The rise of the robots

What will happen when robots will have (most of) our abilities?

During the boom of the agricultural revolution, 40% of the people worldwide were involved in the effort of producing food. Now, that number shrank to 2%, thanks to the technological improvements we all know. New tools were invented to do the job much better, and people were relocated to other occupations, because there has always been a plethora of new jobs created exactly by those advancements in technology. Employment rate has (almost) always grown since then, as had the quantity of wealth produced worldwide. During the last centuries, three main industrial revolutions took place. The steam engine helped in mechanizing the production of goods, which was substantially improved later by electrical energy. In the last century, the shift was about information, data and communication. Now, many different fields are converging to a fourth revolution, one in which the digital world will unfold into the real one, a revolution in which the lines between the digital, the real and even the biological worlds will become blurry. I am talking about robotics, and this time the impact on society can potentially be different from the other revolutions, because of the speed at which it’s happening. In the next decade, the robotics revolution will deeply change society as we know it.

An immediate effect, as automation increases, will be that a lot of people will lose their jobs. From self-driving cars replacing truck drivers, software voice assistants replacing customer service people and robots replacing warehouse workers, a lot of people will soon realize that their job is going to be automated soon. This raises two fundamental questions.
The first is: will this revolution create jobs faster than automating them, as the previous ones did? Many experts says yes, we don’t have to worry about that, because this will be exactly the same as the previous one, and the human society will be capable of handling this, as it always did. As Andrew McAfee has pointed out: people have been predicting mass technological unemployment for about 200 years, and it never happened.
The second question is: will governments be able to react properly to this?
A solution might be the universal basic income, as many people (and governments) have proposed. Basically, jobless people will be guaranteed a minimum wage to cover at least their basic needs. There is a project in Finland going on about this. In fact, in 2017, Finland will be the first country in the world to run an experiment about basic income, guaranteeing a minimum wage of 550€ to a selection of around 10000 Finnish people. Also Y combinator’s president Sam Altman is thinking about it.

Another effect is that, the more automation will take over manufacturing, the higher the percentage of wealth that will be produced by machines. This introduces a question: who owns the machines?
As production shifts towards robots, the owners of facilities and plants will get richer. This can lead to a vicious cycle where the rich get richer, and where economic inequality is boosted. Many have already predicted that globally, economic inequality will only get worse in the next years, unless effective countermeasures will be employed.
Also, it will be increasingly more difficult to overcome the barriers to wealth, as those barriers will grow with time, if the current trends will continue untouched.

Finally, skills and abilities demanded by employers will get higher and more specialized capabilities will be required. This is because in a lot of jobs, cooperation with machines will be necessary, and this is a task requiring specialized skills and knowledge, at least for today’s machines standards (see the video below).

In addition to specialized skills and training, people will be required to have very strong adaptation skills. In a very fast paced environment, flexibility is the key to success, as one should be willing to relocate and retrain very fast to accomplish different tasks. In conclusion, more training and capabilities will be required for the average Joe to climb the ladder of modern, automated workplaces.

To sum up, society as we know it will be completely changed in a decade or two from now. Jobless people, economic inequality and need for flexibility are the issues to overcome. Governments should embrace progress and not be scared of it, because this revolution is inevitable. Only with a global and collaborative effort the technological advancements will make this society thrive.