October 3, 2016

Robots will take over 6% of all US jobs by 2021

Guardian, UK - By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the US, starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers. That’s just one cheery takeaway from a report released by market research company Forrester.

These robots, or intelligent agents, represent a set of AI-powered systems that can understand human behavior and make decisions on our behalf. Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now as well as chat bots and automated robotic systems. For now, they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs like self-driving cars.

These robots can be helpful for companies looking to cut costs, but not so good if you’re an employee working in a simple-to-automate field.

“By 2021 a disruptive tidal wave will begin. Solutions powered by AI/cognitive technology will displace jobs, with the biggest impact felt in transportation, logistics, customer service and consumer services,” said Forrester’s Brian Hopkins in the report.

2 comments:

Strelnikov said...

What's an "obs"?

Anonymous said...

While a lot of these robots will work great in tests, I doubt they will be as universally fail proof as the hype. I suspect they will be like the self check outs at grocery stores, they work well enough if everything is utterly routine, but quite frequently there is some glitch that means a human must come over and sort things out. Sure some jobs can be replaced by robots, the 6% job loss to robots seems a lot more likely then most of the "robots will taking your job" articles that sound like only robots will have a job in a decade. No, there will be a whole new industry, for sorting out the problems robots create.

Of course this totally ignores the other factor to consider in going robot. Robots take a lot of resources to build and operate, will robots be practical as we face peak oil and peak minerals?