Thirty-eight percent of United States jobs are at risk of automation by the early 2030s, according to a report from PwC released last month. In contrast, the risks for Germany, the UK, and Japan are lower, at 35%, 30%, and 21%, respectively.
The firm says the risks are highest in transportation, storage, manufacturing, wholesale, and retail but lowest in healthcare and social work.
Fearing the worst, some Silicon Valley investors think it’s unfair to expect society to adapt to increasing automation without helping people whose jobs are at risk, according to Tomio Geron in The Wall Street Journal.
He quotes Matt Ocko, managing partner at Data Collective, as saying, “You can’t simply command a welder who just lost his job and has a family of four to become an AI TensorFlow expert. If you lose your job, you don’t have the capital to invest in retraining. You can’t send yourself to MIT while your kids are starving.”
One solution, according to Ocko, involves tax credits for people thrown out of work that would let them own the robots that displaced them. (As previously reported, Bill Gates thinks robots should pay income tax. If displaced workers own the robots, the robots’ income-tax liability could offset the value of the tax credits.)
Ocko isn’t alone in his concerns. “Several venture investors support public-policy initiatives or moves by private industry to head off the threat of a dystopian future in which human labor is devalued or made superfluous,” writes Geron.
Universal basic income, or UBI, is a commonly floated idea, but Ocko suggests UBI may not give people sufficient meaning in their lives.
Tim Hwang, a partner at legal technology firm Robot Robot & Hwang LLP, suggests automation insurance to which private industry could contribute, avoiding a large government program like UBI, Geron writes.
Education is also key—PwC found that in the UK, the risk of displacement is 12% for those with an undergraduate degree or higher but 46% for those with just a GSCE-level education or lower. (The report is UK-centric because it is part of the firm’s UK Economic Outlook.)
In the United States, writes Geron, “Rep. Doris Matsui has proposed funding to retrain displaced automated workers into science and technology jobs and to forgive up to $100,000 in student loans for recent grads to train those displaced workers.”
Geron also writes, “Not surprisingly, some of the most active venture backers of automation and AI tend to be more optimistic about the technology’s effects on society.”
Indeed, the PwC report acknowledges that automation technologies will create some totally new jobs, so the net impact on total employment is unclear. Further, the report notes, “Average pre-tax incomes should rise due to the productivity gains, but these benefits may not be evenly spread across income groups.”
Geron quotes Vishal Harpalani, founder of Automation VC, as saying his companies make lives better by making services—such as dermatology, security, property management, and medical diagnostics—cheaper.
“You’re talking an almost 10x decrease in price for services like that,” Geron quotes Harpalani as saying. “That’s happening in every single service: legal, financial, security. Prices are going to drop so substantially that people who couldn’t see a dermatologist will have one that’s software-enabled.”
Geron concludes his article by quoting Roy Bahat of Bloomberg Beta as saying, “My big message is: if you care, look at the present. There are plenty of forms of work society needs: elder care, teachers. You don’t need to look to the future. Just solve that now.”
