Over the next year the world’s biggest online retailer will create hundreds of jobs for humans at two new British distribution centres. It will also create about 6,000 jobs for robots. It would be easy to bracket these automatons with older devices familiar from car assembly lines, but it would be wrong. The non-human labour at Amazon’s new warehouses in Dunstable and Doncaster will move like daleks, interact like bees, shift payloads like forklift trucks and follow long and tortuous itineraries like the humans they replace. A growing weight of research suggests that these tireless shelf-pickers are not the rearguard of the last technological revolution, but the vanguard of the next.
Robots are coming, not as gimmicks and sci-fi fantasies, but as colleagues and competitors. The capabilities of robotics and the advanced software behind it are rising so fast, and their cost is falling so rapidly, that they are poised to transform the workplace of the world’s advanced economies within a decade. Countries that adopt them and adapt to them quickly will see surges in produc- tivity. Britain is well placed to be among them, but only if government grasps the scale of the challenge and trains workers for the shrinking range of complex tasks that robots cannot handle.
The House of Lords’ select committee on digital skills estimates that 35 per cent of jobs in Britain could be automated within 20 years. More recent studies by Deloitte and the Boston Consulting Group forecast a similar invasion of the world of work — in half the time. These estimates are based on the assumption that automation will move rapidly from blue collar to white collar work. Anyone who doubts them should bear in mind that this encroachment is already happening.
Clerical and administrative workers were first in line, as those made redundant by online portals at government agencies such as HMRC and the DVLA will attest. Lecturers, lawyers and accountants are next. As Richard and Daniel Susskind note in The Future of the Professions, published next week, more students sign up for Harvard University’s online courses in a single year than have attended the university in its 377-year history. The number of disputes resolved online by eBay each year is three times the number of lawsuits filed in the United States. The US Internal Revenue Service now accepts nearly 50 million tax returns a year prepared by individuals using specialised software rather than human accountants.
Some will argue that it is less chilling to be made redundant by the internet than by a machine that Hollywood would recognise as a robot. The effect is the same, and so is the challenge that these technologies pose to policy- makers. Just as programme trading is narrowing the range of human responsibilities in the financial markets, self-driving cars will shrink employment for taxi drivers. And robots are taking to the air. As we reported this week, pilotless planes are now being test-flown in British airspace.
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In manufacturing, experts believe the proportion of tasks carried out by robots could quintuple by 2025. The benefits to economies that embrace them fastest will include higher wages in the skilled jobs that remain the preserve of humans — such as the 50 engineering posts that Amazon will create to maintain its new robots — and medium-term productivity gains of up to 30 per cent.
Britain should be one of these economies. Our flexible labour market allows quicker adoption of new technologies than in much of Europe. Our universities are already producing the computer scientists who will programme the next generation of robots. But for the whole workforce to thrive, computer science must be as deeply embedded in our curriculums as reading. The time is rapidly approaching when the choice for blue and white collar workers alike is to know how to manipulate technology, or be manipulated by it.