Accounting firm PwC (aka PriceWaterhouseCoopers, for those of us who don’t keep up so well with corporate name changes) doesn’t think the advance of artificial intelligence and robotics means the permanent creation of an unemployed underclass:
Furthermore, other analysis we have done5 suggests that any job losses from automation are likely to be broadly offset in the long run by new jobs created as a result of the larger and wealthier economy made possible by these new technologies. We do not believe, contrary to some predictions, that automation will lead to mass technological unemployment by the 2030s any more than it has done in the decades since the digital revolution began.
Nonetheless, automation will disrupt labour markets and it is interesting to look at the estimates we have produced to get an indication of the relative exposure of existing jobs to automation in different countries, industry sectors, and categories of workers. We summarise the key findings in these three areas in turn below.
Nevertheless, I do believe that AI and robotics have the potential to continue the long term trend of concentrating wealth and power in the (corporate) hands of a few, at least until a transition occurs in which artificial intelligence no longer refers to what are simply correlation engines and begin to refer to actually conscious creatures. At that point we’ll be seeing questions concerning person-hood popping up, as I’ve discussed before, and then it becomes a lot harder to predict what will be happening to the distribution of all that wealth, much less the actual availability of jobs at all ability levels.
