It’s a well-worn axiom that the impact of future technology is difficult to envisage. Take agriculture. Imagine trying to describe a tractor to a farm labourer in pre-industrial Britain. Today, the challenge is to imagine that tractor being self-driven. But that reality is near at hand. The appropriately named Autonomous Tractor Company, based in the US state of North Dakota, is already in the pre-production stages of its driverless Spirit hay mower.

In the UK, meanwhile, the government is advancing a £160m agri-tech strategy that promises to promote a variety of robotic farm applications, among other goals. A range of early-stage “AgBots” already exist, from the award-winning “Ladybird” that autonomously detects pests in fields of vegetables to the robotic rice-planter developed by Japan’s National Agricultural Research Centre.



The arrival of automation in farming promises radical changes, but it is hardly a surprise. Exactly the same processes have been playing out in the manufacturing and service sectors for decades. Amazon is emblematic of the trend. Its distribution centres are equipped with robotic solutions developed by Kiva Systems that have the capacity to autonomously “pick, pack and ship any item, anywhere, at any time”.

Economists have long debated the merits of automation. On the upside, it’s credited with increasing productivity, predictability of quality and consistency of output. Mitsubishi Electric, for instance, a leading developer of automated systems, recently designed a robot that speeds up the manufacture of ceramic bearings almost ten-fold. On the flipside, research and development costs are high, as is the expense of installation very often.



Environmentalists are fans, in the main. The energy efficiency of automated machines can be optimised in a way that is difficult with human-controlled processes. Automated thermostats, for instance, use up to 30% less energy to keep your house warm.



Man vs Machine

But it is the social costs that beleaguer the automation story. Even before General Electric coined the term ‘automation’ in 1947, workers worried about the implication of technology on job security. As early as 1936, the Trades Union Congress issued a leaflet on the subject (more machines, it argued, should be met with a shorter working week).



The same concerns continue today. “If you look at industries and manufacturers that have had a large scale introduction of robots and automation then of course there’s been a clear downsizing of labour”, says Tony Burke, assistant general secretary of Unite, Britain’s largest trade union group.



He cites the example of the printing industry, where automation has had a “significant impact” on the requirement for manual labour over the last two decades or so. Today, the growth of automated 3D printing presents the prospect of a similar dynamic transferring over into mainstream manufacturing.



Does that mean that human labour will “go the way of the horse”, as Nobel laureate economist Wasilly Leontief famously predicted? Not necessarily. Take the retail industry. Recent years have seen the introduction of standalone kiosks, self-service checkouts and similar automated innovations. Yet overall employment in the sector is 30% higher today than it was in 1978, UK government figures indicate.



Rather than replacing jobs, automation is displacing them, says David Williams, spokesperson for the Union of Shop Distributive and Allied Workers. “People are doing different jobs within the store whilst these automatic tools have come in”, he explains.



Then there’s the question of technological feasibility. Some of the more ambitious automation ideas may take decades to become scientifically possible, let alone financially viable. A recent report about emerging technologies by Policy Horizons Canada, a government-backed body, highlights four automated agriculture applications that could become mainstream by 2026 or before. Reaching a price point that makes AgBots realistic for developing countries, where most farmers are employed, will take longer still.

Unpredictable, uneven impacts

Yet market logic and historical experience both strongly indicate that automation will inevitably affect employment trends over time. Just don’t expect those impacts to play out equally. As a new report from the Pew Research Centre reveals, automation represents potential upsides and downsides for high-skilled workers as it does their low and medium-skilled peers.



The former could benefit from an increase in demand for more cognitive tasks as routine duties are replaced by machines, although “far more may be displaced into lower paying service industry jobs”, the report predicts. Likewise, low and medium-skilled workers could gain relief from monotonous tasks and may find opportunities for more creative employment, but they can expect traditional occupations to tail off.



An onus clearly lies on large employers considering automation to ensure their staff are retrained or skilled up for the new world of more automated workplaces. Automation offers the chance to create entirely new industries or revolutionise old ones, much as the internet is doing for manufacturing. Again, it falls to business to invest its energies and resources in realising such opportunities.



“Technology will continue to disrupt jobs”, Jonathan Grudin, principal researcher for Microsoft, told the Pew researchers. “But more jobs seem likely to be created [and] there is no shortage of things that need to be done and that will not change.” In most parts of the world, that still includes sowing crops and collecting in the harvest. Whether that will be the case for our grandchildren depends when, and if, the flat-capped robots arrive.

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