Robots Replacing Our Job

When people think about robots taking over human jobs, they tend to think of blue-collar jobs especially those done in factories. You could also easily imagine robots doing “dirty” work in mines, in the fields and so on. Somehow, you don’t normally envision robots doing paperwork or white-collar work that’s normally done behind a desk.

Yet this is not only possible but is already starting to happen across various white-collar industries. Why it is happening is a no-brainer. Robots, once purchased, require no salary, fringe benefits or annual leave. They also don’t fall sick and can work round-the-clock. But perhaps more importantly, they can do some of these tasks faster and better.

But before we go on, let’s define what we mean by “robots”. They don’t necessarily have to anatomically resemble humans in the way that C-3P0 does. They don’t even have to be mobile like R2D2. They could be just a computer or super-computer programmed to undertake tasks that humans do.

Here are five jobs that you normally wouldn’t expect to be taken up by robots or computers but it’s already happening.

Pilots - Is flying a plane a white-collar job? One pilot I know has described his job as a high-class taxi driver. In a way, he’s right in suggesting that it’s a kind of blue-collar job because a pilot’s role is to navigate a vehicle. But because planes are so sophisticated, people do think of pilots as white-collar workers.

If cars can be autonomously driven, why can’t planes be autonomously flown as well? The answer is of course it can be, and in fact much of every commercial flight these days are controlled by computers. The pilots are actually only heavily involved during take-off and landing.

It’s just a matter of time before technology allows for planes to safely take off and land using auto-pilot but passengers might have a hard time accepting a completely pilotless plane. There’s also the real concern that computers will not know how to respond to an emergency situation, which requires human judgement. Even that’s being addressed though. The University College London is employing Artificial Intelligence to help the auto-pilot system respond appropriately to sudden changes in flight conditions.

Journalists - Writing is generally considered an artistic endeavour and one would think that as such, it would be hard to be taken over by a machine. Yet, much of journalism (especially today) involves gathering and analysing information from online sources. This is the kind of work that could be automated.

The Associated Press has run experiments to automatically create corporate earnings reports and apparently the result is error-free, which is not usually the case when humans do it. AP’s sports department is also using automation to generate basic reports for small sports events with niche audiences. They’re able to do this with the help of machine-learning systems developed by companies like Automated Insights and Narrative Science which are able to scrape news from various online and digital sources to generate fresh content.

Feature writers and opinion columnists shouldn’t have any reason to fear journo-robots. Their kind of writing is unlikely to be taken over by a machine but basic reporting that requires number crunching or gathering and analysing statistics or results are things that can be done by computers. It will still take a human editor to vet through each computer-generated story to make sure it reads all right.

Doctors - Doctors are specialists who are experts at diagnosing a patient’s illness. Yet when it comes to this, human doctors cannot match the accuracy of a super computer. IBM’s Watson has demonstrated a far more accurate diagnosis rate for lung cancers than human doctors (90 per cent accuracy versus 50 per cent).

But it’s not just the diagnosis part that robots can play a role in medicine. Johnson & Johnson’s Sedasys system is able to deliver low-level anaesthesia, and surgeons already use automated systems to aid in simple procedures. Doctors in Guy’s and St. Thomas NHS Foundation Trust use surgical robots to assist them in surgery.

The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) is so advanced that it has been able to stitch an animal’s intestines much better than human surgeon. Apparently, the sutures done by STAR were tighter and more regularly spaced, resulting in more leak-resistant stitches. Patients might feel more comfortable knowing that a human doctor is overall in charge of their operations but in the future, operations could be done largely by a robot.

The legal profession is another one where there are tons of information to be parsed through. Currently this is done by lawyers who go through past cases to predict which way a ruling would go based on past rulings. This kind of work is ripe for being disrupted by automation. Researchers at Michigan State University and South Texas College of Law have constructed a statistical model that was able to accurately predict the outcome of almost 71 per cent of US Supreme Court cases.

A Canadian company is developing a legal research platform, based on artificial intelligence, called ROSS which combines a vast database of legal knowledge and natural language to assist lawyers with research. It’s like having a “lawbot” as an intern to help with research.

The company’s programmers are teaching ROSS to recognise patterns of context, syntax and meaning within legal documents. “We’ve trained ROSS to calculate the likelihood that a case passage will answer your question by showing ROSS over one million examples of questions and answers developed by lawyers,” shared the company.

Financial Advisers - Robo-advisers are basically automated services that are replacing human personal financial advisers and insurance agents. They’re particularly suitable for those who don’t have complex financial needs.

Bloomberg has reported that robo-advisers are particularly popular with millennials. This isn’t surprising as millennials are used to doing things online, like to be able to access information and services 24/7 and want to get the cheapest prices.

On the insurance front, Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, is replacing 34 insurance claim workers with IBM’s Watson, which will be doing research and data gathering work such as sorting and processing patient medical histories and procedures. This helps human workers process insurance pay-outs faster.

Emergence of new jobs - The rise of robots taking over both blue-collar and white-collar work is naturally quite an alarming development but one can take heart in the knowledge that historically, when advances in technology caused disruption in certain industries, new ones arise.

Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google, puts it best when he said: “You can point to jobs that are going to go away from automation, but don’t worry, we’re going to invent new jobs. People say, ‘What new jobs?’ I don’t know. They haven’t been invented yet. Sixty-five per cent of Americans today work at information jobs that didn’t exist 25 years ago, two-thirds of the population in 1900 worked either on farms or on factories. Today that’s 2 per cent and 2 per cent. If I’d said a century ago, ‘Well, don’t worry you can get jobs developing websites and apps and doing information jobs of various kind,’ people wouldn’t know what I was talking about. We’re constantly inventing new things to do with our time, but you can’t really define that because the future hasn’t been invented yet.”