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Rise of robots

July 7, 2017 | Expert Insights

Scientists at the University of California Berkeley have created a robot that has learnt to pick up virtually any object. The way the robot understands the world is through its vision and it can also construct models using Lego pieces. Nearly 60% of custom home can be built inside a warehouse and shipped on a standard flatbed truck to its destination for installation.

The prediction

The fear that robots will steal all the jobs might fit a classic script. Nearly 500 years ago, Queen Elizabeth I cited the same reason when she denied an English inventor named William Lee a patent for an automated knitting contraption. “I have too much regard for the poor women and unprotected young maidens who obtain their daily bread by knitting to forward an invention which, by depriving them of employment, would reduce them to starvation,” she told Lee, according to one account of the incident. The lack of patent didn’t ultimately stop factories from adopting the machine.

Two hundred years later, Lee’s invention, still being vilified as a jobs killer, was among the machines destroyed by protestors during the Luddite movement in Britain. More than 100 hundred years after that, though computers had replaced knitting machines as the latest threat to jobs, the fear of technology’s impact on employment was the same.

Analysis

Having said this, automation is the new norm in sectors like engineering, manufacturing, automobiles, IT and banking. As automation adoption rises, there will be a run on all labour intensive jobs.

Low skill and high transaction jobs will be mostly affected as automation takes away their jobs.

At the end of the Industrial Revolution, about half of American workers were still employed in the agricultural sector. There was a fear that these workers were lose their livelihood. It did not happen.

Assessment

Our assessment is that, the case of robots might be a little different. Artificial intelligence handles insurance claims and basic bookkeeping & managing investment portfolios. Human labour must reengineer themselves to beat the automation apocalypse. It may be too early to conclude.