Will machines kill jobs?

By Yoon Ja-young

When Alpha Go, the artificial intelligence (AI) program by Google, defeated Go champion Lee Se-dol, many Koreans were shocked. Among the questions that followed such as "How should we live?" or "What will the future be like?" the most immediate concern was whether the fourth industrial revolution led by AI will deprive humans of jobs.

There have been dismal scenarios. At the Davos Forum held in January, experts expected 7.1 million jobs to disappear in developed countries by 2020 due to the fourth industrial revolution while 2 million new jobs will be created. Administrative and routine white-collar office functions are at the risk of being decimated while computer and mathematical and architecture and engineering related fields will likely see growth.

Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, professors at Oxford University, estimate that 47 percent of the jobs in the United States are in the "high risk" category of being replaced by computerization in the next decade or two.

What is notable about anticipations by forecasters is that even the professions that Korean parents have wanted their children to attain, such as lawyers, accountants, doctors, and financial experts, are also facing risks. In the United Kingdom, a chatbot developed by a teenager, which the developer calls a robot lawyer, was in the spotlight for helping drivers get tens of thousands of parking tickets overturned. Watson, an AI doctor developed by IBM, is already assisting human doctors. When even the highest professions are at risk, what can humans do better than AI?

Lessons from the past

While dismal scenarios predict that humans will go jobless, some experts don't agree. Professor Lee Min-hwa at KAIST says that humankind could learn from previous industrial revolutions to get a hint of the future.

The professor points out that there is no evidence that technological innovation has decreased jobs in human history. "The historic lesson from the first, the second and the third revolutions is that technological innovations do change the form of industry but they do not decrease the total jobs," he said.

"Jobs that confront technological advancement disappeared, but there were new jobs that appeared in the new market created by technological advancement," he explained.

There were Luddites in the 19th century, but the increasing productivity at factories prompted a productivity revolution in agriculture and provided people with necessities for their livelihoods at cheaper prices. "Most of the rural population, which accounted for well over 80 percent of the total population, moved to urban areas. Now, the agricultural population is only 2 percent of the U.S. population. In the first and the second industrial revolutions the work performed by 80 percent of the population was taken over by only one percent of the population, thanks to technological innovation. But it provided new jobs for the other 79 percent," he notes.

Following the third industrial revolution, or the information revolution, typists and some jobs at factories disappeared. However, the IT service industries emerged en masse to absorb the workforce. He cited a U.S. statistic, which showed that two thirds of the manufacturing jobs moved to the service sector through the 50-year-period since 1960. The productivity per work hour rose 108 percent and salaries rose 85 percent while work hours decreased. The birth of machines and IT increased productivity, but the increase in market demand has been bigger than that.

"The industrial revolutions created new demand by pulling up the quality of life through higher productivity, instead of curtailing jobs," he notes.

Experts also cite Moravec's paradox, a principle articulated by Hans Moravec in the 1980s. He wrote "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or play checkers, but difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility." For instance, recognizing a dog as a dog is an extremely difficult task for AI, requiring enormous computational resources. High-level reasoning, meanwhile, is easy. It means that mutual cooperation, not mutual exclusion, is desirable for AI and humans. That is why experts pick the most probable of the scenarios to be the ones in which humans and AI will coexist, and that a new individually-tailored market will open.

"The fourth industrial revolution will not decrease jobs. It will only lead to changes in the job sector as did the previous industrial revolutions. Countries that were at the forefront of these changes rose as powerhouses after the revolutions," Professor Lee said, advising that Korea should maximize its use of AI to enhance productivity and create new "fourth jobs."

"Future is not what you anticipate but what you make," he says.

Cho Won-young, a researcher at the Software Policy & Research Institute, recently released a report on what new jobs will be created by the fourth industrial revolution. Software industries, related with technology development, support and use of software, will of course provide opportunities, with smart cars, virtual reality, 3D printing, IoT and cloud computing cited as five promising sectors.

He expects 260,000 new jobs to be created in these sectors by 2025. "Instead of fearing the disappearance of jobs, we need to create new jobs by actively using the technology," he said.

Kim Ki-sun, an associate fellow at the Korea Labor Institute, meanwhile, says that the society should be prepared for the negative impact that the inevitable changes in industrial and labor surroundings will bring about.

"The effect of digitalization isn't limited to whether our jobs will disappear or not. It is expected to bring in major changes to the way we work," he said. Kim cited a survey which showed 70.3 percent saying they work extra hours or during weekends due to smart devices. "The smart devices are blurring the border between work and rest," he said, pointing out that digitalization could weigh on workers in unexpected ways.

"As history shows, it is up to us how to cope with the changes and reshape labor," he said. Kim stressed that coping well with the changes incurred by digitalization will lead to a stronger competitive edge while there should not be further burdens or sacrifices for workers. "Efforts must continue to secure the dignity of jobs and labor."