Robots and Artificial Intelligence: The Impact on Jobs

— February 10, 2017

Finally, robotic beings world rule the world.


OK, not really. But, robots and artificial intelligence are certainly having a major impact right now on the global workforce.


 robotics


In her most recent LinkedIn Pulse piece, March Senior Vice President Juliana Allen summarized statistics from a new McKinsey report, which shows that robotics will have its most profound impact in industries with highly structured or predictable environments. Data collection and processing are also impacted. The upshot is that up to 51 perfect of activities in the US economy could be affected by robotics, representing almost $ 2.7 billion in wages.


Those findings touch on a common public fear: that robots and automation will replace human jobs. The opposite argument is that automation simply frees up humans for more interesting work. For example, March VP Meredith L. Eaton wrote last year about the growing use of automation in journalism, in which systems automatically turn investment data into finance news stories for publications like CNBC and Fox Business.


That describes a much more symbiotic relationship with robots, since actual journalists theoretically benefit from spending less time on rote stories and more time on interesting reporting.


But, what other larger impacts could emerging tech have on society? This week on Hacks and Flacks, we asked whether AI and personal robotics could further shrink economic opportunities for the middle class, thereby leaving fewer people in an actual position to actually buy all these new products.



These are just a few of the debates that robotic and artificial intelligence creators have to wrestle with every day. As a business in this industry, how should you communicate the value of your technologies without exacerbating these very valid worries? It’s a challenge that tech PR pros will have to account for in the years to come.



 

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