Japanese electronics giant Toshiba's humanoid robot Chihira Junko greets customers during a Press preview at a shopping mall in Tokyo.
Dubai - With the advent of every new aspect of technology, peoples' speculation on when their skills and labour should become replaceable increases.
Published: Fri 18 Dec 2015, 11:00 PM
Last updated: Sat 19 Dec 2015, 11:56 AM
The battle between man and machines goes all the way back to when machines first began repetitive tasks of any sort.
It was in 1772 that the British writer Thomas Mortimer wrote, in concern about sawmills, that "those [machines] are intended almost totally to exclude the labour of the human race."
MTv, almost ironically, began airing music videos on television in 1981 for the first time with the music video for song 'Video Killed the Radio Star'.
Jobs at risk:
Typists
Travel agents
Loan officers
Cab drivers
Real estate agents
Lawyers
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Video, as time would tell, did not kill the radio star. It did, however, change the job description to a great extent.
With the advent of every new aspect of technology, peoples' speculation on when their skills and labour should become replaceable increases.
The speculation is often based on sound reasoning too.
According to Marshall Brain, founder of HowStuffWorks, by 2013 there were over a million industrial robots working worldwide - that is a robot to every 5,000 people.
A much talked about report from the Oxford Martin School's Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology in the US last year that attempted to quantify the extent of this concluded that 45 per cent of jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers within the next two decades.
The study examined over 700 detailed occupation types, noting the types of tasks workers perform and the skills required. By weighting these factors, as well as the engineering obstacles currently preventing computerisation, the researchers assessed the degree to which these occupations may be automated in the coming decades.
It found that, unsurprisingly, jobs where physical and mental labor consists primarily of tasks that can be specified through step-by-step instructions or follow a routinely structure were at "high risk". This eliminated work for typists, travel agents, those in fields of transportation, logistics, construction, office and administrative support, as well as many aspects of the service industry.
"Most management, business and finance occupations, which are intensive in generalist tasks requiring social intelligence, are largely confined to the low risk category," the study says. "The same is true of most occupations in education, healthcare, as well as arts and media jobs."
As developments in artificial intelligence advance and computers become fully capable in executing not just doing what they are explicitly being told to, but also decisions through pattern detection, fields such as the managements, the science and engineering, and even the arts will also be at risk.
The study discovered that loan officers, cab driver, real estate agents and lawyers could be amongst those that get replaced by algorithmic and artificial intelligence in the next decade or two.
Robots can be used in:
Transportation
Logistics
Construction
Office support
Service industry
Hospitality Jobs
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At a 98 per cent probability, loan officers are among the most susceptible professions to get reformed by powerful algorithmic processes and software. An online peer-to-peer lender, Daric Inc has already initialised this conversion. The lender has not employed a single loan officer and does not plan to either. It works on an algorithm that learns what kind of individuals made for safe borrowers in the past and constantly updates its understanding of who is or isn't creditworthy.
Reports also put paralegals and legal assistants at slight risk in the coming years. This is already evident in some kind of legal roles such as routine tasks like searching through documents, emails, spreadsheets and other records for keywords. More intelligent tools can go further and use 'predictive coding' in the discovery process.
Even in the UAE, robots are expected to make a substantial shift in relevance in industries like hospitality and manufacturing.
According to experts at last year's Government Summit, artificial intelligence and robots are to replace all too many jobs in the coming decade.
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