When will robots take over your job? Technology has been advancing at a phenomenal pace, with cars such as Tesla, having the groundbreaking technology to have autonomous driving features such as changing lanes for you, the ability to self-park and even predict crashes. Technology may not be there yet for some companies to make their cars fully autonomous for legal reasons, but in few years time, a foreseeable future of science fictional self-driving cars could be expected. According to a J.D Power survey, Auto and tech industry experts predict it will be in the next 12 years, that fully self-driving cars are to be expected. But what does that mean? Will taxi and ‘Uber’ drivers soon lose their jobs? Will we see a dark future where robots will take over most of our jobs? If we don’t have jobs, how do we pay for goods and services? What jobs will be replaced? Will you be at risk?
Why the future of the Information Age could lead to you being unemployed:
The invention of new tools and machines in the past assisted humans in efficiency and productivity. Examples include factory machines, killing old, often tedious and repetitive jobs, with new and better jobs. Thanks to better jobs, living standards improved, productivity and efficiency rose, and the level of output produced by businesses that use factory machines are now extraordinarily high. However, with the introduction of the Internet, new industries are now rising, which surely means they have to be creating new jobs? This is true, but they are not creating enough jobs to compensate for the industries they are killing. One great example is the media service provider industry. In 2004, Blockbuster, a movie and video game rental service, had 84,000 employees and made $9 billion AUD dollars in revenue. In 2019, Netflix had a total of only 8,600 employees and made a whopping $30.2 billion AUD dollars in revenue. Blockbuster later ceased operations in 2010, meaning a total of 84,000 jobs were lost, and only 8,600 jobs were created. This of course is the problem with the Information Age, where new industries are booming and demolishing old industries, which leads to fewer, and fewer jobs. To add to this problem, population growth is rapidly increasing in most countries, with the amount of new jobs being produced each year reducing. This could potentially lead to a high unemployment rate, which could be the path to a disastrous future where only the minorities will be doing all the consuming.
With innovation constantly evolving, future automation will be at a point where we will most likely be competing against them. Right now, robots can be clueless and hopeless at doing complicated jobs, they are however, consistent in doing defined and predictable tasks, such as factory jobs. However, look at a complicated task long and hard enough, you soon realise they are made up of many other small predictable tasks one on top of another. With humans becoming more advanced, jobs became more specialized, but when robots are becoming specialized in certain jobs and are better and more consistent at them than humans, there will almost be no room left for humans to specialize in.
There’s a great website called ‘Will Robots Take My Job?’ which I highly recommend visiting which shows the probability of your job being replaced by robots in the near future:
https://willrobotstakemyjob.com/
A dystopian future like this, could mean people with a degree could be working at jobs that don’t even require a degree. Pharmacists, analysts, radiologists, cashiers and journalists could almost be out of work sooner than those in factories.
Will we be at a point in the near future where almost every job will be completely taken by robots? Will a medical degree be the most useless degree? Will the entire economy just completely shut down, with almost almost no circular flow of money, standards of living decreasing with millions of people unemployed?
Universal Basic Income, a solution or failure?
What is a Universal Basic Income?
A UBI (Universal Basic Income), is a government guarantee that each citizen receives a minimum income. Andrew Yang, a Democratic candidate, proposes a UBI to be implemented, where everyone will receive a thousand US dollars every month. The money is not taxed, and there are not restrictions or policies with what you can do with it. This could be an alternative to welfare, which some say is too small too live on. There are also disadvantages to welfare, as it forces financially poor people to work certain jobs they are not suited for. It also promotes laziness and passive behaviour as it traps people in poverty. If they were to earn a single dollar more than their welfare income by working, all of the money is taken away. A UBI can solve this, as it won’t take away the money that is given to those that are working. So where does it come from?
This is subjective, as every country is different, as they all have unique values. Obtained from cutting the military budget, or increasing the taxes on the super rich for example, may or not be politically acceptable for some nations. However, even if the nation agrees on how to obtain this money for a UBI, will it solve the problem of automation though? With less and less jobs, will people feel less motivated to find a job and work, and are encouraged to live of their UBI? Will they just spend it all on booze, drugs and nightclubs featuring ‘naughty’ dancers? Unfortunately, there’s not enough research and experiments to answer these questions or to see if a UBI is a feasible idea or not.
Conclusion:
The input businesses and corporations produce, and the goods and services people consume or use, are the fundamental functions that keep our economies running. However, with fewer jobs being produced, and robots stealing all of our jobs, who will be doing all the consuming? Will the economy just collapse?
Will we reach a point in the future where only the wealthiest and most powerful CEO’s, Executives of major corporations that own all of this machinery be doing all the consuming?
Will our future see these robots gaining the ability to develop their own consciousness? Will these robots soon realise they are being treated like slaves? Will these robots start killing their creators with their claws? Will they start wars with humanity? Like in the Terminator movies? (Ok, I’m getting a bit off topic now, sorry if I’m giving you nightmares.) Technology on this scale, are almost decades away from today, if not, generations. To give you a better perspective of what robots from today are like here is a real scenario where a security robot ‘commits suicide’.
It’s not likely that the Information Age will be this dark and frightening, as the Information Age could potentially be a massive opportunity to makes lives easier, reduce poverty and hopefully change human society for the better. However, we should still be cautious of the threats that are imposed by robots, as they are evolving rapidly. One things for certain, robots aren’t coming, and that’s because they are already here.
Bibliography:
Click to access The_Future_of_Employment.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhhyBYuz_Bc&t=54s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl39KHS07Xc&t=533s
Article by Thomas Lam, 11H
Year 11 MHS Economics 2020 
This was very informative, with very good examples to make it easier to see why the jobs are being taken over by robots. The use of the “will robots take my job” site was very interesting, and was fun to play around in.
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Great use of visuals and interesting images in order to invoke emotion from the reader. Excellent level of analysis when discussing the solutions to the rise in automation.
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Automation is definitely going to affect people’s lives in a massive way. It is very similar to the industrial revolution, where many jobs were both lost but also created, however, the outcome is hardly predictable. Great analysis, pretty images :))
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