Great headline generators, but what are the chances of this happening?
When it comes to automation, we have traditionally tended to focus on the impact of robotics on manufacturing productivity and employment and how robots could dramatically streamline the conventional order-design-manufacture-supply process. Now, the rise of the smart factory, Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things could all change radically the way in which manufacturers operate by boosting productivity, flexibility and profitability.
The impact of technology has not been clear-cut, however. While Germany invested heavily in robotics, it lost far fewer manufacturing jobs between 1996 and 2012 than the UK, which invested significantly less.
The debate today, though, extends much further than manufacturing, taking in industries as diverse as teaching, nursing, the legal profession and hospitality.
Neither is this an academic debate. We been using robots in surgery for many years and, later this year, automated taxi pods will appear on the roads in and around Milton Keynes. Most major automotive manufacturers and Google are making serious investments in developing technology for the ‘driverless car’and driverless cars themselves.
Uber, meanwhile, is looking to remove the driver from its business model completely. According to the company’s chief executive Travis Kalanick, the service would be a lot cheaper if you didn’t have to ‘pay for that other dude (the driver) in the car’.
The nature of work will change and, while predicting the future is nearly impossible, the more educated and skilled the employee, the more likely it will be that they will find work in the economy of the future.
Perhaps the jobs of tomorrow haven’t been invented yet and what’s to say that what ‘could’ be done by a robot ‘will’ actually be done by one? With suggestions that, in 15 years, 90% of news will be written by machines, that comes as some relief to at least one journalist.
