Robots: stealing our jobs or solving labour shortages?

From fast food to farming, Covid-19 has accelerated the rise of the worker robots. This in
turn will put more jobs at risk and makes the need to reframe society ever more urgent
Martin Ford Sat 2 Oct 2021 Last modified on Tue 5 Oct 2021

As the coronavirus pandemic enveloped the world last year, businesses increasingly
turned to automation in order to address rapidly changing conditions. Floor-cleaning and
microbe-zapping disinfecting robots were introduced in hospitals, supermarkets and other
environments. Some enterprises found that, given the new emphasis on hygiene and so-
cial distancing, robotic operations offered a marketing advantage. The American fast food
chain White Castle began using hamburger-cooking robots in an effort to create “an av-
enue for reduced human contact with food during the cooking process”.

With the worst days of the pandemic hopefully now behind us, the jobs story has turned
out to be unexpectedly complicated. While overall unemployment rates remain elevated,
both the US and the UK are experiencing widespread worker shortages, focused espe-
cially in those occupations that tend to offer gruelling work conditions and relatively low
pay. Even as a quarter of a million of British workers who held jobs in 2019 remain unem-
ployed, job vacancies are up 20% from pre-pandemic levels as employers struggle to fill
many positions. The reasons behind the worker shortages are not entirely clear. A com-
mon assumption is that extended payments to furloughed workers allowed people to re-
main out of the workforce. However, evidence from a number of US states that moved to
discontinue unemployment benefits early suggests that the extended payments may not
have played a major role. Many workers may have simply reassessed their willingness to
do difficult and often unrewarding jobs in return for low pay. In the UK, Brexit has greatly
exacerbated the situation. At least 200,000 EU nationals, primarily from eastern Europe,
who once filled roles in areas such as agriculture, transportation and logistics, have left the
country and may never return.

All of this has created a powerful incentive for businesses to invest in automation as a way
to adapt to the worker shortage. As British farms confront the absence of seasonal work-
ers who once flooded in from eastern Europe, interest in agricultural robots is growing. The
UK-based startup Small Robot Company, for example, has developed two robots capable
of killing weeds in wheat fields while cutting down dramatically on the use of chemical pes-
ticides. The first robot autonomously prowls a wheat field, and with precision and patience
that no human could match analyses each individual wheat plant using several cameras,
mapping the exact locations where weeds are beginning to encroach. Once this data has
been collected, a second, somewhat frightening, five-armed robot follows, killing the
weeds by administering a powerful electric shock.

Another startup company, Xihelm, which received venture funding from the UK govern-
ment in 2018, has built a robot capable of harvesting fragile fruits and vegetables in green-
houses. The robot can, for example, carefully pick tomatoes after using artificial intelli-
gence to identify only the ripest fruit. In the US, where the worker shortage has hit the
restaurant industry especially hard, the White Castle chain has introduced french fry auto-
mation to work alongside its new hamburger robots, while the national restaurant chain
Sweetgreen acquired a startup company that provides robotic kitchen technology. McDon-
ald’s restaurants in the Chicago area are experimenting with an artificial intelligence-pow-
ered voice system that can process customer orders in drive-throughs.
The overall impact of artificial intelligence and robotics on the job market is likely to
be significant

There can be no doubt that the pandemic and the associated worker shortage are acceler-
ating the drive toward deploying artificial intelligence, robotics and other forms of automa-
tion. In the UK, the trend is being further amplified as Brexit’s impact on the workforce be-
comes evident. However, the reality is that most of these technologies are unlikely to ar-
rive in time to offer a solution to the immediate challenges faced by employers. Xihelm’s
tomato-picking robot, for example, remains in the testing phase; the machines are not yet
generally available for purchase. Some of the most critical worker shortages the UK are in
transportation and logistics. By one estimate, the country is currently short of at least
100,000 truck drivers. As has been widely publicised, this has led to shortages of every-
thing from petrol to McDonald’s milkshakes. No robots will be coming to the rescue in the
near future. While a number of startup companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are
working on self-driving trucks, the technology remains at several years away from com-
mercial viability. Add time for governments to craft the necessary regulations or simply to
get the public to accept the idea of fully loaded trucks navigating local roads without a
driver at the wheel and the wait could easily be much longer.

Over the course of a decade or more, however, the overall impact of artificial intelligence
and robotics on the job market is likely to be significant and in some specific areas the
technologies may lead to dramatic change within the next few years. And many workers
will soon confront the reality that the encroachment of automation technology will not be
limited to the often low-paying and less desirable occupations where worker shortages are
currently concentrated. Indeed, many of the jobs that employers are struggling to fill may
prove to be highly resistant to automation. At the same time, better-paying positions that
workers definitely want to retain will be squarely in the sights as AI and robotics continue
their relentless advance.

Consider, for example, the distribution centres run by Amazon or the online grocery retailer
Ocado. As online shopping has accelerated, these warehouses have become an employ-
ment bright spot, providing jobs for many thousands of workers. Less than a decade ago,
facilities of this kind would have been animated by hundreds of workers continuously rov-
ing between tall shelves containing thousands of different items. The workers would have
included “stowers” tasked with taking newly arrived inventory and storing it on shelves and
“pickers” responsible for retrieving items in order to fulfil customer orders. The activity
would have been a continuous mad scramble, perhaps resembling an especially disor-
dered anthill, in which a typical worker might trek a dozen or more miles over the course of
a single shift.

In today’s most advanced distribution centres, this bustling motion has become almost a
mirror image of itself. It is now the workers who remain stationary – doing the picking and
stowing – while the inventory shelves speed about, conveyed between destinations by fully
autonomous robots. Amazon now operates more than 200,000 of these robots at its distri-
bution centres worldwide, while Ocado employs more than 1,000 at a single facility in An-
dover in Hampshire.

Companies such as Amazon and Ocado continue to employ massive human workforces
largely because the robots are – so far – unable to perform the picking and stowing opera-
tions that require human-level visual perception and dexterity. This is certain to change,
however. Both companies, as well as number of well-funded startups, are working on
building more dexterous robots. Indeed, Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, speaking at a confer-
ence in 2019, said: “I think [robotic] grasping is going to be a solved problem in the next 10
years.” In other words, a great many of the hundreds of thousands of workers now em-
ployed in these facilities are likely to become redundant in the relatively near future. And
as robots advance, they will likewise be deployed ever more frequently in restaurants, su-
permarkets and other environments.

More educated white-collar workers will quickly discover that they are by no means ex-
empt from the rise of AI. Any job that involves the relatively routine analysis or manipula-
tion of information is likely to fall in whole or in part to software automation. Some of the
world’s largest media organisations, for example, already use AI systems that automati-
cally generate news articles, while intelligent legal algorithms analyse contracts and pre-
dict the outcome of litigation. AI is even beginning to demonstrate a talent for routine com-
puter programming. In many cases, knowledge work will prove to be easier and less ex-
pensive to automate than lower-paid work that requires physical manipulation. When the
job is focused purely on working with information, there is no requirement for an expensive
mechanical robot and no need to surmount the difficult technical challenges involved in
replicating human dexterity or mobility.

More educated white-collar workers will quickly discover that they are by no means
exempt from the rise of AI

In the long run, as advancing technology shapes our post-pandemic future, the workforce
will increasingly be divided into winners and losers. The losers will be those who focus
largely on routine, predictable tasks, regardless of whether these activities are physical or
intellectual in nature, and often independent of education level. The winners are likely to
fall into one of three general groups. First, skilled trade workers, such as plumbers and
electricians, who do work that requires dexterity, mobility and problem-solving ability in
highly unpredictable settings. The same is true for a care worker who assists an elderly
person with his or her daily needs. This type of work is far beyond the capability of any ex-
isting robot and these jobs will remain safe for the foreseeable future. Second, those work-
ers whose occupations require the development of deep, sophisticated relationships with
other people will be relatively safe. This might include caring roles, such as nursing, or
business or educational occupations that require complex human interactions. While AI is
making progress in this arena – for example, there are already chatbots that can provide
rudimentary mental health support – it is likely to be a long time before machines can form
truly meaningful relationships with humans. The final category includes intellectual work
that is creative or activities that are otherwise genuinely non-routine and unpredictable in
nature. For these workers, artificial intelligence will be likely to amplify, rather than replace,
their efforts. Within many professions, a winner-take-all scenario might unfold; the most
creative individuals will rise to the top, while those focused on more routine activities will
face a growing threat from automation.

The best advice for individuals is to transition from routine, predictable work and towards
one of these winning categories. There are real questions, however, about the viability of
this advice when applied to society as a whole. Historically, advancing technology has
tended to drive most workers from routine work in one sector to routine work in another. As
agriculture became mechanised, workers moved from farms to factories, but they contin-
ued to do routine work. Later, workers moved to routine jobs in the service sector. The rise
of artificial intelligence will require an unprecedented transition in which a large fraction of
the workforce will have to find and adapt to roles that are genuinely non-routine. It is un-
clear whether a sufficient number of these jobs will be created – and, even if they are,
many workers will likely lack the inherent talents and personality traits required to take on
creative or relationship-based roles.

Designing a society that can adapt to the rise of artificial intelligence and allow everyone to
thrive as these changes unfold is likely to be one of our most significant challenges in the
coming years and decades. It will require an emphasis on retraining and education for
those workers who can realistically undertake the necessary transition, as well as an im-
proved safety net – and perhaps an entirely new social contract – for those who will in-
evitably be left behind.

• Martin Ford is the author of Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence
Will Transform Everything, published on 30 September (Basic Books, £20).