Monitoring
AI and hyper-automation
Automation
through robots and other artificial intelligence could affect nearly
half of all US jobs, a report from the Obama administration has
found. Education and job-training programs could prevent the sea
change from destroying the American economy.
Scientists
and economic advisers within the executive branch studied the
potential effects of artificial intelligence on the US workforce and
economy over the next 20 years, as well as ways to prevent the
technological advances from automation from potentially destroying
job opportunities for Americans ‒ which they said it could, for up
to 47 percent of jobs. Rather, the authors sought to guide the
government’s automation policy to create better economic
opportunities for the country as a whole.
“These
transformations will open up new opportunities for individuals, the
economy, and society, but they have the potential to disrupt the
current livelihoods of millions of Americans,” the 55-page
report said. “Whether AI leads to unemployment and increases in
inequality over the long-run depends not only on the technology
itself but also on the institutions and policies that are in place.”
The authors
compared use of AI to how the Industrial Revolution introduced mass
production to the economy, which negatively affected the livelihoods
of skilled craftsman, as well as to the rise of computers in the
workplace, which benefited white-collar workers.
“Output
per hour rose [in the 19th Century] while inequality declined,
driving up average living standards, but the labor of some high-skill
workers was no longer as valuable in the market,” they wrote.
“The advent of computers and the Internet raised the relative
productivity of higher-skilled workers.”
[...]
Although the
report cautioned that it’s difficult to predict exactly how robots
and other AI might change the economy in the future because it’s
“not a single technology, but rather a collection of
technologies that are applied to specific tasks,” the authors
noted that the trend has been similar to what happened with
computerization that occurred at the end of the 20th and start of the
21st centuries. AI could affect as little as 9 percent of jobs over
the next decade or two ‒ or it could threaten nearly half of all
jobs.
A September
report released by Forrester Research found that 6 percent of jobs
could be taken by “early-stage intelligent agents,” as
soon as 2021. In November, a brief from the United Nations Conference
on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) claimed that up to two-thirds of
all jobs in the developing world could be replaced by automation.
More than 1.3 million Brits could lost their jobs to computers by
2030, according to research by Oxford University and consultancy firm
Deloitte.
Although
“AI-driven automation has yet to have a quantitatively major
impact on productivity growth,” the administration’s report
said, industries such as transportation and fast food are already
seeing the results of automation, thanks to self-driving cars and the
use of kiosks and other automated ordering systems.
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