The development of robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has had a significant impact on various aspects of human life. In 2020, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) recorded that there were around 2.7 million industrial robots operating worldwide. This rapid growth raises a fundamental question: will humans be replaced by robots in various aspects of life?
Humans play an important role in society and the world of work. As social beings, humans have the unique ability to interact, collaborate, and use complex skills such as emotion, creativity, and problem solving. On the other hand, advances in robotics technology have expanded into various sectors of life, including the manufacturing industry, healthcare, transportation, and households. Robots and artificial intelligence are capable of performing repetitive, dangerous, or high-precision tasks with high efficiency.
However, concerns about the replacement of humans by robots have also arisen. In this regard, expert opinion can provide valuable perspective. Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro, a renowned scientist and robotics expert, believes that the interaction between humans and robots will become more natural and significant in everyday life. He believes that robots will become true friends for humans in the future. On the other hand, Prof. Rodney Brooks, a renowned robotics expert, argues that concerns about the total replacement of humans by robots are overblown. According to him, the use of robots can help ease the burden of human work and expand our capabilities, not replace us completely.
Will a robot do your job?
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| Will a robot do your job? |
Will robots take your job? It’s an understandable question given the current hype around robotics and artificial intelligence. Many people are asking “will my job be automated?” or “will my job disappear altogether?” as more and more companies and industries become redundant.
I might ask, will robots take my job as the author of this article?
My answer is no.
Will robots take our jobs? It’s highly unlikely anytime soon unless you have a job that is in every way equivalent to playing a real-world computer game. Let me explain.
There are many dynamics driving the current narrative around robots, chatbots for businesses, and AI taking over jobs. Much of this discussion is simply an extension of the long-standing and ongoing economic discussion around the impact of automation and increased productivity.
The more important question about jobs being automated is whether there will be new jobs to replace them. Essentially, workers are asking first whether their jobs will be replaced and second, if their jobs are replaced, will there be better jobs for them to do. The worst-case scenario is that automation will cause permanent unemployment because new jobs are not created after old jobs are automated.
The reality is that until AI becomes as smart as humans, it will change jobs in the same way that all innovative technologies change jobs: it eliminates some tasks but adds new ones to do. Workers in the affected industries will need to re-skill, but their jobs will not be eliminated. As with all innovation, the bigger risk is that fewer people will be needed to do the same job (or achieve the same or better results), so from that perspective, the job will be eliminated for some.
Since the beginning of time, tools, including machines, have been created to increase human productivity. This means that over time, many jobs are lost, but it also opens the door to new jobs. It also means that people get richer because the cost of old essential products and services has fallen and new products and services, some of which are now essential, have been invented.
This is basic economics, and most people know it. The middle class today is far better off in many ways than a king was a few hundred years ago. When a construction project manager brags about saving jobs by having workers use shovels instead of machines, he is asked, “Why not take away the shovels and give the workers teaspoons?” It’s hard to argue that forcing people to be less productive doesn’t help anyone except those directly affected by the relevant innovation (and only in the short term).
Of course, many argue that what we are facing today is a singularity. Once artificial intelligence reaches human-level capabilities on key dimensions, there will be no more jobs for humans to do.
There are many people with a strong vested interest in promoting this perspective. Warnings of impending dangers or making extraordinary claims about AI generate clicks and likes, which creates publicity for individuals and companies. It’s a topic that people will want to know more about because it’s both exciting and threatening. Interesting ideas like these motivate employees and generate sales. But is this a real concern?
The answer is yes and no. If it were true that we could create general artificial intelligence, then it would certainly be a concern. And in this case, worries about jobs will fall lower than other worries (such as AI dominating humanity) because productivity will explode and the world will be abundant.
Even if general intelligence is still a long way off (and I believe it is), it is also true that people need to understand the implications of what they are doing with AI to ensure that there are no unintended consequences from how the technology is implemented. If you are relying on computers to write the rules (i.e. not explicitly programming them), then you need to make sure that if these techniques are applied to mission-critical systems, people understand and account for the risks (as should be the case with any technology used for mission-critical systems). This may be a justification for the rise of AI and the need to regulate aspects of AI, but without achieving general intelligence for AI, there is no binary threat to jobs. More on this later...
It is worth noting that concerns about job automation and fears about the end of jobs are partly due to a failure of predictive imagination. We can see the jobs that will be lost but cannot imagine what will replace them. Who could have predicted information technology as a significant job category before computing became mainstream? Who could have predicted all the jobs surrounding social media before social networking became mainstream?
There is a leap of faith in believing that increased productivity will lead to a better life for everyone, understanding that any change will affect different groups of people, so not everyone will be better off as a result of the change, but most people will be better off.
No one can argue that computers have created more jobs than they have destroyed and we are all better off for it. Jobs are not being destroyed by computers, workers can achieve more using computers. The same will be true for AI, depending on how the bots are programmed.
When will the robots take over?
Yes, we do need to consider the special case of AI reaching human levels of understanding, but is this likely to happen anytime soon? If AI reaches human levels of understanding, the impact will be huge. This is true. If AI is simply a better automation technique, the impact will be much smaller and will result in incredible prosperity for everyone. I should mention that if AI does reach human levels of understanding, this could lead to a future that is either heavenly or dystopian.
There are those who argue that it will reach human levels of intelligence by 2029, such as Ray Kurzweil at Google. Others argue that it will never happen with current silicon-based technology, such as George Gilder. Of course, we know that intelligence and consciousness are possible, because they exist in humans, but we are likely underestimating the complexity involved, the novelty of our intelligence, and the ability of silicon-based systems and technologies to mimic biological processes. This is true even if we assume exponential advances in data, algorithms, and processing power. The answer to the question of when robots will take over human jobs is not anytime soon.
If we exclude the cases where AI reaches human intelligence, or at least say that it will not happen in the next 20 years, we can answer the more pressing question of whether AI using today’s rapidly developing technology will take your job.
- The first mistake is the framing of the question. The question should be what “tasks” will robots do, not what “jobs” will robots do. Of course when we talk about robots here, we are referring to physical robots as well as AI software that can provide software-based services.
- The second mistake is not asking how AI will change the way I do a particular task. In many cases, AI will not replace a task entirely, but will only enhance the way it is done in collaboration with humans.
- The third mistake is not asking what new tasks/jobs will be made possible?
The real question here is what is the essence of this work, and are people facing unnecessary friction in completing the task. The answer is undoubtedly yes. Imagine being able to tell an AI “prepare a presentation on X, that is 8 pages long and has a chart on Y” and it creates it for you and you can tell it what modifications you want. It takes 5 minutes instead of 3 hours. An even bigger time saver is the AI helping you decide which tasks are important. How much time is wasted spending time and effort doing something well and then finding out that what you did was not necessary?
The above points are of course true for every new automation benefit. To specifically answer the question of what tasks will change and what tasks will be enabled by AI, we need to understand how AI algorithms work.
Essentially, AI algorithms are a way of getting a computer to do certain tasks without explicitly programming them. The AI is trained to make connections between required inputs and outputs without explicitly programming what the connections are (or by programming part of it and having the AI extrapolate from there). If you want an AI to identify cats in photos, you don’t have to manually program cat features like elliptical eyes, pointy ears, whiskers, but you can simply show the AI millions of photos with and without cats and it will figure out how to identify cats.
The way it does this, compared to human intelligence, is not very “intelligent”. It is a brute force algorithm that requires a lot of data. What it does is weight the importance of groups of pixels in the image in relation to each other to find patterns that identify cats. By testing these weighted layers over and over (called a neural network) or using other similar techniques, it can create a calibrated algorithm that can accurately identify cats, even in cases where cats have important features missing. This is very useful because it would be impossible (or very time consuming) to program something like this manually. With very large amounts of data and a lot of processing power, it is possible to create a kind of brute force intelligence.
This kind of algorithm is very useful when there is a lot of data (preferably highly structured data). To train an algorithm, it must also be clear whether a given iteration of the algorithm improves the results or not compared to previous iterations. If the relative success rate is not easily or directly measurable (ambiguous) from one "guess" to the next, then this can be a difficult problem for AI. This is often the case with human tasks that do not have a correct answer.
If data is scarce or the solution to the problem lies outside the data, this is also a difficult case for AI. However, the problems that are difficult for AI to solve are the ones that humans can solve.
For example, while there is a lot of data on human conversation, everything that is said by humans has a potentially unique context in terms of the history of a particular relationship, the history of the conversation, and the context of the situation. The further back you go into the history, the more dimensions and the harder it is to train the AI. That is why AI solutions are best focused on narrow situational contexts for chatbots (for applications other than a single shallow answer). Imagine deciding what to say next based on the fact that the five things you said earlier are similar to the five things you said in sequence in another conversation two years ago. This will give you an intuition about the problem.
To know which tasks are “at risk,” you need to know to what extent they can be automated using the techniques described above.
Clearly, in most cases, AI will increase productivity by complementing humans. The combination of humans + AI will be much more powerful than humans alone or AI alone.
It is true that certain tasks, such as driving a truck or car on a specific route, may be fully automated, but even in those cases human presence may be required for unforeseen circumstances, such as a breakdown, accident, or security incident. It is possible that a driverless truck without a human presence would be very easy to rob.
A plumber may have an app that helps diagnose problems, but the plumber will most likely have to fix the problem himself.
Automation has created a world that is more focused on experiences and entertainment than in the past, and this trend will continue. People are going to restaurants, having bigger weddings, taking more exotic vacations, and consuming more experiences and entertainment than in the past, and AI will perpetuate this trend. More and more jobs will be created in the “Experience” sector.
While the impact of increased productivity is positive, there is no doubt that more automation and globalization will result in more winner-takes-all effects and will increase inequality in the world. Unskilled and semi-skilled workers will see their lives improve by some metrics, but they will likely continue to lag behind highly skilled workers. This could have negative impacts on society and politics unless it is addressed.
Accelerating productivity will improve the lives of everyone on the planet, because even those who stand to gain the most financially and become very wealthy from new innovations will only be able to capture a small portion of the value created for society as a whole.
The transition to the new economy will need to be managed to ensure that no segment of society experiences a dramatic decline in their standard of living as productivity increases.
It is important to note that all of the above applies to all innovations, not just those related to AI. All innovations impact the workforce and require workers to receive additional education in order to remain employed. Educational institutions will need to adapt their curricula, including university curricula, to the changing needs of the job market. We have seen this process play out over and over again as automation has transformed the world in particular over the past 200 years.
How to adapt in the age of AI?
The world of work is undergoing a major transformation with the advent of artificial intelligence. Automation by AI does raise concerns, because many jobs that were previously done by humans can now be done by machines.
But don't worry! Based on the jobs above, it can be concluded that AI cannot replace jobs that require typical human abilities such as empathy, creativity, leadership, and the ability to solve complex problems.
So, to stay relevant in the AI era, you need to develop skills that are difficult for machines to imitate, such as interpersonal and communication skills, creativity, innovation, complex problem solving, and adaptability. By developing these skills, you can increase your chances of getting a job that is safe from automation and profitable in the future.
What jobs cannot be taken by robots?
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| jobs that cannot be replaced by robots |
Because of artificial intelligence and AI capabilities, it is no wonder that many people are worried that their jobs could be replaced by AI as AI becomes more sophisticated. However, that doesn't mean that all jobs can be replaced by AI. Here are 10 jobs that AI can't replace:
1. Teachers
In the era of technological advancement, the presence of AI in the field of education is increasingly widespread. The emergence of various online learning platforms, automatic assessment systems, and even teaching robots. It is true that AI can help the learning process with its various sophistication, the role of teachers remains irreplaceable.
Teachers not only transfer knowledge, but also instill culturally appropriate values and norms. This cannot be done by AI. No matter how sophisticated AI is, this technology does not have the personal ability to understand and guide each student with different learning needs.
For many people, teachers are the reference points that inspire academic decisions. The experience of learning with an extraordinary teacher can leave an impression and encourage a passion for learning. Therefore, the possibility of fully digital learning without the role of teachers in the future is very small.
2. Psychologists and Psychiatrists
Currently, there are many AIs that are specifically designed for the mental health sector, for example in the initial screening of clients before meeting a psychologist or psychiatrist for counseling or therapy. However, mental health is a very complex area. It is very difficult for machines to accurately understand the complexity of a person's mental and psychological processes without considering psychological or emotional factors.
To be able to help clients deal with problems related to their mental health, it is necessary to have professional staff who have the skills to listen actively and provide support according to the needs of each client, to establish direct interaction so that clients can undergo the therapy or counseling process properly.
To be able to have a career as a psychologist, you must study psychology. Meanwhile, if you want to become a psychiatrist, you must take further studies in psychiatry after graduating from a bachelor's degree in medicine and a doctor's profession.
3. Lawyers and Judges
This profession in the legal field is also one of the fields that cannot be replaced by AI. As a lawyer, you will be expected to be able to negotiate with various parties, argue, and convince others so that your clients can win cases.
Meanwhile, for the profession of judge, hours of flying and experience are needed as well as humanistic judgment so that they can provide fair legal decisions. Of course, these things cannot be done by machines. If you want to become a lawyer or judge, you must have an educational background in law.
4. Director, Manager, and CEO
Artificial intelligence (AI) is indeed capable of analysis and strategy, but when it comes to leadership, the role of humans is irreplaceable. The complexity of vision, team motivation, and emotional intelligence in decision-making require a human touch. AI can be a valuable tool, but effective leadership still requires a combination of AI intelligence and human capabilities. Investors are still reluctant to have robot leaders.
Therefore, the future of corporate leadership lies in the collaboration of AI and humans, where AI strengthens analysis and strategy, and humans lead with vision, motivation, and emotional intelligence. If you want a career in this kind of leadership, you can consider studying business and management or an MBA.
5. Health Workers
Currently, AI is also widely applied in the health sector, for example in helping the diagnostic process to be more accurate. However, the role of health workers will never be replaced by AI because this profession requires a holistic approach in the patient care process.
In carrying out their duties, health workers such as doctors and nurses have a unique combination of skills, including medical expertise, clinical judgment, empathy, and intuition. They often make complex decisions that require patient interaction, personal judgment, and ethical considerations. These things will not be possible for AI.
To be able to have a career in the health sector, you need to study health. This major is in great demand abroad, so you have a great opportunity to be able to practice in the health sector abroad after graduating.
6. Pastors and Spiritual Figures
Pastors, priests, and other spiritual figures have long played an important role in society. They provide support and education to millions of people, long before the school system developed and access to emotional support was more difficult. Spirituality is an intimate human connection, and it is almost impossible to imagine that robots or AI could replace this role in the future.
Even as technology advances, the role of spiritual leaders remains irreplaceable. Spiritual leaders have the ability to understand and respond to the complexities of human emotion in a way that AI cannot. They are able to guide individuals on their spiritual journey, offering support and direction that is tailored to their needs. Spiritual leaders also have an invaluable wealth of wisdom and experience that can help individuals navigate life’s challenges. In addition, they provide community and support for individuals seeking spiritual meaning and connection.
While technology can assist in some aspects of spiritual life, such as through meditation apps or online platforms to connect with spiritual communities, the role of humans in spirituality remains irreplaceable. Spiritual leaders offer the understanding, guidance, wisdom, and support that are essential to individuals on their spiritual journey.
7. Athletes
Imagining robots competing against each other, like in a basketball game, takes away from the essence and emotional appeal of sports. Robot battles may be exciting for a short time, as can obstacle course drone battles, but they will never replace the thrilling moment when an athlete breaks a world record and sheds tears of joy at their accomplishment.
The beauty of sports lies in the combination of physical excellence, unyielding spirit, and human determination. Robots, no matter how sophisticated, will never be able to imitate the emotions, dedication, and struggle shown by athletes. Therefore, the role of professional athletes in the modern era is irreplaceable. They are a symbol of human excellence, an inspiration to many, and a bearer of an unmatched fighting spirit.
For those of you who want to become athletes or professional sports practitioners in the world, you need to take a degree in sports science according to the branch you are interested in.
8. Scientist or Researcher
Although AI is increasingly sophisticated in data processing, it does not mean that this technology is ready to replace the role of science researchers. Science researchers conduct experiments, analyze data, and draw conclusions from their findings using extensive expertise and knowledge.
The key to scientific breakthroughs lies in creativity, curiosity, and intuition. These human abilities drive the formulation of hypotheses and ongoing experiments, which are at the heart of successful scientific exploration. Current AI systems are unable to replicate this innovative process.
If you are interested in working in science and becoming a researcher, you can choose pure and applied science majors offered by the best institutions in the world.
9. Workers in the Arts
Jobs in the arts and creative industries, from performers and musicians to designers and advertising creatives, rely heavily on human creativity and emotional interpretation, making them resistant to AI.
While AI has made great strides in mimicking logical reasoning, the intuitive and subjective nature of artistic expression remains exclusive to humans. In music, AI struggles to match the emotional depth and interpretive abilities of human musicians. AI cannot incorporate personal experience and improvisation into a performance even though it can generate melodies through algorithms.
Similarly, in the performing arts, AI fails to mimic the expression, agility, and movement of professional dancers and performers. Tasks such as directing a play or choreographing a performance require human intuition and creativity that AI cannot provide. Therefore, jobs in the performing arts remain beyond the capabilities of AI.
To become a professional artist, you can study art abroad. Your experience studying art abroad can add color, richness, and creativity to your art world.
Conclusion
In the future, science will continue to advance and machines will continue to complement human workers and make them more productive. Machines will not be able to replicate the new intelligence of humans to deal with unique situations or devise surprising solutions. Nor will they be able to replace the sense of human connection that is essential in many industries, from healthcare to recreation.
AI will be able to effectively eliminate drudgery and remove friction where the right conditions exist (lots of suitable data). As with previous productivity gains, the productivity gains from AI will continue to improve the lives of everyone in the world, directly and indirectly, and will create new products, services, and jobs that have yet to be imagined.
We don't need to worry too much about the increasing sophistication of AI technology. Remember, that AI is basically a tool that can help humans, not replace them. Use AI to improve performance and create new opportunities, but don't forget to continue to develop the unique human qualities that make you special and valuable.
