Forbes: The Western labor market, but not only it, will change from end to end in the coming decades. The entry of robots into places that until today were occupied by the majority of the working population, will force most of us to become entrepreneurs. And for those who don't succeed: welcome to the haltura economy
By: Goncalo de Vasconcelos, Forbes
The landscape of the world's workforce is going to change from end to end in the next decade. Robotics and artificial intelligence will do any boring, dirty or dangerous work for us. Driving, one of the most popular jobs in the United States for example, will not even continue to exist as a profession once autonomous vehicles creep into our lives. The roads will be safer, the transportation will be more efficient - and millions of people who currently have jobs will find themselves unemployed. In about ten years he will all be forced to become "entrepreneurs", and that will certainly not be a good thing. Welcome to the Halotura economy.
Imagine that you are a large corporation and that you no longer need drivers to transport your goods, you no longer need people to fill warehouses according to your instructions and that your factories will be polished to perfection, just as they will be empty. As a company, this is quite an attractive scenario - people are complex creatures, while robots don't get tired, don't ask for a raise, don't go on strike and produce much more predictable output. Once machines replace humans, your company will immediately become more competitive, move goods faster and be cheaper to operate. At the same time, there is also a dark and quite obvious side to this equation: imagine now that you are part of these workers - suddenly you have become redundant and you no longer have a job. Efficiency doesn't suddenly sound very good. About half of the world's workforce will be replaced by robots in about 20 years. There are also those who overestimate their estimates and predict that about 80% of the professions that exist today will disappear completely within the next 10 years. This radical change in the employment market has already begun to happen, and it poses a real threat to the stability of human society.
This is not the first time that the world is facing this type of crisis. During the industrial revolution, many predicted that unemployment would skyrocket after the machines replaced the factory workers. Although this did happen to some extent, many of the first machines required at least some workers to stay in the factory to oversee the new tools, and later, as the economy expanded, more jobs were created as a result. Peasants who moved to the cities were initially trained as factory workers, later many of them were retrained and became delivery drivers or other professions, as the need arose. Now that autonomous vehicles are slowly becoming a reality, truck and taxi drivers will also need to retrain and acquire new skills.
Autonomous vehicles are much closer to reality than most people think. I recently met Ira Ehrenpreis (a Tesla and SpaceX board member) who came to a meeting while he was just sitting in his car. He didn't even have to tell the car where to go, because it was linked to his phone, and knew where to go using his diary. His car (made by Tesla, of course) drove him to our meeting through the streets of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, finally completing the mission by parking itself. It's real, it's happening on the streets of California today.
And what will the professional drivers among us do? As mobility increases and its costs decrease, a completely new world of demands will fill our daily lives, and new jobs will also be created with it. Take the field of entertainment for example: cheap and effortless transportation will increase the need for entertainment, as it becomes easier to move on the road. Maybe new sports will be created.
Robots, in whatever form they come in, will very soon take over the most boring, dangerous and dirty jobs. Driving, filling warehouses, deliveries and even picking apples, just when the fruit is ripe - everything will be done by robots. Artificial intelligence will go even one step further by helping to fulfill complex tasks, such as financial audits, writing speeches for politicians and other leaders in order to positively influence the largest possible number of voters or to preserve the share price of a listed company. Even the recoding of the technology will be done by artificial intelligence, which will allow the code to heal itself and correct errors.
Just like during the industrial revolution, some jobs will disappear and others will be created. Welcome to the haggling economy, where we will all be entrepreneurs at some point, but only a few will also start companies that will actually employ people.
Or maybe we won't have to work at all, don't just sit with our feet up and relax, with our food, and all our other basic needs, taken care of by robots.
The writer is CEO of SyndicateRoom, a leading manufacturer of crowdfunding platforms.
The article was published on the website Pobars Israel
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Comments
History shows that every time a technological revolution occurred it only created more jobs for more people.
We went through an industrial revolution and a computing and energy revolution and more and more...
And yet I don't know people out of a job because some machine took their job.
There have always been prophets of wrath who predicted masses of unemployed people following their replacement by machines, yet what actually happened was that these revolutions created new professions that did not exist before for humans, more jobs, and increased the well-being of life for all of humanity.
So in the future there may not be drivers but there will be professions that do not exist today such as robot programmer, robot maintainer, robot marketer, and robot calibrater, robot recycler, and robot disassembler, and so on.
There are things that can slow down the entry of robots
And it's not just technological ability, but the price of such a robot.
A robotic hand like the one we see in factories with several trackers costs roughly between 50000 and 150000 and that's without the price of preparing the work environment for this hand. Now it is clear that a humanoid robot that should at least partially imitate the capabilities of a human would be extremely complex and full of trackers
of different types from the foot to the head including sight and hearing
Olah, we are talking about a million dollars minimum. If discounted then
Fewer trackers, less efficiency, less dynamism
On the other hand, a greater complexity that guarantees you more dynamism, its price is in complexity and a greater price
Including more complex maintenance and difficult problems to fix in the robot
Now no factory owner comes to donate his money to robots
or for people he will look for the cheapest means to create
If it will be a robot then he will take the robots
But if the robot costs over a million dollars and 3 shifts cost about NIS 300000, which is less than a hundred thousand dollars
The return on the investment will be more than 10 years, which is beyond the horizon of events for most enterprises, for whom 5 years is an eternity. You have to remember that if there is no work there will be many hungry people who will work for a much smaller amount, this is a market economy. If they are not paid unemployment benefits, people will work for ridiculous amounts like in the third world
It is hard to see how a sophisticated robot could compete at such low prices. Even today, many factories do not go for an automatic solution when the solution flies in the direction of hundreds of thousands of dollars or more as an addition to some production line
They stick some hominids who do the final packaging if the solution is too expensive. It should be remembered that the humanoid robot must be close to perfection to replace a human
95 percent is not enough because we will have to add another person to the price. Even in agriculture, it can be seen with certainty that cheap labor stops the introduction of automation systems, especially those that need many years of development. To sum up, the economic issue can certainly slow down the entry of robots into factories.
Although my name is Shmuel, but you don't have to be a prophet to prophesy or predict the future of the human race outside the earth,
And precisely the article and your more or less learned comments, a matter of perspective...strengthen my non-empirical but reasonable opinion...time will tell.
Everything is true, but the time frames are skewed according to the wishful thinking of the technology fans.
I will give one example: it is true that trucks can drive autonomously on the roads. In a few years it will certainly not be a big story.
Now imagine a truck with Italian ceramic surfaces, which has to be unloaded in a narrow street in Holon, to a building that is under construction and the unloading has to be done on the fifth floor.
Either you call the skilled driver again who knows how to both drive and operate a crane, also to fight with the neighbors who cannot enter their parking lot, and also to convince the inspector that he is already finishing, or the truck will unload itself to a fixed point in an area far from the building (have you ever seen an Israeli construction site? Yes, of course ....) Then any system will move the heavy pallets to the fifth floor,
This is just a simple example that things will take a little longer and maybe this dream of a robotic world where humans just bask in the sun, will come true in 100 years.
I don't know exactly what will happen to the person who was made unemployed by the robots, but I am convinced that in general something negative will happen to him, individually there are always exceptions, but by and large the robot unemployed have a bleak future.
World War III
What was will be and there is nothing new...
A very short time ago in human history 70 percent was engaged in food production. After the industrial revolution those 70 were divided between manufacturing and agricultural workers. The people of that time could not imagine professions such as personal training, website design, and flight attendants. You can go on, but the idea is clear. At the principle level, we moved from the production professions to the service professions and will continue to offer services, but services at a higher level.
Some additional diagnoses.
There will no longer be the same large central manufacturing companies as today. Complex XNUMXD printers will produce customized products according to demand in your residential area. Therefore there will be no inventory and almost no need to transport at all.
The professions of design and lifestyle will require a lot of manpower. Think you can design your shirt, car and house very freely, what will you choose?
The training period will be extended, and if today a bachelor's degree graduate enters the job market in his mid-twenties, then the continuation of this time will be extended after the age of thirty. The training profession will draw a great deal of free manpower. A personal trainer and a private teacher for each child does not sound excessive to me.
Super elderly population. In certain cities in Japan, forty percent of the population is over sixty. Soon in the rest of the world. What will this do to the job market?
free energy The development of solar energy is exponential. It will take time, but in the future the cost of energy will tend to zero. Today, the price of each product embodies about thirty percent of the cost of energy. What will you do with almost unlimited energy?
To finish bread and entertainment. This is what the seven Romans did that an army of slaves worked hard to enable. We are simply going back to that time when the robots serve as our servants.
It is possible to be a little less afraid of the future and the changes on the way. We also know how to adapt very quickly thanks to technology and the rapid transfer of knowledge. Any solution will be quickly replicated across the globe
The governments that do not know how to deal with unemployment will fall, the solution is
To raise a generation that will learn more technology and be creative. Most of the western world needs to become more educated and concentrate on research, the state needed to take care of those who do not have a job in the form of payment for volunteering and education...and maybe one day people will pay to receive service from people and not robots....
Moshe,
I got confused about the future 🙂
Listen, companies produce products first of all because they have a demand, people need these products to live - cars, airplanes, food, toothbrushes, cell phones, shoes, etc.
Now use your imagination and put yourself in the shoes of a factory manager 35 years from now:
1. You have the option of hiring 200 workers to do the work for you, but you will have to pay them a monthly salary, and take care of their food, welfare and health insurance...
2. You have the option instead, to buy 20 robots that will do the exact same job for you, but with much fewer mistakes and glitches, and their maintenance will cost you a quarter of what you would pay for 200 human workers.
Which option will you choose?
When it will be so cheap to produce products, citizens will be able to simply purchase them through monthly allowances they will receive from the government. The government will have no interest in sending people to work, it will be a waste from an economic point of view, it will not be profitable.
Moishela, you are not close enough to yourself to condescend to other commenters like that.
People's reactions make me laugh.. Surely the ancient man.
Companies produce to sell, if people don't have work, people won't have money to consume, if people don't consume, companies have no reason to produce, Kapish?
What will happen is this
A. The prices will be so cheap that to live like today will be really cheap, and those who want to live at a standard of living like today will be able to work part time.
Only this won't happen because it is human nature to want more and to improve the quality of life, so he will want entertainment that currently does not yet exist,
He will want a flight to space because Europe is already fed up, and those who want Europe will already travel in business class (that is, passenger class will be at the level of business class) at the same time for savers, a flight will cost a few dollars if you travel in a crowded class.
In short, look at everything the rich buy today, this is what the middle class will have in a few years, and so on every few generations.
Who decided that the robots will run in the country?
And the robot will run on the Red Planet; And man will roam the earth. as written
Instead of people from proteins there will be people from polymers, semi-conductors and light metals.
Instead of blood in the arteries, electric charges will flow inside their printed circuits
And instead of reproducing sexually, they will multiply and reproduce in workshops where laboring robots will work.
Restaurants will no longer exist, only electric charging stations.
What will still be left?
Probably mostly sports competitions, between robots of course.
Research universities without students, and the main thing...
Factories for the production of air conditioners
The day is not far when the phrase "the house is smart. It is the tenant - stupid" will be relevant...
For those who do not understand bleach: lesson number 1 - the economy is not based on science. Economics, for the most part, is based on human psychology.
I fear that the current enthusiasm for the robotics and artificial intelligence revolution is a bit premature, and there have been quite a few periods of such early enthusiasm. You always think that the problems are solvable at the level of 10 years ahead, then you find out that they are not, and things are "a little" more complicated.
When it comes to home robotics, there's a perfectly good reason why home robots look like pizza on wheels rather than the mythical maid in the steel skirt. The reason is the huge number of parts needed for each such robot. If they solve this problem, we can be pretty sure that we won't need technicians anyway, just as no one takes their computer keyboard to a technician.
https://www.xkcd.com/1425/
A',
What is meant is computing power in relation to the price, that is, the claim is that every two years you can buy a computer that is twice as powerful as the computer you had two years ago for the same amount of money, that is, even if the computing power does not increase at all, but the same computer will cost you half the price after two years, so It still upholds that law.
Listen, I keep hearing about technological breakthroughs in the field of computing, soon we will move to three-dimensional chips that will probably be much more powerful, and large companies, led by Google, are already working on quantum computers that will even jump us into another league... so there is still room for aspiration.
And in general, don't forget that we have a working example, which is the human brain, so we know that at least this level can be reached. And what about the possibility (which admittedly has many moral problems) that we take a piece of human DNA that creates a brain, and simply grow a "brain in a jar" from it? And maybe through genetic changes we will increase this brain by 2 or 3 times? How will this affect the power of thinking? And maybe we will combine that brain with digital chips that will allow it to quickly perform complicated mathematical calculations? The sky is the limit here.
rival
A little note.
In fact, the power of the calculation has been getting harder in recent years. And you certainly won't be able to grow exponentially in the near future.
There are four main areas that integrate well together and develop at a very fast pace in recent years (some even say exponentially) and they are: the power of computing, robotics, artificial intelligence and brain research. In my opinion (as far as I can get an impression from reading and watching the subject) within a few decades robots will already know how to do everything and in a much more efficient and faster way than humans, even maintain themselves and of course other robots.
There will be no economic or other justification, even from the point of view of the robots themselves, for the humans to perform any work when their companions as mentioned will perform the same work in a much more efficient way.
So what will we do during this time? Until we fully integrate with technology and turn ourselves into a fountain of digital robots - we will probably rest, travel, engage in our hobbies, and we will probably receive some kind of monthly allowance from the state that will allow us to live well.
Yes, sounds like a utopia, but I think this is the general direction.
The economy is going to be very entertaining: there will be plenty of manufacturing power competing and able to supply the demands of most of humanity through robotic manufacturing. Most of humanity, on the other hand, will be unemployed and unable to finance most basic needs. She will look at the shiny shop window, but not go inside. Hence the production force will be surplus and will remain unemployed. This will lead to a long and protracted economic collapse that can only be resolved in one of two ways: 1. A dramatic economic change that will cause a different distribution of wealth, the means of production, etc. 2. World War. All against all. There will be a huge demand for the production of eagle tools and soldiers (until those robots are also replaced).
This has already happened once (at least), and it started 87 years ago. From another point of view it has already started and is now happening mainly in Arab countries.
New jobs will be created in all fields of building, renovating and upgrading robots. If everyone has several robots at home (cleaning, cooking, washing-drying-unloading-folding, smart home, smart car, gardening and more) many technicians are needed to repair and take care of them.
Building maintenance companies will be larger, more complex and more serviceable.
Disabled people will have it easier in such a world. The chair will bring it to any room or building through the best access ways. The garages will be more complex.
The entire military field will flourish greatly. Air, land and sea battles will be launched from the ground. The cyber field will grow significantly. Think big people..
With all due respect to all the millionaires of all kinds, most of the world's consumption is still consumed by the billions of people scattered all over the globe.
The factories in China are mostly small based on personnel, if most of them do not work there will be no money for the consumption that exists and is based on daily survival.
Typical communist leftist thinking "Or maybe we don't have to work at all, don't just sit with our feet up and relax, while our food, and all our other basic needs, are taken care of by robots." No, comrades, there is no such thing as money that comes from nowhere, someone (a human being) must work at a real productive job for him and if someone sits at home and gets money, it's always! at someone else's expense. Not even a billion robots will change that
Not to forget that many robotic taxis will need to transport robots from one workplace to another. flesh and blood workers will be last in line.