There is an important question that every person should ask themselves before reading this post: What is a job?
Let’s analyze the concept of a job to find out what happens when a job is ended and what we could do to secure employment as we have known it.
Introduction
All human activities around the world have in common one thing: At some point, they must all be replaced by machines. What’s driving that for our life and economic activities? In fact, some people refer to this as an attack on the human factor.
These people make people lose their jobs at the very moment they feel the impact of machines on their jobs, and they speak of the displacement of the jobs performed by humans, the displacement of the working man and his family as well as of the community they live in. That is an insane concept, the risk being that it leads to a much bigger attack against human dignity.
But this is not the focus of this blog post, if you have doubts about the concept of a job or if you want to be informed about current trends, you can find several sources on the web. I simply want to analyze the concept of a job from the point of view of ethics. That’s a totally different angle!
The meaning of a job
What do we understand by the term job? The primary sense is that of a fixed position and a fixed salary, including overtime payment.
That’s not the whole truth, and most of us know it: Job is a dynamic concept, that encompasses more than just a job title and salary. To manage job or jobs without adapting to the employment conditions and expectations is more than irresponsible. It’s close to negligence.
People do all kinds of jobs all the time without necessarily seeing themselves as engaged in a job, they may do jobs voluntarily or not, they may be paid or unpaid, they may work for a specific task or not.
Moreover, some jobs have fixed terms and there are also opportunities to change jobs if you so wish.
All of these factors are relevant to the concept of a job.
The purpose of my blog post is therefore to help you understand how AI and robotics are changing the current employment concept.
Why robots may take our jobs
When we speak of a job, we often refer to people who are employed to work at a specific moment. Those people will have a fixed, limited, defined role in the economy and society. That’s a very limiting view of the subject. In fact, there are people doing jobs that they’d like to keep or continue indefinitely.
Because of this, the concept of job should be widened and understood as a dynamic concept. But this will create problems, because if I ask a thousand people if they have a job, they’ll say no. They don’t work!
If we want to understand the real impact of AI and robotics on employment, we must therefore define it according to the status of the people who are affected. For that, we have to consider the following categories:
Self-employed: People engaged in free choice and without constraints. They use their own knowledge and skills to make a living. In this case, we cannot say that AI or robotics could eliminate their job. For one thing, AI is not yet able to handle free choice; we also don’t know if and how the training of robots can be automated, or even possible.
Relatively stable: These people work within a set company where they are well trained, they have specific duties, and the job market is stable.
Limited: A person will perform a specific role for a limited time within a company and in a certain environment, but without any stable salary or the like.
Depending on the work we can classify it as highly skilled or low skilled. This work is repetitive and will become a natural factor for machines that are capable of handling them.
When we speak of AI, we have to specify whether the artificial intelligence will perform the job or it will train others to do it, because the outcome could be quite different.
Risks and Opportunities
Currently, the risk of losing jobs in this work with relatively stable, limited or self-employed people is low because the robots in question are not yet capable of performing their jobs. For example, right now, we can say that an AI robot will not replace a maintenance engineer in a hotel.
Robots are able to perform manual tasks and have an exact knowledge of the norms, criteria, habits and needs of the work. Robots are not able to perform a complex activity that involves specific values and principles for this job, or that requires reasoning, creativity, flexibility, intuition, sensitivity or intuition.
But the transition to the automated work will be long and complex, so in the future it may happen that the machines will be able to handle everything that today is not handled by the machines, whether by the ability or the will of the people working on the project.
Furthermore, machines will also be able to communicate and exchange information. This fact itself opens the possibility of many new jobs. But there will also be those that will be destroyed and workers who will have to adapt.
AI and robotics are transforming the labor market and changing the concept of employment. They are now very close to achieving their initial goal of replacing human jobs by machines, and the possibilities and limits of this technology are now being debated by the public.
There are quite a lot of people who seem to think that there is a problem. And this worry is justified, because the automation of certain jobs might lead to greater unemployment and, for example, the reallocation of workers towards less secure and more menial jobs.
There is also concern that robotization of production might cause job losses and unemployment. This fear is already driving the resistance of workers to AI. The problems that the robots represent for workers are the serious need to train new employees in a shortened period of time, the need to accommodate the machines and the need to adapt the workforce to the company’s needs. This is where the answers to questions regarding AI and robotics lie: The training of the new employees will be automated, the idea that human beings must adapt to the environment in which they work and that machines don’t need human beings for this.
Conclusion
The future of employment is already changing. Some jobs will disappear in the near future and new jobs will emerge. How can we think about these future developments, and how can we understand the limits and possibilities of the jobs we have today?
A look at the human workers who will face these changes is enough to see that a movement towards this future is already in motion.
Human jobs will undoubtedly be replaced by AI and robotics, but the result will be a much more efficient and productive work force and, above all, people in the future will be much more prosperous.
A brave robot acting on its own initiative, as well as human action oriented toward the greater interest of humanity can create a better society that, I hope, will not be called automation or artificial intelligence, but simply: “society.”