Will robots bring about the
end of work?
Automation looks set to replace many jobs in the next few decades. What
work will be left for humans to do?
Toby Walsh
Few economic indicators are of more
concern to politicians than unemployment
statistics. Reports that unemployment rates
are dropping make us happy; reports to the
contrary make us anxious. But just what do
unemployment figures tell us? Are they
reliable measures?
If respondents say they are both out of
work and seeking employment, they are
counted as unemployed members of the labor
force. Jobless respondents who have chosen
not to continue looking for work are
considered out of the labor force and therefore
are not counted as unemployed. Ironically, those
who drop out of the labor force – whether because
they are discouraged, have household
responsibilities, or are sick – actually make
unemployment rates look better; the
unemployment rate includes only people within
the labor force who are out of work. But how
exactly will unemployment look in the future?
Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has a simple
way to predict the future. The future is simply what
rich people have today. The rich have chauffeurs. In
the future, we will have driverless cars that
chauffeur us all around. The rich have private
bankers. In the future, we will all have robo-
bankers.
One thing that we imagine that the rich have today
are lives of leisure. So will our future be one in
which we too have lives of leisure, and the
machines are taking the sweat? We will be able to
spend our time on more important things than
simply feeding and housing ourselves?
Let’s turn to another chief economist. Andy
Haldane is chief economist at the Bank of England.
In November 2015, he predicted that 15 million
jobs in the UK, roughly half of all jobs, were under
threat from automation. You’d hope he knew what
A robot works at a tea shop during a Shanghai conference. Photograph:
Imaginechina/REX/Shutterstock
he was talking about.
And he’s not the only one making dire predictions.
Politicians. Bankers. Industrialists. They’re all
saying a similar thing.
“We need urgently to face the challenge of
automation, robotics that could make so much of
contemporary work redundant”, Jeremy Corbyn at
the Labour Party Conference in September 2017.
“World Bank data has predicted that the
proportion of jobs threatened by automation in
India is 69 percent, 77 percent in China and as high
as 85 percent in Ethiopia”, according to World Bank
president Jim Yong Kim in 2016.
It really does sound like we might be facing the end
of work as we know it.
Andy Haldane, UK’s chief economist says “Why?
Because 20th-century machines have substituted
not just for manual human tasks, but cognitive
ones too. The set of human skills machines could
reproduce, at lower cost, has both widened and
deepened.” With machines becoming ever smarter,
Haldane said a wider array of jobs were at risk from
automation than in the past. Low-paid jobs were
most at risk, but the “hollowing out” would
increasingly affect mid-skill jobs as well.
Many of these fears can be traced back to a 2013
study from the University of Oxford. This made a
much-quoted prediction that 47% of jobs in the US
were under threat of automation in the next two
decades. Other more recent and detailed studies
have made similar dramatic predictions.
Now, there’s a lot to criticize in the Oxford study.
From a technical perspective, some of report’s
predictions are clearly wrong. The report gives a
94% probability that bicycle repair persons will be
automated in the next two decades. And, as
someone trying to build that future, I can reassure
any bicycle repair person that there is zero chance
that we will automate even small parts of your job
anytime soon. The truth of the matter is no one has
any real idea of the number of jobs at risk.
Even if we have as many as 47% of jobs automated,
this won’t translate into 47% unemployment. One
reason is that we might just work a shorter week.
That was the case in the Industrial Revolution.
Before the Industrial Revolution, many worked 60
hours per week. After the Industrial Revolution,
work reduced to around 40 hours per week. The
same could happen with the unfolding AI
Revolution.
Another reason that 47% automation won’t
translate into 47% unemployment is that all
technologies create new jobs as well as destroy
them. That’s been the case in the past, and we
have no reason to suppose that it won’t be the
case in the future. There is, however, no
fundamental law of economics that requires the
same number of jobs to be created as destroyed. In
the past, more jobs were created than destroyed
but it doesn’t have to be so in the future.
In the Industrial Revolution, machines took over
many of the physical tasks we used to do. But we
humans were still left with all the cognitive tasks.
This time, as machines start to take on many of the
cognitive tasks too, there’s the worrying question:
what is left for us humans?
Some of my colleagues suggest there will be plenty
Source (adapted from): https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2017/oct/01/will-
robots-bring-about-the-end-of-work
 Summarize what the text is about!
 According to Toby Walsh, how does our future look like?
 Why are economists afraid that so many robots will replace human’s jobs?
 What kind of jobs will be affected?
 According to Toby Walsh, what do 47% automation mean for unemployment?
of new jobs like robot repair person. I am entirely
unconvinced by such claims. The thousands of
people who used to paint and weld in most of our
car factories got replaced by only a couple of robot
repair people.
No, the new jobs will have to be doing jobs where
either humans excel or where we choose not to
have machines. But here’s the contradiction. In fifty
to hundred years time, machines will be super-
human. So it’s hard to imagine of any job where
humans will remain better than the machines. This
means the only jobs left will be those where we
prefer humans to do them.
The AI Revolution then will be about rediscovering
the things that make us human. Technically,
machines will have become amazing artists. They
will be able to write music to rival Bach, and
paintings to match Picasso. But we’ll still prefer
works produced by human artists.
These works will speak to the human experience.
We will appreciate a human artist who speaks
about love because we have this in common. No
machine will truly experience love like we do.
As well as the artistic, there will be a re-
appreciation of the artisan. Indeed, we see the
beginnings of this already in hipster culture. We
will appreciate more and more those things made
by the human hand. Mass-produced goods made
by machine will become cheap. But items made by
hand will be rare and increasingly valuable.
Finally as social animals, we will also increasingly
appreciate and value social interactions with other
humans. So the most important human traits will
be our social and emotional intelligence, as well as
our artistic skills. The irony is that our technological
future will not be about technology but all about
our humanity.
Toby Walsh is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at
the University of New South Wales, in Sydney,
Australia.
 What do you think how automatization will affect the unemployment rate?

Right Wing Radio Duck

 Describe what happens to Donald Duck in the video.
 What does the voice in the radio say?
 How would you describe his statements politically?
 What issues are addressed by the voice in the radio?
 What do you think who Glenn Beck could be?
 What kind of political view does he support?
 Discuss whether such statements could cause political
unrest.
 What do the terms parody and propaganda mean? Which
of both do you think is this video?

Unemployment Cartoons

 Is unemployment a huge problem where you live now?

 What do you think of the Austrian government’s unemployment system?
 Describe an employee whom an employer would never fire!
 What do you think about the fact that many unemployed people are not shown in
statistics?
 What are most efficient ways to look for jobs on the internet?