Merrill Lynch Bank Report: Possible Impacts of the Robotics Revolution

A new report from Merrill Lynch shows that the combination of artificial intelligence and robotics can replace a lot of work, and the era of large-scale employment is likely to end.

If you want to get rid of the story of "turning off the tire factory and the steel mill", you can try to relax by taking a look at the latest 300-page Merrill Lynch report "About the possible impact of the robot revolution."

But you may still not be assured. Although the report states the advantages of robots in terms of population aging, it also predicts that a large amount of work will be eliminated: of which, the UK accounts for 35% and the United States accounts for 47%, including white-collar jobs, because their livelihoods are taken by machines. go.

Robots produced by Shaanxi Jiuli Robot Manufacturing Co., Ltd. will be exhibited at Shanghai Technology Expo: Imaginechina / Corbis

Didn't we hear about this before? From the "Lud's" in the 19th century to the "printing union's protests against computers" in the 1980s, people have been mechanized. However, we still have a lot of new jobs born in this process.

However, there are still concerns that artificial intelligence (AI) combined with evolving robots can make reasonable inferences based on their environment and experience, and will erase a lot of work and fundamentally reshape the entire society.

"The paradigm of automation is in the field of agriculture," says Calum Chace, author of Surviving AI and Pandora's Brain. In 1900, 40% of the US workforce was engaged in agriculture. By 1960, this number was only a few percent, but the nature of people's work has changed. "But then again, in 1900, there were 21 million horses in the United States. By 1960, there were only three million left. The difference is that humans have cognitive abilities - we can learn to do new things. But As machines become smarter, machines have the same capabilities."

If human beings are like horses in AI eyes? For those who don't pay close attention to this industry, it's hard to see how robotics and artificial intelligence can be quickly combined. Last week, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a video showing a small drone passing through a forest area at 30 mph. Without a pilot, it can be avoided with only its onboard processor control. Open trees. Of course, it is far superior in performance to human-controlled drones.

MIT has also created a "robot cheetah" that can skip 40cm obstacles without help. Increasing the progress of standard computing power, processing power is roughly doubled every 18 months, but with the same computing power, chip prices are halved, you can understand why people like Chace are increasingly worried.

The drone automatically traverses a forest area

But the invasion of artificial intelligence into our daily lives will not start with the "robot cheetah." In fact, it started a long time ago; although the contact edge is small, it is far enough. A cooking system with a visual processor can determine if the burger is cooked. The restaurant can provide customers with a tablet with a menu to let people choose the service without service staff.

Lawyers often read some huge documents for the "discovery" of the trial stage, which can be handed over to the computer. A smart assistant called Amy can set up meetings automatically via email. Google announced last week that you can respond appropriately via Gmail's incoming email (you still need to react yourself).

Farther, Foxconn, which assembles equipment for Apple in Taiwan, aims to replace most of the workforce with automated systems. The Associated Press News Agency uses Automated Insights to automatically write news about sports and business. The longer you look, the more you will find that the computer is replacing more simple work. It is even harder to find the work that everyone will do.

So, how much influence does robotics and artificial intelligence have on work and society? Carl Benedikt and Frey Michael Osborne published the original paper The Future of Employment in 2013: How sensitive is computerization to the job market? - Attracting a large number of US bank reports - but Benedikt does not like to be labeled as "Doomsday Prophets."

He pointed out that even if some work is replaced, new jobs that are committed to service and people's communication will emerge in large numbers. "In the past five years, the fastest-growing profession has been related to services," he told The Observer. "The two most demanding ones are "Zumba Coach" and "Personal Coach". "

Frey observed that technology has led to the thinning of cutting-edge employment, which means that fewer and fewer people have the necessary skills to work at the cutting edge of technology. "In the 1980s, it was reported that 8.2% of the US workforce was employed in new technologies," he said. "In the 1990s, it was 4.2%. By the 2000s, we estimated that it was only 0.5%. This tells me that on the one hand, the potential of automation is expanding, but at the same time, today's technology does not create many new jobs compared with the past. opportunity."

This is where Chace is worried. "People who have artificial intelligence have everything else," he said. "This also means that human beings will be divided into a few "God" and the rest."

"I think that our best hope is how to live in a society where material is extremely satisfying, so that the machine can do all the work, and we can play."

It can be said that the above vision has already begun to emerge; a fitness program like Zumba dance is not an entertainment activity for adults? But Chace says that a lifestyle without work also means: “You have to think about an overall income” – from the basic, unconditional support of the state.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that there are quite a few social impact checks on artificial intelligence. Oxford's Frey and Osborne are committed to planning the future impact of technology; in Cambridge, columnists John Naughton and David Runciman are working on a project to predict the social impact of these changes. But technology is developing too fast, and it's hard to figure out what happened in the past, let alone predict what will happen in the future.

But some jobs may not disappear. Frey, 31, will worry that he will still have a job in 20 years? Hehe~~~~. "There must be thiophene." The academic world, at least for now, seems to be safe – at least for scholars to think so.

The goal of smartphone manufacturer Foxconn is to automate production equipment. Photograph: Pichi Chuang/Reuters

The danger of change is not poverty, but inequality.

Productivity is the secret of economic growth. In the late 18th century, the cleric and scholar Thomas Malthus made a notorious prediction: a rapid population increase can lead to pain and hunger.

But Malthus failed to foresee a dramatic technological change – from steam-powered looms to combine harvesters – where the production of food and other necessities has expanded far beyond the predicted number of hungry people. The key to economic development depends more on capital and labor investment.

With the development of robotics and artificial intelligence technology, the latest round of rapid innovation is likely to promote continuous improvement.

Led by Guy Michaels of the London School of Economics, recent research has looked at detailed data from more than a decade in 17 countries and 14 industries, and found that using robots to increase productivity and wages did not significantly disrupt work.

Automation reduces the length of time it takes to produce a product; while workers on the production line are fired, new jobs are created elsewhere, and many jobs become more creative and cleaner. So far, the fear of mass layoffs brought about by machine takeovers, and those that have always been accompanied by other great technological leap, have proved unfounded.

However, this picture that looks reassuring is also an important warning. Relatively low-tech factory workers who have been replaced by robots, few of them can be used as application developers and analysts; advances in technology have been accused of exacerbating inequality, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch believes that the future may continue This trend.

The rise of machines may indeed have enormous economic benefits; but without fine-grained management, these gains may be captured by shareholders and highly educated knowledge workers, exacerbating inequalities and chilling others.

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