On 15 July, "Iron Man" Musk said in a speech at the American Governors Association that automation technology will inevitably have a disruptive impact on the job market. Because in the future, robots will have the ability to do anything that humans do, and do it better than humans.
The attention of the American state heads in the audience was instantly mobilised by Musk, because if this is true, the impact of automation on the job market will be more immediate and far-reaching than low-cost imports from developing countries, hitting these politicians directly in their electoral vote banks.
Mark P. Mills, a professor at Northwestern University and a graduate of the Manhattan Institute, recently published an article in City Journal stating that the future of automated technology replacing professional white-collar workers will come sooner than expected.
Creative destruction is sweeping through urban centres
The unspoken secret of automation technology is that it is easier to develop a robot to replace a junior lawyer than it is to replace a skilled electrician. This fact also helps to explain why economists and politicians are obsessed with "creative destruction", which just recently they thought would do more good than harm to society (Editor's note: Innovation is the process of constantly reinventing the structure of the economy from the inside, i.e., constantly breaking down the old order and structure and creating new ones, which leads to economic growth, a process which is then transformed into an economic process. (Editor's note: innovation can constantly revolutionise the structure of the economy from within, i.e. constantly breaking down old orders and structures while creating new ones, leading to economic growth, a process known as "creative destruction"). They argue that technology and automation have increased productivity and created more jobs.
But in the age of automated algorithms, they are less confident. That's not surprising:
Instead of sweeping through factories and farms, creative destruction has swept through urban centres, taking white-collar jobs. The white-collar community has debated the "end of work" for years, but there's no doubt that the future many feared has come true.
Automation: A Surface Novelty, A Deep Revolution
Much of the media attention has focused on the gradual replacement of manual labour - real robots doing things in front of people, far more intuitive than invisible service "bots" on cloud platforms. But focusing on humanoid robots flipping burgers in fast-food restaurants is just muddying the waters. The real revolution is happening elsewhere.
Not only that, but automation doesn't explain the shrinking number of jobs in heavy industry: investment in information technology in manufacturing has been very low for the past decade or so. And productivity, a key indicator of automation as well as its end goal, has not seen a significant climb. Manufacturing manufacturers are actually underinvesting in technology.
But Silicon Valley has been working on revolutionary software tailored to the malls, Hollywood, hotels, delivery buckets, newspapers, television, finance and even education industries. Some of the algorithmic software on the market today can teach primary schools maths better than a human with a Bachelor of Education degree. The vast amount of paperwork currently approved by bureaucrats and regulators is also gradually being turned over to algorithms.
Professional white-collar workers who make a living in this huge services market will be horrified to find themselves at the end of their tether in the workplace.
Automation's industrial penetration is on the rise
And then look at the longer term, it will be found that automation on the industrial structure of the subversion, far more than that: nearly two hundred "unicorn" enterprises - like the valuation of more than 1 billion U.S. dollars such as YouBuy, venture capital investment tend to rush start-ups -- 90 per cent of which are in the service sector.
It's not for nothing that there's such a clear "preference" for industry. Supercomputers are equipped with software that allows previously unimaginable information-processing tasks to be performed on cloud platforms at low cost, from interpreting X-rays to managing passive funds. But once engineering and hardware convergence are involved, the challenges magnify accordingly, and the complexity multiplies as a result. A trivial glitch that causes perhaps nothing more than a playback jam in video software can have serious unintended consequences when it occurs in the machine's operating system.
Hype for the concept of driverless vehicles is hype, and there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of implementing viable sensors, brakes, and power systems to ensure security and safety. A Goldman Sachs report noted that the automotive industry is still one of the few manufacturing sectors that is not deeply automated; in other industries, automation applications are less than 20-30 per cent advanced.
There will always be a network revolution in the "means of production". Now, what is undergoing a radical change, we may call "management information". The effects of the change should be learnt from history - economic growth has been significantly increased and more jobs have been created - but the social pains of this process are destined to affect the white-collar professionals and the management level of enterprises. Blue-collar workers who lost their jobs in the information age took to the streets to fight against