From ATMs to AI, tech changes work

The robots are coming.

Maybe not today. Maybe not en masse. But just as the evolution of electricity helped to propel the nation through the Second Industrial Revolution more than a century ago, the technological wizardry that has brought Siri to our cell phones and "recalculating" to our highway lexicon promises to be just as transformative.

You and I are already living that reality here in Sioux Falls. ATMs, self-serve checkout lines at grocery stores, airport kiosks that spit out boarding passes with the wave of a driver's license — automation and technology mean we are spending less and less time in the daily rituals of human interaction.

A more pertinent question, perhaps, is can or will technology be the salvation for a city and state that have such critical workforce needs? Could robots do the welding, the assembly line work and the other lower-level repetitive jobs that companies seem to have such a difficult time filling?

There's an interesting debate transpiring on all this, one that we will bring into focus this week as we explore the potential workforce impact of robotics and automation on Sioux Falls' largest industries: health care, financial services, retail services and manufacturing.

Some people, like Silicon Valley software developer Martin Ford, are telling me that advances in robotics and artificial intelligence will eventually make a large fraction of our human workforce obsolete.

Others here in South Dakota are less convinced of that. Technological advances may result in the need for fewer workers, they say, but more likely will simply create a shifting of employees into other more highly skilled occupations.

Our business ventures are too small, too unique to make capital investments in mass-production technology and robotics pencil out, they tell me.

Maybe. But don't fool yourself.

South Dakota isn't too far removed from its horse-and-plow days. Our countryside remains dotted with the broken windows and scoured sidings of 20th century agricultural ambitions long since abandoned because of the onslaught of technology.

Dairy farmers don't sit for long hours each morning and evening filling pails with milk. Now they sit in their kitchens and stare at the apps on their cellphones, making sure the automated system out in the milking parlor is working right.

Farmers no longer send out dozens of hired hands on fleets of plows to till the land, followed by another fleet that disks and smooths it all out. Now machinery is much bigger. Now the tilling and planting is done in one pass.

Now all the hired hands have left for manufacturing jobs. And as automation and robotics get better, they are trying to reinvent themselves once again.

It's difficult to know what their future will be in the evolving technological world. But South Dakota's Department of Labor tells us there are dozens of occupations in this state that will need fewer workers over the next decade.

Newspaper reporters are one of those jobs. The state Labor Department is projecting a 10 percent decline in the need for journalists like me between 2012 and 2022. Word processors and typists, medical transcriptionists, meter readers, office machine operators, telemarketers, power plant operators — all are in jobs where the need is falling in this state.

I can't tell you why South Dakota will require 55 fewer bus drivers by the year 2022. Families having fewer children? More school districts shutting their doors? A decline in people signing up for tour buses?

All are reasonable explanations. But you can bet that technology and automation are somewhere in that equation, just as surely as Google is putting driverless motor vehicles on the road today. Could it be that driverless school buses will transport our schoolchildren some day?

Sounds farfetched. But what sweat-drenched sodbuster laboring behind a team of oxen a century ago ever imagined air-conditioned tractor cabs with computer screens and GPS tracking.

Don't kid yourself. The robots are coming.