Our last poll of 2016 focused on automation and was prompted by Bank of England governor Mark Carney’s warning that automation technology will put millions of jobs at risk.
Carney’s comments followed research published in 2016 by Citi and Oxford University claiming that 57 per cent of jobs across the OECD are at risk from automation.
With this in mind, we asked readers if they fear automation, and the answer was a resounding ‘no’ with 51 per cent believing that automation creates new high skilled opportunities.
Just over a quarter of respondents (26 per cent) thought profits from automation should be used to fund a universal basic income, followed by 15 per cent who took the view that automation will lead to huge job losses. The remaining eight per cent couldn’t find a fit with the options presented, choosing instead to select ‘None of the above’.
Reaction round-up
Tristan Melland: Automation is inevitable and desirable. The world will will end up with 5 Billion useless people, their only function being consumers and “enjoying” life. Our trick as engineers and leaders is to concentrate on the front end, the creative and new, which will not be a n AI capability.
Alex Noble: I voted for “Automation creates new high skilled opportunities”, however I fear that if we don’t invest heavily in education for the next generation and presenting these higher skilled jobs for people then it will only be the elite that will benefit from this modernisation of automation.
Clive Davis: I am yet to be convinced that the level of automation is increasing quickly. I believe the level is changing slowly, as it has done for the 250 years or so. Another advantage of automation is that we can get manufacturing back to the UK as low wages overseas give a smaller cost advantage.
What do you think? Let us know in Comments below.
I am yet to be convinced that the level of automation is increasing quickly. I believe the level is changing slowly, as it has done for the 250 years or so. Another advantage of automation is that we can get manufacturing back to the UK as low wages overseas give a smaller cost advantage.
I voted for “Automation creates new high skilled opportunities”, however I fear that if we don’t invest heavily in education for the next generation and presenting these higher skilled jobs for people then it will only be the elite that will benefit from this modernisation of automation.
I studied automation technology 30 years ago. And we are still not where I thought we could be. In the office we still have the same issues as 20 years ago. Not much different in factories.
Automation can relieve us of stupid and hard labour. It could free people to do more useful things. Imagine care homes where people only work 6 hours each day instead of 12. Where they have time to talk with the residents.
And now imagine engineers designing and making robots that support care workers. And computer and software systems that make reporting obsolete. Freeing time for engagement with residents and patients.
Where is that paperless office?
All three voting options were equally relevant therefore I could not vote for any single one of them. High skilled opportunities has to be preceded by substantial investment in education else we will have a lost generation who have no place in modern society.
The problem is who pays? We will undoubtedly leave it far too late with the potential that only the privileged will benefit.
Who knows what the future holds for Automation or Robotics but If we are to be replaced by robots, will said robots earn our wage for us? Then we can get paid for relaxing somewhere remotely keeping an eye things while my employer benefits from improved efficiencies, less accidents and the unpredictability us humans bring to the work place? Doesn’t sound to bad or does it?
Why then would the employer pay our salary in the first place? Couldn’t an automated real-time diagnostic system do the job of keeping an eye on things without getting tired or inattentive, 24/7, with no holidays or pension? I like the theory that automation could free humanity from the working week, but I’m not convinced the owners of profit-making organisations have ever had any true interest in sharing the benefits of automation with their workforces!
In my (four-wheeled) neck of the engineering woods, the emphasis in product development seems to be on generating virtual toolsets that can iterate and analyse designs given a set of input conditions, design rules and loadcases. Taking a week’s worth of running, tweaking and re-running analyses and automating the design work to the point where the human input is confined to plugging in the inputs (or downloading them from a deck generated by another automated process…) and checking the results. My feeling is that we engineers are not as safe from the concept of automation encroaching on our usefulness as we like to tell ourselves.
Like with airline pilots, it stands to reason that companies will still want a human in the loop to check in if the computer throws out the odd error every once in a while, but surely that can’t keep us all busy enough in our current numbers…
I have worked with new automated innovations since the 1950’s and the same argument was being voiced then. Automation merely reduces human input to the repetitive boring jobs which people generally do not enjoy doing and allows a greater proportion of the working population the opportunity to undertake more interesting employment if they so desire. There currently appears to be no mass unemployment despite the fact that automation commenced many years ago with the advent of steam.
What a wet blanket Carney is persistently preaching doom and gloom, is there no optimism in him. He should get out more but perhaps he is self conscious whilst wearing the sackcloth and ashes.
This is a more complex area than just automation. Yes, change if afoot, and it will be rapid (i.e. we will all notice it), but first we need to be thinking in terms of sustainability, emissions, and how automation helps in this. The development of cyber-physical systems knowledge and understanding has the promise of making our world sustainable through tight control of processes, reductions in waste and other emissions, and saving on materials extraction and landfill by enabling an effective circular economy. There will be significant job losses in most repetitive jobs (I include accounting and other management processes in this), perhaps on the scale that the economists predict. However, it is expected that for a few decades these cyber-physical systems will operate in fairy frequent fault mode, creating new classes of jobs. So, while a circular economy in the UK alone is said to create some 300,000 jobs, the jobs to be lost are far more, and of the jobs that remain there will be new skills requirement to work in a CPS world, meaning job displacement is likely to happen as well. There will be a lot of jobless people around, so we will necessarily see short working weeks, job sharing, and a living wage economy to keep society away from riots, luddism, and worse. And unless the government pays attention to all this and mitigates the downside, we may find ourselves necessarily importing all these foreigners that the BREXIT minority so hate to do the jobs that our people no longer have the skills to do.
Engineers may hold onto our jobs a little longer than most but 90% unemployment will collapse civilisation.
We’re all doomed!
(merry Christmas)
I see the link to the video I posted in my comment has been stripped out.
It’s at “a well known video posting site” and entitled “humans need not apply”.
It describes one possible future where automation makes nearly all human jobs obsolete and compares humans to horses around the time of cars becoming mainstream. The outlook for humanity is not rosy with us all finding high tech jobs or becoming people of leisure but in fact becoming useless burdens. Useless things tend to get discarded.
A bit like what happened with automatic car washers.
Automation is the only way manufacturing can continue in the UK. The problem is as the profit margins fall in the UK the automatic lines are moved overseas and the next generation of robots are used in the UK, each of these steps reducing the actual workforce. As manufacturing profits rise industry should increases its contribution to the Public Sector to ensure the service sector can maintain their workforce. Not everyone is able to reach the high technical skill levels.
However, the problem is that many of our industries are foreign owned, and profits do not remain in the UK
We could start with “driverless” trains rather than cars, at least the railroads are well defined and signalled.
I am sure your suggestion will be hugely welcomed by the unions who will advise their members to adopt any progressive measures.
Automation is inevitable and desirable. The world will will end up with 5 Billion useless people, their only function being consumers and “enjoying” life. Our trick as engineers and leaders is to concentrate on the front end, the creative and new, which will not be a n AI capability.
Let us automate the tax assessment service 1st – make it a lot simpler and quicker – we should use a 1 or 2 page tax return form as they have in Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan etc. and also set a low tax threshold (say 10 or 12%) which would everyone would pay quickly and without argument. This would eliminate the requirement for all the unnecessary people trying to collect personal taxes and direct them to ensuring that the big multi national companies paid their fare share of taxes. Accountants could be better employed working on projects ensuring contractors collected accurate payments for work done and they could also also work for clients to verify these payments quickly and ensure that payments for work done are paid on time. I am certain that the Government would collect more revenue and there would be less people and companies going bankrupt. The general mood of the population would get better – especially at Christmas.
But, sadly CD misses the point. When, throughout history have civil servants ever voluntarily reduced their ‘control’ and hence opportunities for their continued employment. What he suggests is of course quite correct: simplicity….but as so many of our fellow citizens (the ones who do not create wealty) livelihoods depend on the conflict, not its outcome, like turkeys (to mis-quote a former PM) they are unlikely to vote for an early Christmas. Happy Christmas? early or not!
” …….but 90% unemployment will collapse civilisation.”
Some years ago, I visited an establishment -run as a part of a Government. Over the exit door -through which all the senior staff left every evening – was a simple sign.
“Never forget, we are four meals away from anarchy.” What my host told me was that ‘if the population remains un-fed for a complete day…and for breakfast the next day….the breakdown in civil order is inevitable.’ Its a strange irony that for much of mankind’s history it was only the elite, the thinkers (monks and clerics primarily) those at the summit of society who were guaranteed food and lodging: the lower orders had pretty much to fend for themselves, ‘they -the toffs’ living off their labour. Can one imagine some future scenario -as postulated by the present ‘top-end??’ (banks, accountants, lawyers, administrators and of course we Engineers who will have designed and built the automation) where we are the only ones who ‘work’ and they are the masses with leisure? Lets hope our final act in the run-up is to educate them how to usefully, effectively and sensibly (artistically?) use it!
Ultimately the fewer people employed means that an increasing number will need to be supported through taxes! Not everyone will be able to be transferred to a higher skill job, which will end up being fewer and fewer anyway. Automation tends to be rigid. Machines need to be built for specific tasks, and humans are more readily adaptable. Though a downside of manual work is that quality can be more variable. Ultimately business and manufacturing is part of society, it relies on society to buy products and the fewer people with an excess of income over expenditure will result in fewer products being bought! Automation often comes about in a revolutionary way, and society requires time to evolve to accommodate it. Evolutionary assimilation and implementation of automation will result in less social upheaval.
I imagine people going back to university to be part of the next great change, then being part of it. Meanwhile people in the current revolution will lose their relevance as the next one takes hold, have to go and study again and come back later.
So we would indeed be less employed on actual work and more employed on learning and preparing for work. There would still be a lot for each person to do but less of it would be directly about output.
Its worth remembering that the form of automation we are witnessing is not down to replacing humans in niche, repetitive or difficult tasks. Computing power has meant increasingly general purpose machines are replacing general labor. Just as general purpose desktops have replaced most general purpose typists.
The oft repeated statement that more automation creates new jobs is it bears thinking about when the majority of the workforce are in the same type of jobs that existed 100 or more years ago. Shopkeepers, transporters and factory laborers have always by far outnumbered engineers, designers, artists and programmers. In fact by the nature of the latters work they always will.
Just as cars have made horses unemployable in all but the most specialised roles I suspect increasingly general purpose robotics and programs will make many basic forms of labor obsolete. This is not to say this is bad but it is seemingly inevitable and we cant simply assume most of the population will move to fields like engineering, design, art, programming when the success of those fields depends on a few specialists supplying their skills to a large number of consumers who now have no jobs.
Automation certainly introduces some high skilled jobs, but for much fewer people. Those who can make the transition will be fine, but it leaves a growing volume of unusable workers because not everybody can assimilate new technical skills. By (blinkered) focussing on the purely immediate business benefits there is a great danger of creating wider and more expensive problems in society. Increasing the numnbers of people who get displaced means a bigger social security bill, which means higher taxes. There needs to be a trade-off or compromise. In social terms it may be far more (tax) efficient to retain some levels of manual semi or unskilled jobs for those who cannot assimilate skills meaning that instead of living off the dole they are doing something constructive to society or the company, even if it is only picking crops or stacking boxes.
Further to Tristan Melland’s comment. The problem is that those 5 billion ‘useless’ people will need to be supported, housed and fed, and without worthwhile jobs they will not have the resources to purchase the new fangled automatically produced goods! Automation is a good thing if it allows something to be done that cannot be produced consistently and in sufficient volumes by a manual operation (skilled or unskilled) or as quickly.
Automation would replace managers first. And they won’t allow it. Managers can’t supervise machines. Imagine a manager telling a machine to work longer today, even when the machine is obviously broken and needs repair…