Robot revolution will change world of work

University of Oxford Associate Professor in Machine Learning, Michael Osborne, addressed the conference, part of QUT's Real World Futures series, at QUT's Gardens Point campus.

Professor Osborne co-authored a groundbreaking study that predicted 47% of jobs in the US could be overtaken by computers in the next decade or two.

“Machine learning is the study of algorithms that can learn and act, and algorithms are increasingly a cheaper alternative to human work,” Professor Osborne says.

“They are replacing some of the most quintessential human activities.”

Professor Osborne says the idea of technology taking jobs was not new, pointing to the change in the agricultural workforce in the US as an example.

The research finds jobs highly susceptible to automation include health and aged care workers, data entry keyers, referees and umpires and even waiters and waitresses. More secure roles included members of the clergy, choreographers and funeral attendants.

Three key “bottlenecks to automation” – creativity, social intelligence and perception – would ensure humans were still needed.

“What unites those bottlenecks is the fact that humans possess a very deep reservoir of tacit human knowledge about the society and culture we find ourselves in,” Professor Osborne says.

“For example, for creative let's say we're trying to write a hit song. It's relatively easy to design an algorithm that is able to churn out songs ad infinitum, but it's very difficult to teach that algorithm the difference between a good song and a bad song.

“Because as humans, we draw on an enormous variety of cultural cues from over our lifetime and it's difficult for us to get that into code.”

Professor Osborne says the “most alarming” aspect of the study finds those earning higher salaries and those holding at least a bachelor degree were the least likely to be affected by job automation.

“Simply put the more skilled you are, the more secure you are from automation,” he says.

“To me this was probably the most alarming finding in our study because it suggests that the people least well equipped to move into new forms of employment are those who are going to feel the burden of automation resting most heavily upon their shoulders.

“It really does raise some concerns that questions of inequality we are already tackling are likely to worsen.”

The future workforce would create new jobs and industries, for example wind energy engineers and nanotechnology engineers, but it was hard to predict how many.

“We as a society are not short of challenges to tackle in the 21st century and those challenges are very much going to demand human skills, human hands, human intelligence, human empathy, all things that are not going to be readily replaced by machines.”

But it is important to “distinguish between what we can and can't expect” from robots.

“For a long time people have been forecasting that something like Daisy the robotic housemaid was just around the corner but actually I think that's very far from the truth,” he says.

“Reproducing the full faculty of human fingers and human eyes is still a long way away.”