Gartner sees things like robots and drones replacing a third of all workers by 2025, and whether you want to believe it or not, is entirely your business.
This is Gartner being provocative, as it is typically is, at the start of its major U.S. conference, the Symposium/ITxpo.
Take drones, for instance.
"One day, a drone may be your eyes and ears," said Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's research director. In five years, drones will be a standard part of operations in many industries, used in agriculture, geographical surveys and oil and gas pipeline inspections.
"Drones are just one of many kinds of emerging technologies that extend well beyond the traditional information technology world -- these are smart machines," said Sondergaard.
Smart machines are an emerging "super class" of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind, said Sondergaard. Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text.
This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, says Gartner.
"Knowledge work will be automated," said Sondergaard, as will physical jobs with the arrival of smart robots.
"Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025," said Sondergaard. "New digital businesses require less labor; machines will be make sense of data faster than humans can."
Travelers at Dusseldorf Airport in Germany don’t even have to park their cars anymore. Last week the airport begin a using self-driving robot that resembles a forklift to deliver some cars to and from an appropriate parking space.
The idea is to get business travelers in and out of an airport as quickly and easily as possible. A driver can pull into a transfer station at the parking lot entrance and leave their car after checking in on a digital touchscreen. Sensors in the station measure the dimensions of the vehicle, and send that information to one of the robots. The robot, called Ray, adjusts its arms to fit the new vehicle, then drives to the transfer station and slides its arms around the tires to lift the vehicle off the ground.
The “robots are coming” narrative dominating discussions of the economy was popularized by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their 2011 book, Race Against the Machine. They have built on that theme in the richer, deeper The Second Machine Age (W.W. Norton, 2014). The first half of the book provides a valuable window, at least for a non-technologist like me, into past developments and the future trajectory of digitization. Their claim is that digitization will do for mental power what the steam engine did for muscle power—that is, quite a bit, transforming our lives at work and play.
The remainder of the book dwells on the role of digitization in generating both bounty (more consumer choice and greater output, wealth, and income) and spread (greater inequalities of wages, income, and wealth). In treating these topics, they heavily rely on the work of others. As in their last book, they do not provide much direct evidence of the connection between technological change and wage inequality. I study these issues and believe they are wrong to tightly link digitization and robots to wage inequality and the slow job growth of the 2000s. Although the authors claim “technology is certainly not the only force causing this rise in spreads, but it is one of the main ones” my fear is that this book, like their last one, will fuel the mistaken narrative that technology is responsible for our job and wage problems and that we are powerless to obtain more equitable growth.
Let me start where we agree and where I very much appreciate their argumentation. Brynjolfsson and McAfee are very clear that we are experiencing a dramatic growth in wage, income, and wealth inequality; that living standards have faltered for a significant share of the population; and that these are challenges that must be addressed. They rightly fear that current inequities will generate greater future inequity: They argue that current wealth solidifies and expands inequality through the political process and worry that inequality impedes social mobility—the degree to which a child’s chances are linked to his or her parents’ current station. Inequality begets greater inequality. I appreciate their refutation of denialism and ‘so whatism’.
Their weakest case is that digitization is associated with the slow job growth of the last 15 years. The authors review all the reasons why economists find such a claim untrue, including 200 years of history disproving a link between technology and slow job growth. They propose a few reasons why things may be different now. However, their only evidence is that employment and productivity grew in tandem for many decades but became decoupled in the late 1990s and offer their “reading of technology” as an explanation. In fact, there’s a simple answer to the riddle of slow job growth: slow economic growth resulting from the collapse of two asset bubbles and inadequate policy responses. Job growth occurs when economic growth exceeds productivity. Simply put, if workers can produce 2 percent more this year than last year, the economy can grow 2 percent without adding any employment. Thus, the economy must grow faster than productivity to create jobs, something that has not happened in the unique circumstances of the 2000s.
