In a survey with respect to Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, and the future of jobs, Arron Smith and Janna Anderson (2014) collected 1896 experts of technology’s responses and attempted to find out whether the impact of AI and robotics on jobs by 2025 will be negative or not. The statistical findings were that about 48% of experts were concerned about the displacement of jobs by robots, and others stated confidently that AI will create more jobs than that it may destroy.
In recent decades, robots with AI can finish some pre-defined works instead of human workers. Those robots possess the ability as much as workers. Some people start to worry about job losses and worse wealth inequality. Even some governments have posted anti-AI statements in public. For instance, after the meeting among some scientists who were against AI and President Obama, a federal report pointed out that “AI could threaten up to 47 percent of jobs among 702 occupations in two decades” (Berger, 2016). This indicates that if these threatened jobs result in job replacement, millions of Americans have to make a meager living and face challenging economic problems at least in a short term.
However, I found an interesting thing that existing workers are insufficient for the demand. In Stephen Moore’s report, America’s worker shortage: One million and counting, he asserted that one of the most serious problems of the U.S. economy for companies nowadays is finding workers when plenty of working-age people are out of the labor force. He wrote, “There are at least one million jobs that go begging day after day if only employers could find workers to fill them”. For example, U.S. Gulf Coast refiners plan to do repairs in 2017, but they are facing a great labor shortage; and it is difficult to find even the lowest-skilled workers. Next year, planned maintenance may cost 1.26 billion dollars, according to Industrial Information Resources (IIR), a department detecting labor supply for refiners and other industrial companies. It is no doubts that repairing is a huge cost. However, refiners have to spend even more money to interest and retain employees, and engage skilled workers from another area to finish works. Obviously, it is inefficient and expensive. Jarrett Renshaw (2017) pointed out that “That’s going to complicate scheduling and even extend outages, a vice president of IIR said”. Find more information from this link: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-refineries-labor-analysis-idUSKBN14I0FAAt this time, automatic systems and controlled robots can displace some of the skilled blue-collar workers, brings more labor supply and satisfies the demand of the industry. AI plays an important role in meeting the worker shortage by offering labors and cutting costs. What do you think? Do we really need to worry about the unemployment caused by AI?