Humans Need Not Apply

Will automation, AI and robotics mean a jobless future, or will their productivity free us to innovate and explore?Is the impact of new technologies to be feared, or a chance to rethink the structure of our working lives andensure a fairer future for all?

- Dr louise Walsh

On googling ‘will a robot take my job?’ I find myself on a BBC webpage that invites me to discover the likelihood that my work will be automated in the next 20 years. I type in ‘editor’. “It’s quite unlikely, 8%” comes back. Quite reassuring – but, coming from a farming family, it’s a sobering moment when I type in ‘farmer’: “It’s fairly likely, 76%”.

The results may well be out of date – such is the swiftness of change in labour market predictions – but the fact that the webpage even exists says something about the focus of many of today’s conversations around the future of work.

Many of the discussions are driven by stark numbers. According to a scenario suggested recently by consultancy McKinsey, 75–375 million workers (3–14% of the global workforce) will need to switch occupational categories by 2030, and all workers will need to adapt “as their occupations evolve alongside increasingly capable machines”.

Just recently, online retailer Shop Direct announced the closure of warehouses and a move to automation, putting nearly 2,000 jobs at risk. Automation – or ‘embodied’ artificial intelligence (AI) – is one aspect of the disruptive effects of technology on the labour market. ‘Disembodied AI’, like the algorithms running in our smartphones, is another.

Dr Stella Pachidi from Cambridge Judge Business School believes that some of the most fundamental changes in work are happening as a result of ‘algorithmication’ of jobs that are dependent on information rather than production – the so-called knowledge economy.

Algorithms are capable of learning from data to undertake tasks that previously needed human judgement, such as reading legal contracts, analysing medical scans and gathering market intelligence.