Artificial intelligence and robots threaten two in five jobs but Australians remain positive
THE robots are coming, with as many as two in five roles at risk, but experts say you can fight back with unexpected, uniquely human skills.
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PATHOLOGISTS to solicitors, factory workers to farmers ... as many as two in five Australian jobs are at risk over the next decade from a trend experts have dubbed “the fourth industrial revolution”.
Robots and artificial intelligence is expected to rise up and take over up to five million roles in Australia over the next 13 years, including traditional jobs once considered safe from technological change.
The increasingly intelligent technology is expected to affect everyday life from the way we seek medical treatment to way we travel, and could render everything from driver’s licences to real estate valuations obsolete.
But experts are divided over whether machines and software will steal these jobs or merely transform them, whether robots will widen the gulf between the rich and the working poor, and whether Australians are optimistic or merely complacent about the transformation ahead.
CREEPING INVASION
Australian workers and students still have time to adapt to the incoming revolution however, industry experts say, and the tech-savvy landscape could deliver opportunities for entrepreneurs and corporations to innovate and export their creations.
The Australian Information Industry Association this month released new research showing 97 per cent of Australians felt positive about their future job prospects despite the automation revolution, and more than half were confident in Australia’s ability to adapt to change.
ROBOPOCALYPSE: They’re after our jobs. Is yours one of them?
But the Galaxy survey of more than 1000 Australian adults also showed less enthusiasm about whether Australia was keeping pace with innovation now, with 41 per cent claiming the country was “generally falling behind”.
Leading research in the field, CEDA’s Australia’s Future Workforce report, is even bleaker.
It predicts two in five of Australian jobs are at high risk of disappearing within the next 15 years, or more than five million roles.
An additional 18 per cent of jobs are at medium risk of being eliminated, the study says, and job losses will hit rural and regional areas particularly hard, with up to 60 per cent of jobs at risk.
FUTURE IN THE BALANCE
While some experts challenge the accuracy of these predictions, Innovation Science Australia board member and AirTree Ventures investor Daniel Petre says there is no doubt jobs will go in the newest revolution.
The real question, he says, is whether the changes will create enough new roles to cover those losses.
“People fall into two camps,” he says. “Everyone accepts that jobs will dramatically change. The question is: will there be net job destruction or net job creation?
“I sit on the net job destruction side,” the former top Microsoft executive says. “I think there will be fundamentally (fewer) jobs going forward.”
Jobs most at risk of replacement by automation, artificial intelligence, and robots are those with a “binary set of rules,” Petre warns, and this includes more roles than you might expect.
It’s not just factory workers at risk, he says, but solicitors who draw up standard contracts, office administration staff responsible for data entry, professional drivers, real estate agents, and even some members of the medical fraternity, such as pathologists and general practitioners.
“There’s no doubt that software will better diagnose pathology than humans, whether blood or melanomas,” he says.
“In 20 years’ time, all pathology will be done by software, not by humans, because software will be all-knowing, no errors, no biases. It will also be much faster, maybe within five years.”
Ill Australians may not even visit GPs in future, Petre predicts, but instead see someone trained to ask the right questions of patients and input their information into software to reach a diagnosis.
TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTION
Everything IoT founder Eitan Bienstock says, like the industrial revolution, emerging technology will reduce farm labour too.
Technology such as Smart Paddock can remotely track cattle using multi-sensor ear tags, he says, while Watersave uses sensors, flow meters, and soil moisture problems to irrigate land automatically.
“In any technology revolution — and this one is no different — it will replace people on the ground,” he says.
“There will be automation on the farm. Humans will focus on jobs that require a human touch while a machine can do the repetitive, tedious work.”
Petre warns removing these roles, in addition to well-paid jobs like those of lawyers and pathologists, could create new social inequality. Not all new jobs created in the robotic revolution will be on par with the jobs they replace, he says, and higher intellectual demands will exclude some workers.
“What gets created is a whole bunch of high-order skill jobs; higher (emotional intelligence), higher intelligence jobs, and a bunch of the middle IQ jobs go away,” he says.
“They might get replaced with health care workers or more food service workers or more service industry workers but, while not disparaging those roles, a lot are not carrying the same pay as a lawyer or a pathologist. Even if you have net job creation, it’s not equal.
“This is the thing I struggle with,” Petre explains, “what do you say to a 35-year-old, a good person, who just wants to work hard but they are just not smart enough? What do you say?”
CHANGE OF FOCUS
But Australian Information Industry Association chief executive Rob Fitzpatrick brands some of the predictions around job losses as “alarmist,” and says most jobs will change rather than disappear.
“We will be creating roles that never existed before. There will be roles like privacy guardian, there will be opportunities for information security officers, and in the next five years we’re going to see a lot of chief corporate social responsibility roles,” he says, in addition to more demand for data scientists and image-recognition specialists.
Requirements within jobs will also change, he says, forcing workers to retrain.
And the new roles would not just require new technological skills, he says, but uniquely human skills like empathy and critical thinking that could not be replaced by machines.
“We need both hard skills and soft skills,” he says. “Problem-solving and creativity will be just as important, and will probably be more eligible across multiple roles.
“Kids don’t need to be able to code, for example — coding will be automated — but it’s about understanding why and how things work.”
Mr Fitzpatrick says the new industrial revolution will also create unprecedented opportunities for companies and government agencies to innovate and export artificially intelligent and automated systems, though they needed to move now to avoid being left behind.
“What we need to do is get on the front foot and call out where those opportunities are, and we need to shape policies to make Australia not just a taker but a creator of new technologies,” he warns.