In shades of science fiction, an Australian professor (there always was a professor in those old sci-fi movies) has made a dire prediction—robots may end employment as we know it. Maybe HR staff in the future will be addressing circuits and batteries rather than comp and benefits. Will they need an oil can?
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University of Oxford Associate Professor in Machine Learning Michael Osborne told the Brisbane Times that technological advances will be eliminating an astounding percentage of low-skill jobs in the next 2 decades.
In the professor’s study of 702 professions in the United States, he identified the jobs most at-risk of a robot takeover as food services (87 percent of jobs eliminated) and warehouse workers (67 percent). At the other extreme, the jobs most likely not at risk of being taken over by automation were workers in the information sector and those employees in upper management.
The depressing results were nearly the same in studies in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia.
But Professor Osborne is also reassuring. He cites that with the demise of jobs with the advent of the machines and assembly lines at the dawn of the auto industry, new types of employment actually opened up in expanding industries such as hospitality, tourism, engineering, and technology.
He also said that while robotics can replace a lot of mundane and repetitive labor, they still cannot duplicate creativity and social intelligence, which, as of now, cannot be recreated through electronics.
And what of the future? Professor Osborne told the newspaper that “Hollywood’s imagery of terminators and other self-aware robots wreaking havoc” is not the future scenario he envisions, “… [b]ut I think in the near term the larger question is that of employment really, and how people’s work might be affected by increasing automation.”
The real question for HR is how many of their tasks can be done by a robot.