“Artificial Intelligence Is The Greatest Threat To UK Employment In The Near Future.” To What Extent Do You Agree With This Statement? Provide Examples And Evidence To Support Your Arguments.

Artificial Intelligence Is The Greatest Threat To UK Employment In The Near Future

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Artificial Intelligence Is The Greatest Threat To UK Employment In The Near Future

Introduction

Technological development such as digitalization has several implications for UK labor markets. It is crucial to assess its impact on developing policies which promote effective labor market for the benefit of societies, employers, and workers as a whole. Such rapid technological innovation and progress can threaten the employment of UK in the following ways:

By changing the previous tasks of the workers.

By raising the demand for labor in jobs or industries which develop or arise due to the progress of technology.

Artificial intelligence is considered to be the area of technology which emphasizes the development of intelligent machines that react and work like humans. Industrial robots are one of the most significant types of the technology of artificial intelligence in recent times. This report discusses the effects of artificial intelligence on the rate of employment in the UK.

Description

It has been believed that technology has the ability to replace with human labor in daily tasks whether cognitive or manual but still it cannot replace human labor in some special tasks. As some researchers believe that the effects of technology lead to an increasing demand for jobs of well-paid skills which need special cognitive skills. Similarly, it also increases the demand for least-skilled low paid jobs which require special manual skills but the demand for medium-paid skill jobs decreases (Jarrahi, 2018, p.580). The researchers have named this process as job polarization. In the UK the number of jobs of higher-education like health professionals, engineers, and managers is growing while jobs of middle-education such as assembler, machine operators, and clerks are decreasing (Frey & Osborne, 2017, p.257).

The UK is considered to be the region with the most operational robots followed by China and the United States of America. The automotive, chemicals and plastic industry of UK has introduced the most number of industrial robots in the process of production. From the last two decades the usage of robots in the UK has been increased by more than 200 percent which leads to significant gains in productivity and also affected the rate of employment. According to recent research, one additional robot per thousand workers decreases the ratio of employment-to-population by 0.2-0.35 percent and wages by 0.3-0.6 percent. When the industrial robots compete with the labor force for production, it dominates with the productivity effect of the labor workforce. Smart robots affect the employment rate in the sector of manufacturing, specific in the industries which are most exposed to robots (Brougham & Haar, 2018, p.250).

Although artificial intelligence has improved the world in several ways, still there are several concerns related to the effect of artificial intelligence on workforce and employment. Many researchers are talking about several millions of unemployment in the upcoming decades in the United Kingdom due to the effect of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Automation (Makridakis, 2017, p.55).

Jobs, Roles, and Task at Risk

The monotonous task can easily be automated which can make several roles obsolete. For now, these activities and task include document classification, call center or customer care operation, content moderation, discovery, retrieval and many other tasks which are based on the automation and technology and not much dependent on human efforts. Moreover, the roles which are linked to operation and factories and production lines support replaced humans by smart and efficient robots which have the ability to move, find and navigate the desired objects or can even perform complex tasks and operations (Cath, et, al., 2018, p.515).

It has been believed that artificial intelligence is very efficient in managing complex activities which require the process of data streams, accumulated knowledge, and multiple signals in real time. There are some autonomous vehicles which can understand and capture the atmosphere and its dynamics. It can act, decide, and see in real-time towards objectives of well-defined optimization (Muller & Bostrom, 2016, p.570).

Sectors That Will Be Affected

Transportation in the UK is already in the mode of transformation which is based on the soon reality of efficient autonomous cars that will be considered safer, effective, and efficient. The demand for professional drivers for trucks, taxi, and other vehicles will be expected to decrease (Ford, 2015, p.45).

Electronic commerce will also have to face significant transformation in which fulfillment centers will become completely automated with smart robots that have the ability to navigate the space to execute the orders of the customer and collect products which need to be delivered or sent to customers automatically through autonomous cars or drones. So, the significance of physical stores network and salespersons will be shrunk (Torresen, 2018, p.75).

Even more traditional professions of the UK which are based on strong relationships of human-like legal professions will also be affected. Typical services of support in the legal context which have to do with management, knowledge extraction, comparison, summarization, discovery, classification, and document handling are considered to be the tasks which the agents of Artificial intelligence can perform efficiently (Brundage, et, al., 2018, n.p).

Example

The most significant example of artificial intelligence replacing human work is of the department of typical customer care in which hundreds of employees who works with the common mission for handling customer complaints, and requests in the best possible way. The work task of handling customer requests can be broken down in different jobs that are repeated over time and across separate kind of requests such as identification of customer, retrieval of customer history, request classification and understanding, problem mapping and identification to any solution, escalating or forwarding to any other team, retrieval of customer document, and making the final decision which is based on particular corporate policy. All of the above-mentioned tasks can be performed with the algorithms of Artificial intelligence which is proved to be more accurate, faster, cheaper, and reliable than the human's corresponding team. It has been believed that the properly trained system of artificial intelligence can understand the requests of the customer in natural language. Moreover, it also has the ability to identify the implied or mentioned entities, can estimate the intent of customer early enough, can process huge data volume, and can apply the policy of corporate sector for identifying the best decision or action for a specific case. They have the special ability to make such decisions while communicating with the customer in natural language. These technological developments need a very less percentage of humans in the team of customer care department. This process will eventually reduce the requirement for human intervention by making the system of Artificial intelligence autonomous (David, 2015, p.26).

Conclusion

So, it is concluded that the development of UK in the field of artificial intelligence is leading to the decrease in certain jobs and roles for humans, but in many cases, these artificial intelligence robots are also supporting human beings in several ways. They are empowering the human factor for performing better in managing critical and complex situations that require creative thinking and judgment. The initial disruption of technological unemployment due to the revolution of artificial intelligence can lead to the new-era of well-being, creativeness, and prosperity. The labor of UK will no need to perform limited or routine jobs. So, the government of the UK needs to think that how employment agreements and market companies should work in the era of artificial intelligence.

References

Brougham, D. and Haar, J., 2018. Smart technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and algorithms (STARA): employees’ perceptions of our future workplace. Journal of Management & Organization, 24(2), pp.239-257.

Brundage, M., Avin, S., Clark, J., Toner, H., Eckersley, P., Garfinkel, B., Dafoe, A., Scharre, P., Zeitzoff, T., Filar, B. and Anderson, H., 2018. The malicious use of artificial intelligence: forecasting, prevention, and mitigation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.07228.

Cath, C., Wachter, S., Mittelstadt, B., Taddeo, M. and Floridi, L., 2018. Artificial intelligence and the ‘good society’: the US, EU, and UK approach. Science and engineering ethics, 24(2), pp.505-528.

David, H., 2015. Why are there still so many jobs? The history and future of workplace automation. Journal of economic perspectives, 29(3), pp.3-30.

Ford, M., 2015. The rise of the robots: Technology and the threat of mass unemployment. Oneworld publications.

Frey, C.B. and Osborne, M.A., 2017. The future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerisation?. Technological forecasting and social change, 114, pp.254-280.

Jarrahi, M.H., 2018. Artificial intelligence and the future of work: Human-AI symbiosis in organizational decision making. Business Horizons, 61(4), pp.577-586.

Makridakis, S., 2017. The forthcoming Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution: Its impact on society and firms. Futures, 90, pp.46-60.

Müller, V.C. and Bostrom, N., 2016. Future progress in artificial intelligence: A survey of expert opinion. In Fundamental issues of artificial intelligence (pp. 555-572). Springer, Cham.

Torresen, J., 2018. A review of future and ethical perspectives of robotics and AI. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 4, p.75.