A report by Forrester research claims that early stage intelligent agents (IAs) will replace up to 6% of US jobs in the next five years. The abstract of the study claims:
Early-stage intelligent agents (IAs) have arrived and are gaining traction among consumers. And as consumers fall in love with the customized, proactive utilities IAs provide, IAs will capture the interactions that customers used to have directly with brands. Marketers who prepare for IAs will thrive, while unprepared brands will cede their customer access. This report explains the different ways that B2C marketing leaders can prepare for intelligent agents and how to pick the best approach.
Primarily, this will come in two dominant forms.
1. Self Driving Cars (logistics/trucking & ride services)
2. Enhanced Virtual Assistants (next-gen Siri, Cortana, Google-Now, WATSON)
White collar jobs are generally at higher risk - low level service jobs cost a lot and provide little in return, and are very easy to automate.
“Six percent is huge. In an economy that’s really not creating regular full-time jobs, the ability of people to easily find new employment is going to diminish. So we will have people wanting to work and struggling to find jobs because the same trends are beginning to occur in other historically richer job creation areas like banking, retail and healthcare,” said Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union. - The Guardian
The real question is - with rampant automation in an era of massive wealth inequality, and reductions to social programs.... Will we initialize a basic income? Will more people use pay-share services like Steemit? Will people simply be killed if they are poor?
Not every hotel concierge, bus driver, or call-center worker is smart enough to become a computer programmer, or creative enough to become an artist. What should be done with these people? I think we have two choices:
1. Basic Income or Pay-share services like Steemit.
2. Debtors Prisons, Internment (and death) camps for the underemployed (dumb)
I think history shows us where this is headed.
@iontom
they will also create 16% more jobs.
same thing happened with the industrual revolution.
bullshit report. moving on...
Will it though? We're no longer just automating labor, we're also automating intelligence & creativity.
True. The Associated Press is producing stories about minor league baseball games written by AI using databases storing play-by-play data from each game. In this case, it's not costing anyone a job; they weren't able to report on these games at all before. But it's just the beginning. IBM's Watson produced a movie trailer: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/09/01/watch-ibm-watson-creates-first-entirely-ai-made-movie-trailer-really-eerie/#gref
The source of your 16% projection? Did you read the report?
New jobs will be created but they'll require new skillsets we're not training for.
Things may be fine in the long run, but it will be incredibly disruptive in the short term, and 6% unemployment is huge, with ripple effects throughout the economy and long-term implications before things improve.
As for the Industrial Revolution keep in mind that it created a massive number of new kinds of jobs that had never existed before. What's happening now is far more incremental.
At some point, we're going to have to have a conversation as a society about how we value people's time. I wouldn't minimize the potential disruption we're looking at.
Not that there's any stopping it, nor that it's not necessarily, ultimately, a good thing. It's just going to come with considerable pain.
I am not that pessimistic :-) The story of the last 2-3 centuries is full of examples of disruptive innovations which have led to job market reorganization. The common feature is that the minimum education threshold required to get a job (for most people) keeps increasing. This is a challenge, but not a bad thing per se. Do we really miss the good old times when most people were slaving in mines or in the countryside and died before 40...?