Every year, more and more jobs disappear to the rise of robot automation. Could your's be next?
of people dislike robots within the workplace
of bookkeepers will be replaced by robots
of manufacturing output has increased with a decrease of manufacturing jobs
Robotic Automation is the use of software (optionally with hardware) to meet a task with greater efficiency compared to that of a human. Companies around the globe are taking advantage of robotic automation to ensure their businesses are running at an ideal speed while saving costs due to rising labour costs.
Rising labor costs and greater demands for efficiency and quality is causing robotic automation to gain more and more traction for industrial use. The increase of industrial robots is exponential and is expanding as technology advances allowing for lower-cost solutions. Whilst this is a positive for companies as they don’t have to pay for as many skilled workers this also means that the workers are losing jobs due to robots taking their place. This raises some ethical issues when it comes to pushing workers out of their jobs which in turn may make it harder for them to find a job in the same industry. Robotic automation would also require more power consumption which indirectly affects the environment.
‘Forrester’ predicts that RPA (Robotic Process Automation) will take over low-value repetitive tasks. In 2018, RPA will replace or change around 311,000 office and administrative positions and 260,000 sales related positions in the US.
Any repetitive or simple task is a candidate for robotic manufacturing. Robots can achieve tasks that may be too dangerous or in a hard to reach area for humans. The technology for robots is constantly evolving; sensory systems and machine learning allow robots to adapt to changes in the task allowing for more complex tasks to be performed.
In a workplace environment, several aspects could be replaced by machines. Systems such as advanced robotics designed to do a specific task or a program designed to emulate a specific thought process could be used to replace jobs of people. This has already been implemented in the workplace, especially in factories and farms. This work requires little to no education and consists of repetitive work which robotics can replicate perfectly with consistency and efficiency. Operations such as farming are replaced with machines consisting of blades and belts in order to swiftly cut up and collect crops with ease.
Digital systems are not always physical however. In certain workplaces, businesses are starting to implement software with the capability of managing and controlling a set of human staff. Programs coupled with AI can gain the ability to search the web for freelancers and assign them tasks to do in order to achieve business wishes such as designing a website. This program can learn through feedback on reliable freelancers and use this information to check up on and manage staff with ease which could replace a human manager job. Operations such as farming and factories however need physical digital system as they work with tangible products.
There are several stakeholders involved such as the companies who own the robots, the government, the manufacturers of the robots and the workforce.
After Collecting 19 responses from a state selective school, we were able to determine what the future gerneration thinks of the possible introduction of robots automation into their future careers.
Through careful analysis of the graphs, we can conclude how the overall opinion on the introduction of robots into the workplace is mixed. The radar chart and the middle chart demonstrate the even split with people equally within the far right or left side of the spectrum.
With the use of pivot charts, we can also conclude how the data is distributed. People who plan to go down finance, medicine seem to be evenly distributed on whether they would be comfortable working with robots while people who plan to go down science seem to be happier without the introduction of robots. Other industries participants are interested in such as Army or Entertainer don't seem to be alarmed by the introduction of robots into their workplace.
Other observations that could be made are how people under Science agree that robots will affect their industry while people under Medicine have an even split. The average comfortability was 3.2 which is around the middle, implying people are still not sure what impact robots would make in their industry.
