A couple hundred years ago, moving the ceiling held pankha or punkah-type fans manually for the rich was a job. With the appearance of modern electricity fans, that job was automated, and that is just one example. A lot of things that have been done manually for years are being done by machines saving time and many expenses including labor costs. The fact that automation is bound to take over our lives is something we have to accept sooner or later. With the advancement of artificial intelligence, it can go as far as automating creative jobs like painting or even writing.
Experts have analyzed the improvements to make predictions that AI is expected to replace as many as 10 million jobs in the UK by 2030. Elon Musk even suggested that it AI could actually beat humans by 2040. It should not come as a surprise when an expert claims that two-thirds of famous casino city Las Vegas jobs will be taken over only by 2030, and that does not mean we will see robots roaming about the place. Automation may not make any difference to the naked eye, but it will be all over the place hiding in plain sight.
Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis (ISEA) published a report estimating the number of jobs that will be automated in the US, and the low wage cities will be hit the hardest, and Las Vegas is on the top with about 65% jobs expected to be automated by 2035. The map below puts together the stats for all the US states:
It remains a heated debate in scientific circles whether or not the influence of artificial intelligence in our lives be as intensive as some predict. The accelerated adoption of AI gadgets in our lives is pretty clear as we make our lives dependent on home assistants, the likes of Amazon Alexa, or phone assistants like Siri. Our smartphones are AI devices, and there is hardly any person in even the developing world who does not own one. In 2016, 1.5 billion handsets were shipped, and 1.6 million industrial robots were operated globally in the year 2015, and the number is expected to rise to 2.6 million by 2019.
If the incoming robots are expected to be as productive as the ones in use today, research shows that one robot on average will replace 5.7 workers so one million such robots can easily replace 5.7 million US workers. If the growth rate of automation holds, the number of robots will rise to 18 million by 2035 replacing 5.7 million workers in total. Most Americans work in the service sector that has the most potential for human replacement. Self-checkout stores and ATMs are just the beginning of the services that automation will continue to replace, and the advancement will allow AI to perform tasks as complex as cleaning, radiology, and even surgery.
Robots are already capable of substituting hired services with their abilities for performing tasks like mowing lawns, cleaning carpets, serving food, making coffee, laying bricks, managing WallStreet portfolios, flying planes, painting buildings, teaching table tennis, ironing clothes, writing poetry, and the list goes on and on. The list includes pretty much all the daily tasks, and in the future, AI will enable them to perform all the highly paid tasks like routine surgery, economic analysis, and flying commercial planes.
Las Vegas is at the top, but if the trend follows, the entire US will see automation taking over pretty much all jobs, as AI technologies become more affordable. Artificial intelligence is taking over our lives in the form of self-driving cars and trucks, drones, vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, and so on.
When 90% of the US workers who are in the service jobs get replaced by robots will the economy break down? Will it be capable of creating entirely new jobs? These are all the questions that remain unanswered, and new questions will arise as the robotic take over accelerates.
Source: Market Watch