A New Era of Robots and (Maybe) Freedom
Tap a screen, hear the booze pour, then watch synchronized metallic arms shuffle and spin through the air. Your future bartender has arrived, and it’s brought a warning.
The Tipsy Robot in Las Vegas is the second robot bar in the world, the first appearing on a cruise ship. On the Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas, in place of servers and mixologists stand Mix and Mingle — and their offspring will soon grace the Vegas strip.
This won’t be the first, or last, time robots have replaced people on the strip. Other than the restaurants installing touch screens and others opting for conveyor belts, Las Vegas is on the brink of a major economic shift.
And we aren’t ready for it.
Accommodation and food services stands as the most susceptible to automation, at 73% of all activities within these jobs being automatable. According to our research, the hardest hit congressional district by the automation of this sector would unquestionably be Las Vegas — Nevada’s First Congressional District. Accommodation and food service jobs employ the largest share of workers in this district.
The decisions we make now will affect the future of our livelihoods, our environment, our economy, and our politics.
We are getting behind the pace of automation.
The pace of disruption in the workforce due to technological advancement is accelerating and can no longer be ignored.
It would be foolish to say that there is nothing to fear. Automation does in fact have the ability to impact all occupations in some capacity, rendering some jobs obsolete and scaling down entire teams to only one worker.
The technology we have today has the ability to replace both routine jobs and non-routine jobs of varying skill level — from serving drinks to combing through documents for law firms. Our technological advancement has made it possible to automate high- and low-income jobs alike, despite popular belief that white collar jobs will be perfectly safe.
We almost certainly won’t be able to replace entire industries fast enough to keep up with the pace of disruption given the already increasing rate of investment in automation and the pace of development of artificial intelligence.
According to a 2013 study by two Oxford University scholars, 47% of occupations are automatable, and a McKinsey Global Institute study from 2017 states that 51% of all activities people are paid to perform in the United States are highly susceptible to automation, accounting for $2.7 trillion in wages. These numbers do not take into account the possible capabilities of future technologies.
As people in more and more sectors feel the impact of disruption, it becomes harder to replace the jobs. Retraining is one option, but it would be unwise to think all displaced workers will transition easily into some new traditional job. And how quickly can we expect to retrain half of our workforce to perform completely new jobs?
A new opportunity for freedom from toil
The same new technologies that disrupt jobs have the potential to increase our quality of life. But only if we make decisions that drive disruption to benefit everyone.
I see our automation potential as an opportunity for a better economy, and a better world. Losing jobs to automation should not be something we avoid, but embrace. We can and must prepare new answers for people other than promising to bring back jobs.
Imagine what we could devote ourselves to when our labor is not wasted on tasks that can be automated.
The question might not be how to create enough jobs to replace the ones lost to automation. The question might be how can we make sure everyone can meet their needs without having to rely on jobs in the way people do now.
Districts most susceptible to automation
Methodology: The following chart used data from the 2015 U.S. Census 115th Congress on number of employees per sector by congressional district and percentage of technical potential for automation as measured in a McKinsey Global Institute report entitled “A Future That Works: Automation, Employment, and Productivity” published in January 2017.
Congressional districts considered most susceptible include those that have the highest concentration of employees in sectors with the highest potential for automation. If automated to full potential across sectors, their local economies would see massive disruption. Vulnerable sectors include accommodation and food services, retail trade, health care and social assistance, and transportation and warehousing.
Nevada’s first district which includes Las Vegas has a distribution of jobs by sector that looks different from most other congressional districts. The striking difference in the number and concentration of workers highlights now devastating mass automation could be. Las Vegas is highly susceptible because only one sector needs to be automated for the district as a whole to see significant economic disruption. Other highly susceptible districts also have very high automation potential overall and high concentration of workers across sectors. But the differences among these charts highlight now far-reaching the effects of automation can be and how the rate of disruption will vary based on the workforce and pace of automation.
Las Vegas, NV (D1)
