Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) warned that the job market will eventually be taken over by robots.
Bush told New York AM 970 radio host John Catsimatidis on Sunday, “The looming challenge of automation and artificial intelligence and the rapid advancement of technology brings great benefits but also creates huge challenges.”
Bush added that “this is not something that’s science fiction” and that it was necessary to improve education in order for people to have the necessary skills to compete with automation.
Here are five reasons why Bush and others shouldn’t worry about this:
1. The notion that technology will result in economic calamity is an old and tired argument. The argument has roots from the Industrial Revolution, where many fretted that “the labour of the poor” would be harmed by the invention of machines, according to The Economist. John Maynard Keynes, the founder of Keynesian economics, warned of “technological unemployment”; Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson gave similar warnings. But such ominous pontifications have been unfounded.
2. Automation and artificial intelligence are a part of a process called creative destruction. The term “creative destruction” originated from the late economist Joseph Schumpeter’s book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, in which he explained the “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”
In other words, capitalism rewards profitable industries while those that aren’t successful fail, leading the way toward technological advancement, higher standards of living and creation of wealth. For instance, the invention of automobile caused the decline of the horse-and-buggy industry; everyone would agree that cars are a vast improvement for society over horse-and-buggies.
Automation and artificial intelligence are a part of the creative destruction process.
3. Automation has proven to create more jobs rather than fewer. This is because automation and technological advances have resulted in lower business costs, therefore freeing up resources for businesses to expand and create more jobs elsewhere. For instance, the invention of automated teller machines (ATMs) may have caused a decline in bank teller jobs, but the lower costs associated with ATMs allowed banks to open up more branches; therefore creating more jobs.
According to The Economist, “The number of urban bank branches rose by 43% over the same period, so the total number of employees increased,” meaning that jobs were merely re-positioned toward “things like sales and customer service that machines could not do.”
4. The same holds true with artificial intelligence. There are already fields that use artificial intelligence and have seen gains in employment, according to The Economist:
For example, the introduction of software capable of analysing large volumes of legal documents might have been expected to reduce the number of legal clerks and paralegals, who act as human search engines during the “discovery” phase of a case; in fact automation has reduced the cost of discovery and increased demand for it. “Judges are more willing to allow discovery now, because it’s cheaper and easier,” says Mr [James] Bessen. The number of legal clerks in America increased by 1.1% a year between 2000 and 2013. Similarly, the automation of shopping through e-commerce, along with more accurate recommendations, encourages people to buy more and has increased overall employment in retailing. In radiology, says Dr Barani, Enlitic’s technology empowers practitioners, making average ones into experts. Rather than putting them out of work, the technology increases capacity, which may help in the developing world, where there is a shortage of specialists.
The article also points out that artificial intelligence will create its own set of jobs:
Self-driving vehicles may need remote operators to cope with emergencies, or ride-along concierges who knock on doors and manhandle packages. Corporate chatbot and customer-service AIs will need to be built and trained and have dialogue written for them (AI firms are said to be busy hiring poets); they will have to be constantly updated and maintained, just as websites are today. And no matter how advanced artificial intelligence becomes, some jobs are always likely to be better done by humans, notably those involving empathy or social interaction.
Studies such as the 2013 Oxford study that found that 47 percent of Americans job could be lost due to automation are examining the issue from a static point of view.. Certainly there will be jobs lost from automation and artificial intelligence, but workers will eventually transition to the new jobs that will ensue from automation and artificial intelligence.
5. It could take years for jobs to be displaced by automation and artificial intelligence. A McKinsey Global Institute study found that 50 percent of current jobs could be displaced by automation by 2055, but the margin of error is 20 years due to “economic trends, labor market dynamics, regulations and social attitudes,” per The New York Times. Even if there is a messy transition in the labor market due to automation and artificial intelligence, there will be plenty of time for the workforce to adjust. It always has; there’s no reason to think that this time will be any different.