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Attention workers: Robots are coming for your jobs

By Felicity Duncan

I’m a big fan of dystopian science fiction – stuff like Blade Runner and Tank Girl, imagined worlds in which the future has arrived and it’s not great. Given my fiction preferences, I’m always on the lookout for signs that the world as imagined by William Gibson and portrayed in Johnny Mnemonic is about to happen. So when I recently read a blog about advanced in robotics, I couldn’t help but take it as a Sign.

Essentially the blog, by Steven Hansen of Global Economic Intersection, discussed how advances in robotics suggest that machines instead of people will soon do more and more jobs, particularly in rich countries.

You see, one of the major problems that emerges in any large business (and in government, in the army, basically in any big group of people) is that it gets harder for managers to control, manage, and communicate with employees the further down the chain you go.

Think about a huge global retailer like Walmart. Right at the very top is a boss who has a vision of where he wants the company to go. But as that vision works its way down through layers and layers of employees all the way to the cashier at a Walmart in Columbia, Missouri, a lot gets lost. The boss hopes that all the interstitial layers are set up to make sure that the cashier is doing exactly what she should be doing, but there’s no easy way for the boss to know if it’s happening.

To deal with this, managers use technology. Long ago, it was punch cards to make sure people got to work and left at the right time. Today, GPS trackers are used to monitor where drivers are going, cameras are installed to keep an eye on retail staff, and complex computer systems are used to make sure that inventory is accounted for and payments are recorded and double-checked.

But even all this technology isn’t sufficient to fully overcome the gap between the top and the bottom of a large corporation, which is why a company striving for customer service still has rude employees at the bottom of the pyramid. Given this, it’s easy to see why managers would be so interested in replacing pesky human workers with machines.

This is already happening all over. In factories, for example, many routine tasks are already automated, and the robot carmakers are happy to work 24 hours a day in the dark, with no breaks. Automated call centres, ATMs – many routine tasks in companies have been taken out of the hands of people and put into the cheaper, more efficient, and less vocal hands of robots.

This trend is likely to accelerate in the years to come. Consider, for example, developments in driverless vehicles. For several years, mines in Australia have been using driverless mega-trucks to shunt ore around. The US military uses unmanned smart drones to launch attacks in the Middle East; and Google and other car manufacturers are currently lobbying hard to get driverless cars on to public roads, arguing that they are safer than human-driven vehicles. What this means is that, within a few years, many human workers in the transportation and logistics industry could see their jobs filled by robots – truck drivers replaced by driverless trucks, warehouse floor workers replaced by smart robots.

Almost all profit-seeking companies are permanently on the lookout for ways to reduce their staff costs; after all, staff costs are often the biggest line item in the company ledger. Today, as technology improves and develops, more and more companies are going to be looking at reducing their headcount and increasing their chip count, replacing workers with robots capable of performing the same tasks.

What does this mean for investors? Frankly, it’s a mixed bag. While the increased profitability that is likely to result from the trend towards automation will benefit shareholders, the employment disruption that the process will cause is simultaneously likely to put a dampener on the economy. It’s possible that displaced workers will eventually find alternative, higher-value employment, but that depends a lot on their ability to adapt to higher-skill work (since robots will soon be able to handle all the routine, low-skill work). And even if workers do ultimately adapt, the disruption could be prolonged.

The accelerating automation trend will probably help companies streamline and raise profits, but the potential for unrest and economic disruption should not be ignored.

* For more in-depth business news, visit biznews.com or simply sign up for the daily newsletter.

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