–by Jordan King, a new voice in the blogosphere–here’s his take on “the real world”

 

In the near future, we will surely see more technology and even more automation.  Functional self-driving cars are already here; they’ve been around since 2008.  There are robots that perform factory work; there are robots that replicate white-collar work; and there are even robots that write music!  What’s going to happen to jobs? Will robots take them all?

For now, we don’t really need to worry; current robots can only do basic factory work and repetitive computer work. Currently, there is a robot called Baxter; he’s a multipurpose robot that can pour drinks, fold clothes, cook food and perform many other simple tasks.  Baxter learns by humans physically moving his arms and showing him what to do. He can be programmed to perform multiple and varied tasks.

Here is a video of Baxter Brewing coffee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcxKd-oe-L0&feature=youtu.be

 

As you may have noticed, Baxter is extremely slow; a human is about 10 times faster.  Baxter can work all day without human supervision as long as he’s doing repetitive tasks.  For now, Baxter is probably not a threat to people’s jobs.  Although in the next few decades Baxters and other multipurpose robots will definitely be much faster and able to do more complicated tasks.          

In the near future, the first people to lose jobs likely will lose them to self-driving cars.  We’ve already had functioning self-driving cars for eight years.  Uber is already planning on having self-driving cars enter the workforce in a decade from now.  In 20 years from now, most if not all of Uber’s workers will no longer be working for them. There’s also self-driving trucks, which some believe will enter the workforce in less than 10 years!  According to alltrucking.com, there are currently 3.5 million truck drivers employed in the US. Transportation is one of the most likely sectors of jobs to be replaced by automation.
The United States Department of Transportation says 16 percent of all US jobs are in the Transportation sector.
Here is a list of 12 jobs most likely to be replaced by robots according to Oxford University data.

 

 Another study states that 47% of jobs are at a high risk of being replaced by robots.  So how can we deal with this?  What will potentially half the population do if they don’t have a job?  According to Forbes, robots will be the biggest job creators in history.  Is this true, though?  I say, it probably is.  Just look at historical unemployment rates.

(United States Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Unemployment rates have relatively stayed the same despite recession, economic growth, and economic turmoil, so robots won’t make a difference.  Even though there have been jobs outsourced to China, India, Latin America and most factory work is replaced by machines, the unemployment rate, historically, stays relatively the same.

With the onslaught of robots, unemployment rates will rise initially as they have during other periods of economic turmoil. But, after all the steam blows over, unemployment rates will return back to normal like they have throughout US history.  

So… robots probably won’t take our jobs.