Will automation and AI give us four-day weekends – or simply leave us without jobs? Smart machines could give us all lives of leisure in future – or they may simply leave us without any wages

Artificial Intelligence expert Toby Walsh looks ahead to the work revolution coming our way, when robots are predicted to take over

In 1900 many people worked in dreadful conditions, doing repetitive and tedious jobs. The streets were full of horses and carts. Life expectancy for someone born that year was just 41. Wind forward to 1962 and working conditions had greatly improved. The streets were full of cars and trucks and the jet age had begun. Life expectancy had nearly doubled, to 71.

The year 2062 – when it’s estimated that computers will become as intelligent as us – may well be a similarly optimistic time.

The price of basic goods should have fallen dramatically, as they’ll be produced by more efficient ­machines. Poverty could be a distant memory, if we share the wealth created by robots that never sleep.

If you’ve been enjoying a long Christmas holiday and are wishing you didn’t have to go back to work tomorrow, consider this: by 2062, technological advances may have resulted in weekends lasting four or five days.

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But with some leading economists worrying that many jobs are simply going to disappear by 2062, with little or none of the income sharing needed to make up for this, will the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution in fact leave lots of people behind?

Should we be worried?

Economists have been making predictions about industrial advances causing job losses for decades. Back in 1930, for example, John Maynard Keynes warned about “technological unemployment”. Yet joblessness today is at historically low levels in most countries, despite the world’s population being bigger than ever.

Work hasn’t ended – indeed, many of us seem to be spending more and more time doing it.

Modern fears about future job displacement can be traced to a 2013 study on the impact of automation, by Carl Frey and Michael Osborne at Oxford University. This made a much-quoted prediction that 47 per cent of jobs in the US were under threat of automation over the next two decades, a figure that would surely be very similar in the UK.

Since that report – which ironically used machine learning to predict which of over 700 different jobs could be automated – Andy Haldane, the chief economist of the Bank of England, predicted in November 2015 that around half of all jobs in the UK were at risk of automation.

And in October 2016 Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, predicted that 69 per cent of jobs in India and 77 per cent of jobs in China are at risk.

Which jobs are really at risk?

Frey and Osborne found a 94 per cent probability that a bicycle repair job will be automated in the next two decades. But bikes are fiddly objects to repair and have lots of non-standard parts. It would require a very expensive robot for a job that isn’t well paid, so it will not be economically viable.

Added to this, being a bicycle repair person is a social job. It’s about talking to the customer, selling them the latest kit, offering tips on good places to ride. It’s not just about repairing bikes. Frey and Osborne didn’t take factors like these into account.

Their study also found a 55 per cent probability that a commercial pilot will be automated in the next two decades. From a technical perspective, we can already automate much of this job today. Yet that 55 per cent figure seems unlikely; Boeing predicts that over 600,000 new pilots will be needed during that time.

Another prediction is that there’s a 98 per cent probability that fashion models will disappear in the next two decades. Are we really going to replace human pouts, hip-swaying and swagger with robotic catwalk performers? We don’t want to know what clothes look like on a robot, but on a person. And robots aren’t going to be walking in high heels anytime soon.

It’s also surely too blunt to say many whole job types will cease to exist. Frey and Osborne classified “accountant and auditor” as being at risk. They are certainly parts of these that will be automated, but I doubt the job will cease to exist.

Fast facts: automation and jobs A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017 analysed the impact of automation in the US between 1993 and 2007. It found that on average, every new robot replaced around 5.6 workers – and offsetting gains were not observed in other occupations. It estimated that every additional robot per 1,000 workers reduced the total population in employment in the US by 0.34 per cent. Automation also put pressure on the jobs that remained. Every additional robot per 1,000 workers reduced wages by 0.5 per cent. The number of industrial robots in the US quadrupled, eliminating an estimated half a million jobs.

Some roles are starting to be automated without being replaced by jobs elsewhere, such as in the oil industry. The price of oil collapsed from $115 per barrel in August 2014 to below $30 at the start of 2016. This drove the industry to decrease headcount and introduce more automation.

Nearly half a million jobs disappeared from the oil industry worldwide. But now, as the price of oil is rebounding, and the industry is growing, fewer than half of those jobs have returned. ­Automation has reduced 20 people typically working at a well to just five.

The developing world may suffer, however. Globalisation outsourced many jobs from rich economies to poorer ones, such as call centres relocating to India and factories in the Far East serving the West. These trends may now start to reverse. The improved efficiencies that AI and robotics will bring may shift many of these jobs back to the developed world.

How can businesses survive?

The music business suggests how some industries might adapt. ­Digital music hasn’t resulted in fewer human musicians. Indeed, the demand for musicians is predicted to increase modestly in the next decade. Also, many musicians now make more money from performance than from recording. We value experiences, hearing our musical idols in person.

Even supposing the prediction that 47 per cent of jobs are at risk of automation proves to be accurate, that would not translate into 47 per cent unemployment. There will be many new jobs created by technology.

Just look at the industrial revolution. Before then, most people worked in agriculture or as craftspeople. Many of these jobs became mechanised – but new ones were created in offices and factories.

Some people suggest that “robot repair person” will be one of the new jobs. I am entirely unconvinced by this example, ­however. The thousands of people who used to paint and weld in car factories got replaced by only a couple of robot repair people. There’s also no reason why robots won’t be able to repair other robots. We already have factories where robots make robots. There are even “dark factories” – which have no people and so no need for lights – in which robots work night and day building other robots.

The Japanese company FANUC, one of the largest manufacturers of industrial robots, has operated one of these near Mount Fuji since 2001, helping the firm achieve annual sales of around $6bn (£4.7bn).

Can I have a four-day weekend?

To avoid 47 per cent unemployment, we might just work a shorter week. That was the case during the industrial revolution.

Before then, many of us would wake up with the sun, go out into the fields and work till the sun went down, and then go to bed. Many worked around 60 hours per week. After the industrial revolution, work was reduced to around 40 hours per week for most people. Some of us even got a few weeks of holiday each year.

The same could happen with the AI revolution. We could shorten the working day. Or we could have a three-day or four-day weekend.

However, this would require some of the wealth generated by increasing productivity to be shared around, and there is little evidence this is starting to happen. Indeed, the opposite seems to be the case. Wage growth for most workers in developed economies has stopped, or is failing to keep up with the limited inflation we now experience.

There is an argument that we could afford to work less, as more efficient machines will make many of life’s essentials cheaper. So we might not need wage growth in order to work less. We could therefore – in theory, at least – live on less.

Who will be the first to suffer?

In the developed world, the canaries in the coal mine are likely to be drivers of taxis, trucks and delivery vehicles.

There will be benefits to this. Around 95 per cent of road deaths are caused by driver error. The sooner we replace human drivers with reliable computers, the better. Around three-quarters of the cost of transporting goods by truck are the labour. But an autonomous truck will not need to take breaks so can drive for twice as long, at nearly one-quarter the cost. That’s roughly an eightfold increase in productivity.

For lorry drivers, the transition might be relatively painless. In Australia, for example, the average age of a lorry driver is 47. In a decade or so, many will retire, their jobs being taken by automated trucks. Young people will simply not enter the profession.

But for taxi drivers, change might be quicker and more painful. One of the newest jobs on the planet – being an Uber driver – might also be one of the shortest-lived.

How should we prepare?

One way to keep ahead of the machines will be to learn new skills as new technologies are invented. Learning will need to be lifelong.

We will also need to consider large changes to our educational system. Greater emphasis on Stem subjects (science, ­technology, engineering and mathematics) is definitely not the answer. There will be only a limited demand for computer programmers; indeed, when AI succeeds, much of the programming will be done by the computers themselves.

Humans will instead need strong analytical skills. They will need emotional and social intelligence. And they will need all the other traits that makes us human, such as creativity, resilience, determination and curiosity.

By 2062 machines will probably be superhuman, so it’s hard to imagine any job in which we will remain superior. This means the only jobs left will be those in which we prefer people to be doing the work.

The AI revolution will be about rediscovering the things that make us human. This is a reason why it might be called the Second Renaissance. We will be rediscovering our humanity.

By 2062, machines will be able to write plays to rival Shakespeare’s Macbeth. To paint works as provocative as Picasso’s Guernica. And to compose music as beautiful as that of Beethoven. But we’ll still prefer works produced by human artists. These works will speak to the human experience, which a robot can never feel.

There will be plenty of artisan jobs we value, too. Brewing craft beer. Making cheese. Growing organic wine. Throwing pottery by hand. We will buy the hand-carved wooden bowl over the cheaper, more perfect machine-made one.

As social animals, we will also increasingly appreciate and value social interactions with other humans. Barristas will be pushing buttons on computer-controlled coffee machines that make ­perfect coffee every time, but we’ll still line up to have a human make us coffee for the chitchat. For the smile and the human experience.

We will still prefer a human sales assistant to help us choose a dress. A human doctor to deliver bad news about our blood test. A human barman to pour us a glass of whisky and offer a consoling word. A human coach to help get us fit. And a human judge to pass sentence in our courts.

The most important human traits in 2062 will be our social and emotional intelligence, as well as our artistic and artisan skills.

The irony is that our technological future will not be about technology, but about our humanity. And the jobs of the future are the most human ones.

This is an edited excerpt from ‘2062: The World That AI Made’ by Toby Walsh (£14.95, La Trobe University Press), out now