“The Robots Won’t Cause Massive Unemployment This Time, Either: The Cognitive Asymmetry of Creative Destruction,” an article by Andrew McAfee (Principal Research Scientist, MIT), looks into why human jobs, in particular, remain irreplaceable with automation and the increased development of artificial intelligence (AI). Using translators as an example, the article indicates that even though machine translation has gone a long way, humans remain important in tasks requiring interpreting context, ensuring accuracy, and then communicating with clients. The “O-Ring” model demonstrates how even small human mistakes at vital tasks serve to spoil the entire job, hence making human oversight indispensable.
Leaving routine work to automation, higher-order tasks require human ingenuity–dealing with ambiguity or cultural subtlety. But the better technology gets, the more critical humans become in performing tasks that are complex in nature. For example, translators perform so much more these days than mere translations; they also project manage, clean up information, and ensure that the product is what it should be. This makes them all the more important as machines take over the basic functions.
McAfee points to historical cases, such as ATMs and radiologists, where job loss was foreseen but never came to be; in fact, jobs increased because technology could not master the nuances of all tasks. This, therefore, would mean that with automation, though some tasks decrease, new and more specialized human roles will open up.
The core argument here is that AI and robot-driven mass unemployment is overhyped. Evidence can be traced in the U.S. labor market, where demand for human labor has remained consistent despite massive technological advances over decades. Jobs are changing, not quite vanishing at variously predicted rates. Where the technologies for translation are getting better and cheaper, the demand is upward, with human translators continuing to be in demand, though in different capacities.
While AI and automation are augmenting productivity in the long run, it is not without human intervention. Humans remain irreplaceable in overseeing, refining, and fine-tuning these automated jobs on a continuous basis for their applicability in the workplace.