NOW ILLEGALS ARE TAKING OUR JOBS, NEXT IT WILL BE ROBOTS

Robots Are Coming for Your Job Sooner Than You Think. Will you be prepared?

By Caroline Thompson

VICE News
September 27, 2017

Back in March, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sat down with Axios to talk about his role in the newly formed Trump administration. Mnuchin said a lot of outlandish things during the course of this interview, from claiming the president had "perfect genes" to proposing we "look at putting Trump on the $1,000 bill." Most of this was the standard 2017 circus nonsense we've come to expect from those in the president's inner circle. But one exchange in particular should give American workers pause.

Midway through the conversation, interviewer Mike Allen asked Mnuchin about the threat of mass job loss from automation and artificial intelligence. A previous guest, Mark Cuban, was very focused on how it might affect the workforce. "What's your take on that?" Allen asked.

Mnuchin smirked. "I think we're, like, so far away from that," he said. "It's not even on my radar screen."

"How far away?" asked Allen. "Seven more years?"

"Seven more years?" Mnuchin laughed. "I think it's 50 to 100 more years!"

Curious, considering the conversation happened just a few short months after Uber began testing self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, and a year after the ride-sharing company began a similar test in Arizona. It also happened after Amazon opened its first prototype grocery store in Seattle, which requires zero human interaction, and may well be a possible indicator of what could come to pass at Whole Foods, which the online giant recently acquired. The number of retail jobs lost in the past year alone (6,100) is more than the total number of people employed by the coal industry, a darling of the current administration.

Contrary to Mnuchin's beliefs, automation and AI-related job loss isn't 50 or 100 years in the future. It's already happening. And his comments suggest we aren't prepared.

"Nobody believes this is coming soon, and nobody believes this is going to happen to their job," said Michael Solomon, co-founder and managing partner of 10x Management, a talent agency for high-performing software engineers, coders, and designers. "People assume the only positions that will be affected by automation are jobs like factory work, agriculture, driving, and other blue-collar jobs. But that's just automation—they ignore the artificial intelligence side, which is what they should be worried about."

Solomon is worried, and the numbers back him up. He spends much of his spare time trying to get the word out about what he sees as an imminent job loss apocalypse, recently launching the Day After Labor, a website dedicated to bringing "the topic of impending net job loss due to advances in technology to the forefront of social and policy discussions."

According to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, 38 percent of American jobs are at risk of becoming obsolete within the next 15 years, and it's not just blue-collar work that's going away.

"AI is going to eliminate a massive amount of white collar jobs," Solomon said. "Loan officers are going to be made entirely obsolete by this technology, because a machine is much better at calculating risk than a human is. When you really start to look into these things, you start to see this is going to impact everyone. This is going to end the careers of stock brokers and lawyers and many white-collar professionals."

AI is already being tested and perfected throughout industries many would imagine are immune. With each passing day, bots are getting better at writing the news, diagnosing obscure illnesses, scanning legal briefs, and even composing full orchestral symphonies.

Solomon isn't the only one who sees the potential for mass joblessness on the horizon. Just before the end of his term, President Obama's top economic and scientific advisers released Artificial Intelligence, Automation and the Economy, which took a deep dive into what emerging technologies might mean for the future of labor. That report focuses heavily on automated vehicles (called AVs), and estimates "2.2 to 3.1 million existing part- and full-time US jobs may be threatened or substantially altered by AV technology" within the next two decades.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I wonder if Trump can come up with some kind of wall to keep the robots out.