Essay
AUTOMATION AT RISK TAKING AWAY OUR JOBS
Artificial Intelligence or known as AI, is the 21th-century marvel innovation that rapidly growing in use. Everywhere in today's modern world, we cannot escape from it. As Andrew Ng – the former chief scientist of Baidu Research – said, AI is the new electricity; just as electricity transformed industry after industry in the late 19th century, so will AI in the coming years. Experts suggest that in Malaysia only, 54 percent of all jobs could be at high risk of being displaced by technology in the next two decades[1].
In 2016, Google DeepMind develop AlphaGo, an AI playing Go (a very complex board game that requires intuition, the creative and strategic thinking of human beings [2] ) defeating the number one player in the world in 4 out of 5 games [3]. As we can see, from the simple task of adding two numbers together to the most complex task as operating surgery on the human heart, we cannot argue that the sky is the limit for the use of this kind of automation. But as always everything has its dark side. The increase in AI usage in the industry is also meaning an increase in unemployment as the machine replaced the workers. In 2018, a study has been done by experts member from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, the non-profit OpenAI and others to measure the rapid growth of AI around the globe[4]. From the result, it is showing that AI’s usage continues to skyrocket in various fields and time to develop one is decreasing. The automation and AI, without we realize affected abundance fields such as finance, business, heavy industry, healthcare, education, military, and the list go on.
First, from the finance aspect. Human traders at the trading center used to be the job that required focus and intuition which AI/computer biggest weakness since it only relies on data. But these days, it is not reliable for a trader to process a hundred requests from the client . “Clients want efficiency,” says Brian Pomraning, head of electronic client solutions – Europe/Middle East/Africa and liquid markets products at J.P. Morgan in New York. “They have the need to execute hundreds of orders. Our algos can process orders and react to any variables at any time across a wide range of securities and sectors. They allow functions that a single human brain cannot perform.”[5] AI is also used by a large financial institution to analyze the market and making sure the clients get the best from their investment and again defeat human market researchers because we are limited by time and we ourselves cannot process the big data. AI can carry out this task easier because of their ‘behavioral prediction’ which involves analyzing a vast array of data points about the market in a short period of time.
Second, from the heavy industry. The heavy industry, in a nutshell, is an industry that worked using complex machines and facilities (such as heavy equipment, large machine tools, huge buildings, and large-scale infrastructure) to produce large and heavy products by going numerous processes. Human workers replaced by machine and automation in this industry have been an issue since the first Industrial Revolution in 1812 where technophobe as known as ‘Luddites’ riot against textile machine and the British government had to dispatched 14,000 soldiers to the heart of England to protect factories and quell the violence[6]. So why does company use automation and machine? That’s because machine can operate 24/7, safer operational environments, reduced operating costs , and effective especially if it is driven by AI. The AI is much-desired workload because it does not know ‘tired’ unlike human workers that require rest, food, drink, and demand high paycheck
Thirdly, from the automotive sector. In the United States of America, a company named Amazon established by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994, which nowadays expanded and grew to be one of the big four companies alongside Google, Apple, and Facebook, had already implemented AI in their delivery truck making it driverless. This causes the human truck driver, which is one of the common job the U.S. according to an NPR report using Census Bureau data [7] to be a concern with the AI taking their job. It is only in a matter of time before AI overtake that job. In daily vehicle cases, Uber and Grab who monopoly e-hailing services in Malaysia also started to get interested in the ‘AI-powered hailing’ system. Sony recently collaborated with Uber to use AI in its system and apply starting in Japan. Although futuristic as it sounds, it is still unknown when is the final project be released. We also can see how AI start to shape the way of hailing. If that happens soon,so many e-hailing drivers will be jobless and overtake by AI. As for Malaysia, maybe more time needed to imply self-driving truck, AI-driven hailing and the majority of our city does not pay attention to automation in self-driving which is pretty concerning.
Finally, in a business environment. AI is already on the way to replaced customer services. In 2018 Google introduced and demo ‘experimental’ human-alike phone call services that impressively make the person, on the other hand, did not realize at all he talking to a machine. Although Google claimed that the AI chatbot is limited to a closed topic, it's scary how easily a company and small business to acquire this technology and eliminate the need for a human operator. Next job that in danger of being replaced is sales workers.Most companies try to use AI because they think sales workers are overpaid. They literally invest in particularly replacing these jobs. Even if some people rage about uprising of AI and automation, it is inevitable as people start to go shopping cashless and even using online shopping services to ease themselves. Without proper attention, local mall and retail shop may closed and suffer from this effect because more people prefer Amazon, Shopee or Lazada as their platform. On the other hand, it is good for competition to grab buyers and generate income by using AI to manage and become ‘shopper assistant’ thus increasing the sale and the cycle continues.
Now come to the most intriguing part of this topic, can we avoid or preventing them from taking away all our job? Banning the usage of this technology is not actually a solution to help those displaced workers as the automation and AI will still emerge and needed as time passes. We cannot stop technology innovation. So how do we solve this problem? Some experts have predicted that soft human skills like communication, creativity and empathy will always be needed because robots can’t replicate those skills therefore ‘some’ jobs are having probability that will never be displaced . However, for the unlucky workers, new inventions could open the door to other hard skills that could be required and in high demand in the future.
One of the solutions to the risk of automation is to prepare and re-train displaced workers so they can work and cooperate with AI to further make the job efficient and faster. This is because robot/AI still need human touch to perfectly execute the task given. Nowadays people always jump between jobs and acquire lots of skill that can be applied somewhere else. This can be amplified even more when the jobs are being ‘threaten’ thus making an employee a more diverse person. The other way around is not all people need to work. This solution can be done right by charging or taxing the AI/machine in the company. Although unreasonable as it sounds , U.S presidential candidate for 2020 , Andrew Yang propose in his campaign that we as citizen should benefit on machine displacing human workers[8]. UBI aka Universal Basic Income or he also call it ‘Freedom Dividend’ where giant companies such as Amazon, Google, Facebook should not avoid paying tax as they did in 2018[9] and the citizen will get 1000$ a month for a person ,for just being a citizen. How the monthly was generated? Well we live in digitized world where ads are everywhere. For every advertisement we clicked , for every website that we entered, some income is generated, and Andrew Yang propose that money to be use back to us to both help in personal finance and boost the economy
In my personal view, AI and automation are unpredictable because we never had anything like it in history. In Malaysia this issue is lurking in the dark, waiting to strike unlike another issue such as global warming, political, immigrants and many others. Advancements in automation are good in many ways but need to put the measure in order to prevent is usage spiral out of control and probably cause the economy to collapse. Only time will tell what will happen to our job .
References
[2]https://www.wired.com/2016/03/googles-ai-wins-first-game-historic-match-go-champion/
[6] https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-luddites-workers
[7] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state
[8] https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-freedom-dividend-faq/