The Robot Economy: Will Machines Take Your Job by 2025?

[Buster's Uncle]

The Robot Economy: Will Machines Take Your Job by 2025?
LiveScience.com
By Tanya Lewis, Staff Writer  6 hours ago



From driving cars to caring for the elderly, many of the tasks humans perform today will soon be taken over by robots and other forms of artificial intelligence, experts say. But a new report finds that people disagree about whether that future will be an optimistic or a pessimistic one.

Researchers surveyed more than 1,800 industry experts, scholars and other analysts about whether they think robots will take over more jobs than they create by the year 2025.

Half of the respondents said they think this will happen, while the other half said robotics technology will create more jobs than it takes away, according to the report, released today (Aug. 6) by the Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center, in Elon, North Carolina.

"There was obviously no clear consensus at all among the folks surveyed," said Aaron Smith, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center's Internet Project and lead author of the report. In addition, the responses didn't divide along professional lines —people from vastly different industries took similar viewpoints.


Techno-optimism

The majority of those surveyed agreed that robotic technologies such as driverless cars, robot caregivers and intelligent digital agents will be ubiquitous parts of daily life within a decade, but they diverged sharply on whether these developments will have a positive or negative outcome.

The 52 percent of respondents who took a positive or neutral view of the future of employment said that historically, technology has taken over some jobs, but has ultimately created more jobs than it has displaced.

"Technology will continue to disrupt jobs, but more jobs seem likely to be created," said Jonathan Grudin, a principal researcher for Microsoft in Seattle.

These experts claim that humans will find other forms of work that require uniquely human abilities, especially ones that involve creativity, empathy, problem solving and critical judgment. In addition, the technical advances will relieve humans of some of their everyday drudgery, freeing them up to do more meaningful work.

Interestingly, as robots take over more mass production work, "a number of people predicted a return to small-scale, artisanal preindustrial modes of civilization,” Smith said. "We’ll be a nation of Etsy producers.” (Etsy is a website where people sell handmade or vintage items.)

But not everyone was sanguine about the future robot workforce.


Robot redundancy

The remaining 48 percent of respondents expressed concern about the growing infiltration of machines into the workforce.

"As just one aspect of the rise of robots and AI, widespread use of autonomous cars and trucks will be the immediate end of taxi drivers and truck drivers [the No. 1 occupation for men in the United States]," said Stowe Boyd, lead researcher at GigaOM, a media company and research firm based in San Francisco.

These experts argued that technology advances did away with many blue-collar jobs in the past, and now threaten to take over white-collar jobs.

"Automation is Voldemort — the terrifying force nobody is willing to name," said Jerry Michalski, founder of the think tank REX (the Relationship Economy eXpedition), in San Francisco. "As long as we need fiat currency to pay the rent or mortgage, humans will fall out of the system in droves as this shift takes place."

Although a small percentage of people will be very successful in the new robot economy, many more will be forced into lower-paying jobs in the service industry or, at worst, permanent unemployment, some experts say.


How to prepare?

Many of the survey respondents said they thought that the U.S. educational system isn't preparing children well enough for the future.

"Only the best-educated humans will compete with machines," said Howard Rheingold, an Internet sociologist and self-employed writer, consultant and educator. "And education systems in the U.S. and much of the rest of the world are still sitting students in rows and columns, teaching them to keep quiet and memorize what [they are told], preparing them for life in a 20th-century factory," Rheingold said.

In addition, political gridlock and economic shortsightedness may prevent the United States from handling the tough choices that robotic technology could bring. Events such as Occupy Wallstreet demonstrate a growing gap between rich and poor, and that gap will widen as human jobs become more scarce, some say.

On the surface, the divided opinions reflect different views on where robot technology and artificial intelligence are heading, Smith said. "But really, it was disagreement about how we as society are going to deal with it," he said.

Despite these differences, the respondents who saw a positive future for employment and those who saw a negative one agreed on a few things. "Both groups agreed that, as a society, we are in control of our own destiny on this," Smith said. "We have the ability to choose whether we have a good outcome or a bad outcome."


http://news.yahoo.com/robot-economy-machines-job-2025-121151853.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Pew: Split views on robots' employment benefits
Associated Press
By CONNOR RADNOVICH  August 6, 2014 12:35 PM



FILE - This March 19, 2013, file photo shows the iCub robot trying to catch a ball during the Innorobo European summit, an event dedicated to the service robotics industry, in Lyon, central France. The iCub robot, created by the Italian Institute of Technology, is used for research into human cognition and artificial intelligence. Robots and artificial intelligence could create a near-dystopian income gap, kill all low-skill jobs, or have little impact over the next decade. That according to nearly 2,000 experts surveyed for a new study from Pew Research Center’s Internet Project and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani, File)



WASHINGTON (AP) — In 2025, self-driving cars could be the norm, people could have more leisure time and goods could become cheaper. Or, there could be chronic unemployment and an even wider income gap, human interaction could become a luxury and the wealthy could live in walled cities with robots serving as labor.

Or, very little could change.

A new survey released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center's Internet Project and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center found that, when asked about the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs, nearly 1,900 experts and other respondents were divided over what to expect 11 years from now.

Forty-eight percent said robots would kill more jobs than they create, and 52 percent said technology will create more jobs than it destroys.

Respondents also varied widely when asked to elaborate on their expectations of jobs in the next decade. Some said that self-driving cars would be common, eliminating taxi cab and long-haul truck drivers. Some said that we should expect the wealthy to live in seclusion, using robot labor. Others were more conservative, cautioning that technology never moves quite as fast as people expect and humans aren't so easily replaceable.

"We consistently underestimate the intelligence and complexity of human beings," said Jonathan Grudin, principal researcher at Microsoft, who recalls that 40 years ago, people said that advances in computer-coding language were going to kill programming jobs.

Even as technology removed jobs such as secretaries and operators, it created brand new jobs, including Web marketing, Grudin said. And, as Grudin and other survey responders noted, 11 years isn't much time for significant changes to take place, anyway.

Aaron Smith, senior researcher with the Pew Research Center's Internet Project, said the results were unusually divided. He noted that in similar Pew surveys about the Internet over the past 12 years, there tended to be general consensus among the respondents, which included research scientists and a range of others, from business leaders to journalists.

Respondents in this latest survey generally agreed that the education system is failing to teach the skills that students need for the future. Smith said some survey respondents criticized the system for promoting memorization of tasks rather than creativity, teaching a "Henry Ford education for a Mark Zuckerberg economy."

Also, Smith said, some respondents concluded that jobs that don't require specifically human traits — such as empathy, ingenuity or resourcefulness — are at risk for being replaced, including low-skill blue collar jobs or even white-collar jobs that have people performing repetitive tasks.

Respondents offered a few theories about what might happen if artificial intelligence takes over some positions and fewer jobs are created.

Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, foresees chronic mass unemployment with the wealthy living in "walled cities, with robots providing the labor."

Some respondents see people returning to small-scale, handmade production, and an appreciation would grow for products with the "human touch." Others thought people could also face abundant leisure, allowing them to pursue their personal interests.

Stowe Boyd, lead analyst on the future of work at Gigaom Research, said if, as he predicts, widespread joblessness comes to pass, humanity would have to confront its deeper purpose.

"The fundamental question lurking behind all of this is 'what are people for?'" Boyd said.

For this survey, Pew posed closed- and open-ended questions to technology experts — researchers, futurist and tech developers — and other interested parties, including writers and business leaders, about how far they expect robots and artificial intelligence to grow, and what the impact will be on jobs by 2025. The study was not representative of a particular group of experts, only of those who chose to respond.


http://news.yahoo.com/pew-split-views-robots-employment-benefits-163149769.html