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Relax, Humans – Robots Are Not Going to Take Your Jobs

Despite the headlines, fear about AI may be artificial.

Since day one as a founder in the AI space, I’ve seen headline after headline about how artificial intelligence is out to replace humans — despite the fact that artificial intelligence is better suited to enhance human workers’ capabilities than replace them.

Cover stories from Der Spiegel in 1964, 1978 and 2016 predicting that robots would put humans out of work. As Mark Twain said, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

First off, artificial intelligence, although often depicted in sci-fi movies as embedded into a robot, isn’t a robot. Rather, it’s a new form of software.

With that out of the way, it’s important to understand what the future holds for AI. I recently shared my thoughts on this and concluded with the idea that the future of AI is human—that is to say, the future will revolve around humans working alongside AI systems rather than being replaced by them.

Right now, the economy shows no signs of a coming AI-jobpocalypse. Unemployment in the United States stands at below 4.5% at the time of this writing, and the big concern that many employers have is that they face labor shortages, rather than labor surpluses. Widening our scope, the unemployment rate in the developed world is down to 5.5% and heading toward a 40-year low.

I was recently in Washington, D.C., and had the pleasure of meeting and hearing Congressman Robert Latta, author of the the Self-Driving Car Legislation, speak about the role he sees automation playing in the future. Coincidentally, I was lucky enough to meet him on the very day that legislation was approved by the House (in fact,  he had to run off to the vote right after speaking to the group I was with).

Congressman Latta’s message was clear — more jobs, rather than fewer — with the need to double and triple down on education to ensure that folks in the workforce are retooled for their future jobs working with machines, not being replaced by them. I couldn’t agree more with Congressman Latta. As the representative of Ohio’s 5th congressional district in Bowling Green, he is acutely aware of the reality of the challenges being faced by everyday Americans, and he has taken concrete steps to proactively address them.

As a founder of ROSS Intelligence, the leading AI company in the legal space, I continue to see lawyers using AI to further their reachtake on more clients, and perform at levels never before possible. This is the strength of artificial intelligence: it enables us as humans to further productivity and do more,  without taking humans out of the loop.

While jobs will certainly change in scope as technology advances, it’s important to remember that the role of lawyers is substantially different in 2017 than what it was in 1907, without a reduced overall demand. Moreover, all of this change happened prior to the widespread availability of artificial intelligence software (or, in some cases, of any software at all).

The practice of law has changed considerably over the past 100 years.

The biggest trend I continue to hear about is not job losses, but a shift in the kind of jobs that are available. The consulting firm Capgemini recently surveyed 1,000 organizations that have already deployed AI systems and found that 4 out of 5 of them have created more jobs since the deployment of AI. Even more exciting, 3/4 of respondents to Capgemini’s survey attributed a 10% or greater rise in sales to the deployment of AI-based solutions.

Another famed consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, recently weighed in on this shift in the job market, finding that “one-third of new jobs created in the United States in the past 25 years were types that did not exist, or barely existed, in areas including IT development, hardware manufacturing, app creation, and IT systems management.”

While it’s obvious that not all industries will benefit from an untapped latent talent in the labor pool creating whole new job categories in response to technology, like we’re seeing in law, medicine, and IT, the key will rest in the retooling and education of those being replaced by automated systems.

According to Goldman Sachs, autonomous cars could ultimately eat up 300,000 driving jobs a year, but that won’t happen for at least another 25 years, leaving more than enough time for the economy to adapt. This means that, yes, the transportation industry will change dramatically, but the effect on the trucking job market may not be as devastating as many have suggested.

Along the same vein, I like to remind people that when the ATM debuted, many feared that the machines spelled the end for bank tellers. The name itself, Automated Teller Machine, didn’t do much to assuage those fears, either. But since its introduction in 1970, the numbers of bank tellers continued to rise. The reason: what banks found was that, because the number of human tellers needed in each branch would fall, ATMs made it cheaper to open more branches, leading to more human teller jobs overall. Most importantly, as anyone who remembers heading to the bank ahead of the weekend to withdraw money can tell you, consumer satisfaction with banks continued to rise as they were able to withdraw their money 24/7 in a convenient fashion.

Chart from “Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth” by James Bessen.

And yes, for those about to point out that the Department of Labor does predict that the number of tellers will decline by about 8% over the next decade, I do know that — but that’s a gradual decline in a field attracting few new applicants, rather than the kind of cataclysmic one-year drop off that had been predicted so many decades ago. It’s also worth keeping in mind that this 8% decline over the next decade may have more to do with other recent trends, such as online banking and folks using less cashrather than ATMs themselves. Also, it’s 2017; 47 years later, the machines that were going to replace tellers still haven’t done so.

I must admit that just because fears in the past about automation have proven to be false doesn’t mean they will continue to be so in the future. That being said, it’s hard to give into the headline hype about robots replacing humans considering everything we’ve seen.

I’ll leave readers with this fact: Of the 270 detailed occupations listed in the 1950 US Census, only one occupation has since been eliminated by automation, according to Harvard economist James E. Bessen. The one job the robots truly took from us? Professional elevator operator.

It isn’t that AI won’t automate parts of jobs—that’s clear and already in motion. It’s that AI won’t likely be able to automate entire jobs. As Bessen stated in a 2016 piece, this distinction is important, because “if a job is completely automated, then automation necessarily reduces employment. But if a job is only partially automated, employment might actually increase.”

The future of work will see a dramatic revolution — a world in which humans and machine systems work together to accomplish more than ever before possible, and I, for one, am very optimistic about what the future holds.

So, don’t hold your breath on finding a robot sitting in your seat at work tomorrow, because with AI, you may have more work to do than ever before.


Andrew Arruda is a Canadian entrepreneur and lawyer. He is Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of the artificial intelligence company ROSS Intelligence, a leader in the legal technology industry and one of the top 100 private AI companies in the world. Arruda speaks internationally on the subjects of A.I., legal technology, and entrepreneurship and has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, BBC, Wired, CNBC, CBS, Fortune, Inc., Forbes, and the Financial Times. A member of the Forbes 30 under 30 class of 2017, as well as a 2016 TED speaker, Arruda aims to forever change the way legal services are delivered.