. Many commentators have suggested that the rapid growth in robotics will see cost effective automatons replacing humans in industries ranging from restaurants to every day white collar sectors, but the Chairman and President of one of Japan's largest robotics companies is trying to allay such fears, saying that it will be a long time before humans have to worry about competing with robots on the job market.
"There are many robots under development that are intelligent but can't do anything," said Junji Tsuda of Yaskawa Electronics in an interview with FT. "They're not going to develop on an exponential curve, like computers. It's going to be linear, steady growth."
Cynics might point out that Tsuda has everything to gain from putting public minds at ease about the prospects of robotic domination of the workplace, and his views certainly fly in the face of those put forward by many independent commentators. Many Futurists believe that the manufacturing industry is particularly at risk from automation, but as Justin Reich, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, says, the threat could stretch beyond routine construction.
"Robots and AI will increasingly replace routine kinds of work-even the complex routines performed by artisans, factory workers, lawyers, and accountants," says Reich who goes on to suggest that such a situation could lead to an increasing situation of 'haves' and 'have-nots'. "There will be a labor market in the service sector for non-routine tasks that can be performed interchangeably by just about anyone-and these will not pay a living wage-and there will be some new opportunities created for complex non-routine work, but the gains at this top of the labor market will not be offset by losses in the middle and gains of terrible jobs at the bottom. I'm not sure that jobs will disappear altogether, though that seems possible, but the jobs that are left will be lower paying and less secure than those that exist now. The middle is moving to the bottom."
Conversely, Junji Tsudaargues that not only are robots a long way from being able to replace complex human routines, but robots could easily carve out a niche in roles that aren't considered 'human'.
"The brain is developing incredibly fast, both in performance and falling price. The biggest problem is the hands that do the work. Human hands have incredible precision. There are more than 10,000 sensors in here. To put more than 10,000 sensors in a piece of hardware . . .There is still lots of work - inhuman work - that we shouldn't ask people to do. We should roboticize that as soon as possible."
Tsuda's view on the development of robotics is very similar to that of Adam Rutherford, a technical advisor on the upcoming sci-fi drama Ex-Machina, which sees a highly advanced A.I uploaded into a remarkable robotic body. On the prospects of intelligent robot's like Ex-Machina's Ava becoming a reality, Rutherford suggested that, although the intelligent computers may be around the corner, the physical aspects of these sci-fi machines are a long way off.
"Ava's body... is probably decades from realization. Currently, scientists struggle to get robots to do things we find trivially easy: they can drive a car, but not actually get into one. Four billion years of evolution is a hefty head start."
So if the experts are to be believed, if you work with your hands, the chances are you don't need to fear robot invasion of the workforce just yet.
New laws will be needed to stop robots stealing human jobs, a leading international employment lawyer has warned.
Vast swathes of the global workforce could be replaced by machines thanks to rapid technological change and innovation in artificial intelligence and robotics.
And future governments will be forced to bring in legislation to ensure quotas of human workers as traditional working practices are turned on their head.
Gerlind Wisskirchen, a Cologne-based employment lawyer who is vice-chair of the International Bar Association’s (IBA) global employment institute, said existing legal frameworks regulating employment and safety are becoming rapidly outdated.
He said: “What is new about the present revolution is the alacrity with which change is occurring, and the broadness of impact being brought about by AI and robotics.
“Jobs at all levels in society presently undertaken by humans are at risk of being reassigned to robots or AI.
“And the legislation once in place to protect the rights of human workers may be no longer fit for purpose."
“In some cases new labour and employment legislation is urgently needed to keep pace with increased automation.”
Mr Wisskirchen’s report for the IBA said the competitive advantages of poorer, emerging economies which rely on cheaper workforces will soon be a thing of the past as robot production lines and intelligent computer systems undercut the cost of humans.
A German car worker costs more than £34 an hour but a robot costs around £5 per hour.
He said: “A production robot is thus cheaper than a worker in China. Nor does a robot become ill, have children or go on strike and it is not entitled to annual leave”.
Mr Wisskirchen warned that white collar professions will not be immune to the AI revolution and predicted a third of graduate level jobs would eventually be replaced by machines or software around the world.
Among the professions most likely to disappear are accountants, court clerks and ‘desk officers at fiscal authorities’.
The report covers both changes already transforming work and the future consequences of what it describes as ‘industrial revolution 4.0’.
The three preceding revolutions are listed as: industrialisation, electrification and digitalisation.
Industry 4.0 involves the integration of the physical and software in production and the service sector.
The report names Amazon, Uber, Facebook, ‘smart factories’ and 3D printing as pioneers.
Mr Wisskirchen said governments will one day have to decide what jobs should be performed exclusively by humans such as childcare.
He said: “The state could introduce a kind of ‘human quota’ in any sector and decide whether it intends to introduce a ‘made by humans’ label or tax the use of machines.”
He noted that the traditional workplace is disintegrating, with more part time employees, distance working, and the blurring of professional and private time.
He said: “It is being replaced by the ‘latte macchiato’ workplace where employees or freelance workers are based in the cafe around the corner, working from their laptops.
“The workplace may eventually only serve the purpose of maintaining social network between colleagues.”
All that said, it’s too soon to write dirges for the humble human worker. In today’s workplace, there are still things that robots just can’t do. At Quiet Logistics, an order-fulfillment center for online retailers in Devens, Mass., 64 robots are used to move merchandise around the warehouse, but 330 humans are required to fold, package, and ship the products. Why not have robots do the whole thing? “People are really good at picking up things,” says Bruce Welty, Quiet Logistics’ chief executive officer. “It’s very difficult to get a robot to make the decisions required that a human makes to pick something out of a bin—particularly if there are many different things in that bin.”
Humans continue to have another advantage over robots: They remain a more flexible workforce. To handle this year’s holiday shopping season, Amazon.com hired 50,000 part-time workers. While seasonal, part-time labor is not something you can necessarily build an economy on, it’s worth noting that Amazon didn’t buy more robots, because you can’t hire a robot part-time (yet). What would additional robots do when demand receded? “Come January,” says Jim Tompkins, a supply-chain consultant, “all that automation’s going to be staring you in the face.”
This is the state of the robotic arts today: a point where humans and robots share labor, with robots handling the simple and repetitive and humans taking care of the complex and dynamic. Some robotics designers and engineers would like this to be a blueprint for the future, where increased automation does not necessarily displace human beings. Rodney Brooks, a former MIT robotics professor, is an optimist. To Brooks, who is also founder and chairman of robot maker Rethink Robotics, these machines are going to help workers, not compete with them. He points out that personal computers didn’t get rid of office workers, they changed the jobs people did. When it comes to robots, “it’s not a one-for-one replacement,” he says. “People are so much better at certain things.”
But robots are still in their relative infancy. As faster processors and improved sensors enhance robots’ capabilities, it’s highly possible that the peaceful coexistence between man and machine may evolve into something more competitive. “In manufacturing, there’s already a ton of innovation going on,” says Brynjolfsson. Economists like him fear that as robots get smarter, the gross domestic product will expand at a healthy clip, but that positive data would mask reduced employment and lower wages. “Can GDP continue to grow? Of course it can,” says MIT economist Frank Levy. “The question is: Can everyone benefit?”
Extrapolate this further, and the role robots play in our economy and our lives begins to provoke fundamental questions about the nature of work. We have organised our economic system around the idea that income is derived from labor. But what happens when labor is not just transferred from one group of people to another (outsourcing) but to machines?