Opinion: Automation is here, but why are there still so many jobs?

Automation has been happening for over 200 years. So far, it has created a lot more work than it replaced

Opinion: Automation is here, but why are there still so many jobs?
Automation has been happening for over 200 years. So far, it has created a lot more work than it replaced. Will Industry 4.0 be different?

Historically machines have created far more jobs than they have replaced, but this time will be different. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning and the Internet of Things (IoT) – in short, Industry 4.0 – machines are quickly getting better at performing both manual and cognitive tasks without much human intervention. In the past machines have augmented human labour. Now, they are replacing it.

An increasing number of studies show a positive correlation between automation and jobs – not only in the past, but also under the conditions of Industry 4.0.

According to Nicolette Barnard, Head of HR at Siemens Australia who will be speaking at Digitalize 2017, “while technology continues to transform tasks within jobs, the occupation itself will remain and not disappear”.

This does not mean that there will be a smooth transition. In the middle-income bracket, where most people work, employees with the right skills for Industry 4.0 are upwardly mobile – the value of their work increases, but there is a severe shortage of such workers. Globally, supply will fall short by 40 million in 2020, according to McKinsey. Concurrently, workers who lack the right skill sets are facing downward pressure.

In the past five years, a number of mass open online courses (MOOC) have begun to address both problems. They are enabling employees to obtain new qualifications even as they continue to work.

One of most reputable, Coursera, currently has 24 million registered students. Its founder, Andrew Ng, is a Stanford scholar with a background in AI. “As AI researchers,” he said in an interview with The Economist, “we have an ethical responsibility to address the problems we create.”

On-the-job-training is equally important. Apprentices at the Siemens campus in Germany, for example, learn to utilise augmented reality (AR) in order to work alongside cooperative robots. They learn to check components digitally, and to test code for automation systems by utilising virtual models. Clearly, this goes far beyond traditional skill sets and training methods.

Jobs are changing
When manufacturing merges with information and communication technology, workers will have new sets of tasks. Their jobs are increasingly focused on planning and coordinating, supervising and decision making. To the extent that their work remains manual, it will increasingly be augmented by machines such as collaborative robots.

However, automation is not restricted to manufacturing industries. It plays increasingly important roles elsewhere. In medicine, physicians applying AI to diagnostics can improve outcomes significantly. In recent tests, some forms of automated image recognition performed up to 50% better at classifying malignant tumours when analysing X-rays and CT-scans than a team of expert human radiologists. The machines had a false negative rate (where a cancer is missed) of zero, compared to 7% for the human team.

The current wave of automation and digitalization does not only change individual jobs. It changes the entire work process, whether in services, research and development, sourcing, production, or distribution. In short, connectivity trumps hierarchies.

Digital twin
Merging the virtual and “real” aspects of manufacturing is the key to Industry 4.0, and nothing exemplifies this better than the digital twin – a virtual representation of a product down to the last technical detail.

This pairing of the virtual and physical worlds allows analysis of data and monitoring of systems to head off problems before they occur, prevent downtime, develop new opportunities and plan for the future by using simulations. The ultimate aim is to create, test, and build products in a virtual environment – so that physical manufacturing only begins when the product already performs.

In other words, digital twins, and Industry 4.0 at large, give productivity a boost.

Learn more at Siemens’ annual digitalization conference, Digitalize 2017, which will be held in Sydney on Wednesday 30 August 2017. For registration and more details see https://www.siemensdigitalize2017.com/ 
 

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