Futurists have warned for years that automation will take your job.
Now it’s happening—albeit in pockets—at manufacturers, warehouses and even some labor-intensive white-collar professions, USA Today reports in a wide-ranging special report.
As the political debate rages over how to inject fresh energy into the American economy with President Donald Trump taking office, automation presents perhaps the greatest threat to the American economy.
But it may also reflect its greatest opportunity if workers embrace robotics, artificial intelligence and automation. Either way, it’s poised to accelerate—and if not here, then in foreign countries that will reap the benefits while the American economy suffers a competitive disadvantage.
About 49% of worker activities can be turned over to some sort of machine or robot, increasingly helped along by artificial-intelligence software, according to consultancy McKinsey. PricewaterhouseCoopers says in a separate survey that about 58% of CEOs plan to cut jobs over the next five years because of robotics, while 16% say they plan to hire more people because of robotics, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey.
As artificial intelligence programs proliferate, automation won’t be confined to the factory floor. “We often think about automation as applying to front-line, low-wage, low-skill activities and jobs—and what we’ve discovered is there are some activities that are high-wage, high-skill that are actually very susceptible to automation,” says Michael Chui, a McKinsey Global Institute partner in San Francisco. “Almost every job in the economy has a significant percentage of activities that can be automated.”
The professional service robot industry expects to sell a third more units from 2016 through 2019—333,200 in all—than it sold in the past 17 years, says the International Federation of Robotics. They could be used in place of professionals, whether it’s medicine, agriculture, hospitality or even the supermarket down the street.
USA Today has the full story.
