The digital
future of work: What will automation change?
Rapid
advances in robotics and artificial intelligence are making inroads in the
workplace, with machines carrying out physical and cognitive activities. What
will this mean for employment?
Technology experts and economists are engaged in a growing debate about the effect
of automation technologies in the workplace. Some “techno-pessimists” are
concerned about the mass destruction of jobs, while “techno-optimists” see
considerable productivity gains for the economy that will in turn help create
new work opportunities. Technology in the past has tended to create more jobs
than it destroys, at least in the long run. Could this time be different?
In this video, one in a
four-part series, experts from academia and industry join McKinsey partners in
a discussion of key issues about what automation may or may not change. The
interviews were filmed in April at the Digital Future of Work Summit in New
York, which was hosted by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) and New York
University’s Stern School of Business.
Interviewees include
NYU professors Arun Sundararajan and Vasant Dhar; Allen Blue, a cofounder of
LinkedIn; Carl Camden, former CEO of Kelly Services; Stephane Kasriel, CEO of
Upwork; McKinsey senior partner Katy George, and MGI partners Michael Chui and
Susan Lund, who convened the summit together with professor Sundararajan.
Interview transcript
Susan Lund: With today’s technology,
roughly half of the tasks that people do can be automated. That’s a staggering
figure. But just as interesting, and maybe even more important, is that only 5
percent of jobs can be entirely automated. What it means is that, increasingly,
all jobs are going to be affected. The way we work is going to shift over time
as machines and machine learning and artificial intelligence start to take over
some pieces of what we do. That will require people to adapt and change. And
jobs, occupations as we know them today, will shift.
Arun Sundararajan: There are two main dimensions
to how technology is changing work. One is that a lot of what humans used to do
is increasingly being done by machines: robots, cognitive machines, simple
software on your computer. The other side of it is digital technology is
changing how we organize work. It’s taking us from fulltime employment, which
was the predominant way of earning a living in the 20th century, toward a wide
variety of non-employment work arrangements. What’s exciting and scary at this
point is the confluence of these two forces.
What does workplace automation mean in practice?
Michael Chui: It’s clear from our research,
but also just looking at history, that people increasingly, over time, will
have to be complements to the work that machines do. Work side by side or work
with machines. We’ve certainly seen this in history, in all kinds of places.
Everywhere from the farm, where we now have gigantic machines that help harvest
and sow crops, to being in an office environment, where there’s work that we
used to do by hand or by calculator and now software helps us do it, whether
it’s spreadsheets or word processors or even more sophisticated analytics.
Going forward, we’re going to see more of these technologies which involve
robotics or artificial intelligence, again, working side by side with human
beings. Even if you’re on a shop floor or a factory floor, you’re seeing these
robots, which are now safe for humans to work alongside. Whereas traditional,
industrial robots are confined to cages because they’re incredibly dangerous
machines.
Katy George: What I think it will mean in
practice, first of all, is that many jobs will change dramatically. Some of the
tasks we do today, we’ll be able to do in a much richer way because we have the
benefit of automated support, much more insightful data analysis, real-time, et
cetera. And it will mean, in some cases, that the job designs themselves will
completely change and new jobs will be created to leverage all of the new
technology opportunities that we have.
Is this time different?
Vasant Dhar: In general, I tend to be
optimistic about human creativity and ingenuity. But I think this time around,
we’re facing some really severe challenges. People have made the case that
we’ve been worried about this previously and we needn’t have worried because
new technologies have created new opportunities for human beings. But I worry
that this time might in fact be different because we haven’t had intelligent
machines in the past that we could trust with making decisions. That was in the
domain of human beings. Machines assisted us. They helped us. But it’s
different this time. And it’s going to be very challenging.
Stephane Kasriel: This is not the first
industrial revolution. That’s why we call it the fourth. Historically, what
we’ve seen is, yes, technology changes are destroying some jobs. But net-net
they have created more opportunities, more jobs than they have destroyed. So
usually there’s a short transition period which can be very difficult for some
people. That’s why we built a safety net to allow people time to transition. Or
if they can’t transition, give them a place to retire. It seems like this
transition is not going to be fundamentally different from others.
Carl Camden: Robotics and automation as
well as supply chain management have already transformed the work place. Every
year fewer and fewer people work in jobs and more and more people work in gigs.
That trend is irreversible. It just happens that automation, the rise of apps
and so on, is speeding it up today. But it was inevitable that the jobs model
was going to collapse.
Should we be pessimistic or optimistic?
Susan Lund: No longer do bank tellers
hand out cash to customers, because there are automated teller machines.
There’s one example. But has bank teller employment gone down? No, not in the
United States. There are as many, and in fact more bank tellers, as there were
when the ATM machine was first introduced in the 1990s. But they do very
different things. They’re involved in selling customers other types of
financial products, and they’re doing what we call higher value added services.
Alan Blue: We have no idea what the
future of work really looks like. There are some threads we understand, but we
really won’t know. So the most important thing for us to do is to build a
system which allows us to be immediately responsive to changes that exist in
the workforce.
Michael Chui: One thing that we should be
worried about is whether we can adopt automation quickly enough. What we know
is, because of demographics, because of aging, we simply don’t have enough
workers, won’t have enough workers going forward, to have the type of economic
growth that we want. To be able to continue to grow GDP per capita for
countries, whether they’re developed or developing, to become more prosperous
over time. For that to happen, we actually need the machines working alongside
human beings. That means, in order for the economy to grow, we need to make
sure that we develop and adopt all of these technologies and make sure that
people are working so that the next generation will have better lives than we
do. Other things that we might worry about? For certain, these technologies are
going to displace human labor. They’re going to start doing things that people
used to do. And what’s incredibly important again, number one for the
individual workers because they need to be able to have meaningful work, but
secondly, even for the overall macro economy, we need to be able to redeploy
that labor. We talk about mass redeployment rather than mass unemployment.
That’s a tremendous challenge. How do we make sure that we find new things for
people to do, be able to pay them to do it, and also retrain them so that they
can do these new activities?
McKinsey July
2017
http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/future-of-organizations-and-work/the-digital-future-of-work-what-will-automation-change?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mgi-oth-1707&hlkid=900bdbf2da10413bbd58572a85e028c1&hctky=1627601&hdpid=f3889f06-b02f-4e3a-8a36-8d3c718408cf
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