By: Faraz Mohsin
Will AI and robotics create more jobs or destroy them in the future?
There are predictions (research conducted by Oxford University in back in 2013 that 47% of jobs in the US were under threat of automation in the next two decades.
However, even if we have as many as 47% of jobs automated, it doesn’t necessarily mean 47% unemployment. Possibly, we might just need to work reasonably fewer hours and get paid reasonably well. If you remember before the Industrial Revolution, people used to work 60 hours per week and after the revolution, it reduced to 40 hours per week. The same could happen with the future AI and Robots Revolution.
Secondly, in the past, technologies have created more jobs than destroy them and it could happen in the future too. There is no reason to suppose that it won’t be the case in the future. Future is very unpredictable and there is no economics written to confirm the future of jobs for next few decades.
That being said, Robots, machines and AI will replace humans wherever humans are not needed to do the work such as in manufacturing lines, automatic cars, home delivery by drones etc. Robots will also replace the numbers, it won’t be 1 human v/s 1 robot for example currently there are thousands of people work in assembly lines, it might be replaced by only a couple of robots
In the next fifty to hundred years, machines will be super-humans and unassumingly machines will perform better than for the above-mentioned jobs. This means the only jobs left will be where we prefer humans over machines such as arts, movies, music etc.
The key point to note is robot’s don’t need to buy a house, eat food and have the willingness to be rich and successful, they will be machines just doing the job, so even if more robots will do the job, I think there won’t be unemployment we might just need to work 10 hours a week.