Automation is colour blind, with advances in artificial intelligence seen to make a number of blue and white collar jobs redundant.
Economists have noted the emergence of “job polarisation” in the workforce, where middle skill jobs have declined, but low skill and high skill jobs grew.
A 2013 study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne found that 47% of US workers had jobs that were vulnerable to automation. The study further said that labourers in transport and logistics, office support, and sales and services are likely to be supplanted by “computer capital”.
Frey and Osborne concluded that machine learning will put a large portion of employment across diverse occupations at risk in the near future.
Still, another school of thought argues that the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence across enterprises will only generate new jobs.
James Bessen, an economist at the Boston University School of Law said that instead of destroying jobs, automation redefines them in ways that bring down costs and boost demand.
For example, he said that the ubiquity of automated teller machines (ATMs) might have been expected to make bank tellers extinct. Instead, having fewer tellers per bank branch made it cheaper to run a branch, thus banks were able to open more of them to respond to customer demand.
Thus, artificial intelligence is not expected to cause mass employment, but it is expected to accelerate the adoption of computer related automation, thus disrupting the job market. To cope, workers will need to learn new skills more quickly than they had to in the past.
