The Robot-Replacing Humans
By: Shereein Saraf
Tags: Economics, Artificial Intelligence, Political Economy, World, Technology

The Robot-Replacing Humans

In the never-ending debate of automation of jobs, due to the rise of robots, leading to the redundancy of humanity, this article leaps forward to envision what the future of work beholds.

For the longest time, humans have been irreplaceable in many industries of work and life. The development of human capabilities and instincts has led to innovations ranging from nomadic tools and implements to Artificial Intelligence and robots. In primitive eras, such discoveries enabled survival, but in modern times, it furthers productivity, efficiency, and economic growth.

Although technology has enhanced convenience and safety, most would argue that it has raised apprehensions about the nature of work in the future, essentially due to the detrimental impacts of automation and a robot revolution on jobs and wages. This proposition might not be right for several reasons.

In the eighteenth century, when industrialization hit Britain, it created additional jobs rather than destroying them. The consequent development of the railways, the steam engine, and the power mill aided the workforce towards increased productivity and efficiency, leading to economic growth. Ironically, technological advancement then extended the working hours and made conditions harsh. At the same time, it improved the standard of living and created urban clusters of industrial workers. The rapid urbanization, in turn, gave rise to slums and inadequate conditions.

Even though economies have grown, there has been a rise in inequality of opportunities, income, and socio-economic conditions. Labor has witnessed a growing polarization of jobs — high waged and low waged; specialized and low-skilled. Household incomes have stagnated, but prices have inflated. Unemployment and underemployment are on the rise. (McKinsey & Company, 2017)

So, as time progresses, should we fear worse conditions and potential job losses? Even though the world is not a perfect place to live in and disruptions are a part of newly-embraced technologies, innovations and breakthroughs are successes for humans.

What is required is the judicious adoption of these technologies. Developing countries like India, with a younger demographic, can employ the technology at its disposal to support its thriving workforce. It lies in tandem with some of the developed industrial countries — Germany, Japan, and South Korea — that used technology and robots to transform its economy to high employment rates and higher standards of living.

An apt case would be the use of bots in healthcare to test COVID-19 positive cases in Rwanda, a middle-income African country. As their population is low, and those involved in medicine and healthcare are even lower, the state decided to adopt robots to check for temperature from a distance and conduct preliminary tests, allowing them to restrict the spread of the virus efficiently.

Part of the answer lies in the word ‘intelligence’ itself. While humans are intelligent, robots are not so much. While humans can learn and develop novel ideas, work multiple jobs for a living, have a mid-life crisis, and end up switching jobs or even careers, robots are yet to evolve. While 2.7 million industrial robots operate in factories across the globe, the global human workforce adds up to 3.492 billion as of June 2020.

If, with the advancement in technology, humans will become redundant, why do we even aspire to innovate? The short answer to this is that we won’t. A better explanation follows.

The standard prediction about the arrival of Artificial Intelligence is 2060, as of 2020, which is in forty years from where we are now. This projection in 1995 was twenty years.

In his book, The Rise and Fall of Nations: Ten Rules of Change in the Post-Crisis, Ruchir Sharma points to the fact that Artificial Intelligence is not coming around any time soon. He goes on writing — the joke in the AI industry is that if one says they can bring AI in twenty years, they stand a chance to persuade investors to fund their work. But, if one says as less than five years, the investors will remember, expecting positive results; and if one says as more than one hundred years, no one would be interested.

However, it is the robotics revolution that intends to replace the human workforce faster than most technology revolutions. It has indeed. In an essay adapted from this book, titled “Robots won’t kill the workforce. They’ll save the global economy.”, he argues that the density of industrial robots is higher in countries with an aging population — South Korea, with 531 robots per 10,000 employees; Japan with 305; Germany with 301. On the other hand, economies, like the United States and China, that top the share of income and production globally do not surpass others in robot density. Although the growth in the robot population is the fastest, these economies are strong due to its efficient human workforce.

It will not be wrong to say that it is the human population trends (and not robot population) that provide markets, policymakers, and social scientists alike with insights into an economy’s future — whether it will rise or fall, develop or doom. A higher young population always is a determinant of a substantially growing economy. A higher robot population represents a developed economy, with much stagnant growth rates, at least with the precedents set until now.

In the short-run and the long-run, robots and Artificial Intelligence will complement humans. The focus of businesses and the state must be on extending the reach of technology to the most underdeveloped economies and the backward sections of the society to bring about their potential and contribute to the process of human growth and development.

Technology must serve the purpose of increased efficiency and productivity and is not to make human beings redundant. Man can replace robots; bots cannot replace men. If not so, the day when robots will be driving self-driven cars is not far away.

This article was originally published on What-if Economics. View and subscribe to my newsletter to get insights right in your mailbox.