Technological Takeover: Why Robots Are Coming for Your Job

By Timothy Hayes on November 15, 2014

Take a minute and look at the device that you’re using to view this article. Maybe it’s a laptop, a desktop, a tablet, or even your phone. The point is, it’s probably not being used to its full potential. NASA used less computing power to put men on the moon.

Now, the machine in your pocket has the potential to calculate astronomical numbers extraordinarily fast in enormous groups and you use it to play Candy Crush. However, some are not content to use this kind of innovation for simple distractions.

Many of you have probably heard of Google’s driverless car project. This project began as an off-shoot from the Defense Advanced Research

Meet your future chauffeur: the Google Driverless Car.

Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge, a race involving teams of robot engineers, computer programmers, mechanics and, most importantly, robotic vehicles.

The Grand Challenge took a look at what could be done to produce autonomous military off-road-capable vehicles given enough incentive: a two million dollar incentive to be precise. The event was a resounding failure the first year, with none of the teams actually finishing the race. A team from Carnegie Mellon University made it the farthest, but their robot wandered off the course and got stuck on a rock.

The next year, however, the competition increased as competitors, inspired by the failings of the previous teams, took to the road. In 2005, the Stanford University vehicle, nicknamed “Stanley,” became the first autonomous off-road vehicle to complete the Grand Challenge.

Since then, Google has invested substantial time and money into creating a driverless car. Sebastian Thrun, the former team leader of the Stanford robot, spearheaded the project after a second successful urban version of the Grand Challenge was hosted in 2007. A small fleet of these vehicles has been driving around since 2012, covering over 700,000 miles with only two accidents, both attributed to humans and not the vehicles. It might not be a flying car, but science is getting there.

This sounds groundbreaking, but while these robots may be interacting in new environments, automated transportation is nothing new. In many factories today, if a worker needs a material or tool, they can send a request out and have a robot find and deliver that exact item faster than any human. The only difference is that now, instead of interacting with other robots on a factory floor like at Anniston Army Depot, the Google cars are interacting with and replacing humans.

Robots aren’t just replacing humans on the roads. It’s happening everywhere. Economically, it makes sense. If you’ve got a company to run and you have to pay workers but robots can do it for the cheap cost of electricity, why are we even talking about keeping human workers?

Meet Baxter, a general purpose robot coming for your job. (image credited to Steven F. Bevacqua)

However, you, dear reader, think that you might be just fine. You’re a college student and you’ve got a job lined up for you when you graduate. Maybe.

Ultimately, while employment in the US is up, the competition for jobs is tougher than ten years ago. Now demand for labor is outstripped by the number of people seeking work in the US. With more and more students seeking university and other higher education, some fields are becoming flooded. Why?

Some might blame bad economic policies, while others would blame immigrants taking over jobs that native-born Americans once held, but ultimately, the problem lies in one area: computers.

Computers began replacing humans as soon as they arrived; that was their purpose. Originally, scientists and engineers would have to manually solve equations or retrieve data from analog archives that could take days if not weeks to sort through. Early computers might still have taken a day or two, but they were faster, nonetheless.

As time passed, consumers became familiar with what are known as personal computers: small computational devices that can perform basic functions for everyday life and make some of our work easier. For instance, this very article is being written on a personal computer and has been turned into an editor via this computer communicating with another.

Humans have always made tools to make life easier. From the Stone Age, things have been progressing at an ever-increasing rate. The Stone Age lasted approximately 3.4 million years. By comparison, the Bronze Age lasted only a few thousand years until the Iron Age, which lasted one thousand years or less depending on the region. These time periods are shrinking at an exponential rate because technology is pushing the human race into new time periods faster like an ice crystal branching off and forming more and more branches towards infinity or a snowball rolling down a hill until it’s an avalanche. Perhaps we are witnessing the dawn of The Robot Age.

It sounds crazy, but it’s already happening. Doubtless you’ve seen spambots on the internet. They’re basically a robot that’s told to send lots of advertising out to millions of people constantly. Some are very simple and others can be almost life-like in their text patterns. These however, are not some Terminator sitting at a computer typing away. They are the computer. These machines are able to pass on information faster than you’d ever be able to which is why they exist. They effectively complete a task for essentially free and don’t get tired, need a day off, or ever stop their job. Ever.

Now spambots are harmless enough, if annoying, but they’re not the only bot taking over. There are bots sorting through emails and archives. You use a bot when you go to the library or grocery store if you use the self-checkout. You might have seen automated alerts going out on your phone. Your phone is even a type of bot. All these technologies have replaced jobs in some form or another or simplified jobs for humans to basically be a talking head that people can interact with and put information into the bot so the bot can do all the work.

Now, that’s normal enough. We’ve seen humans and animals pushed out of jobs before in the Industrial Revolution, but of course those created new jobs. People could go from highly skilled farmers to being a low-skill factory worker. Then factories got automated and those jobs went away too. Look at any large assembly line in the America today and you will see machines doing a large amount of the work, if not all of it. All humans do is inspect it, wrap it, and ship it. Nowadays, even those jobs could be automated.

Again, you, dear reader, may be skeptical of the impact this will have on you, but even white collar jobs are getting checked off the list of bot takeover. If you’re planning on an office job, if it’s not a receptionist, you’re looking at replacement. Even receptionists are due to be replaced with robot receptionists in Japan.

Maybe you’re an artist. That’s soon not going to be a safe haven either. For now, robots are pretty okay at what has been called artificial creativity. This is where you show a bot what to do, how to do it, parameters, and a goal and let the bot take off. This has effectively been utilized in painting, music compositions, and writing newspaper articles.

So what can’t bots do? For now, a fair bit of important stuff. Ultimately, while bots might be able to do a lot of office work, factory work, software development, and even some faux-creative stuff, these computers are not able to fully replace humans yet. For one, bots have relatively narrow or niche uses. A software bot couldn’t be taught to make a coffee without massive redesigning. Humans, on the other hand, are flexible. While some bots do have cross-field uses, they are specialized overall.

Bots also don’t seem to be able to handle personal communication well. They have a limited vocabulary and lack the experience humans have at socializing. Anyone who’s used phone bots or a self-checkout can relate to being annoyed or frustrated by the computer not understanding what for humans is a simple request.

However, in these instances, a translator of sorts may help people. These specialists “speak” machine and can interpret what the machine needs. Jobs in the computer science and engineering field are safe until machines figure out how to make each other. Machines also can’t innovate so inventors, scientists, researchers, and theorists are okay for now too. Management will always be needed, but the role humans play in that field may change. Psychologists, too, will likely never be bots and true creativity can’t be modeled by bots either.

Bots are here and they’re growing fast. That’s no secret. You’ll encounter them more and more as innovators build bigger, better, faster robots to take over jobs we don’t want people doing or don’t need them doing. Hopefully, this will all be balanced against a new breadth of jobs for humans to fill, but if it isn’t, we’ll have some problems to fix.

A special thanks to CGPGrey, a YouTuber who’s video inspired this article. Check it out below.

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