The Robots Are Coming! Read online

  Advance Praise for Andrés Oppenheimer’s

  THE ROBOTS ARE COMING!

  “A must-read for those who fear their jobs may be threatened by robots or AI, The Robots Are Coming! presents a realistic picture of the fantastic opportunities for those who start preparing themselves now!”

  —Peter H. Diamandis,

  founder of Singularity University

  and XPRIZE Foundation and author of Abundance

  “If you want to understand the future of jobs, read The Robots Are Coming! The detailed and brilliant reportage of Andrés Oppenheimer provides an eye-opening account of the brave new world of work that awaits us. It’s not just truck drivers and retail clerks who are at risk; professionals like lawyers, doctors, and high-tech engineers, all of them really, need to get ready for what’s coming.”

  —Richard Florida,

  author of The Rise of the Creative Class

  “This is by far the best book on the topic. Rather than sensationalizing or downplaying the coming technological changes, Andrés has articulated them in a way that almost anyone can understand. And he provides a very sensible guide to the jobs of the future.”

  —Vivek Wadhwa,

  author of The Driver in the Driverless Car

  “With the investigational rigor of a seasoned journalist and the practical but scholarly approach of a public intellectual, Oppenheimer explores the future of work in the age of automation through real stories and thoughtful analysis. A must-read for anyone thinking about the future—all of us, and a clarion call for Latin America.”

  —Joi Ito,

  director of MIT Media Lab

  “In a time of accelerating innovation, The Robots Are Coming! is an essential guide—and a fascinating ride—through the transformation of the workplace. In his timely and vivid account, Andrés helps us navigate the future world of work. Everyone should read it.”

  —Carl Frey,

  codirector of the Oxford Martin Programme

  on Technology and Employment

  “As the first knowledge worker in history to have my job threatened by a machine, I’m qualified to say that what matters most is what we do next. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em! The Robots Are Coming! explains why we humans shouldn’t panic. Instead, we must focus on using these amazing new tools to make our lives and our society better, just as we have always done with new technology…. The Robots Are Coming! is an essential and entertaining guide to that transformation. Read this book and don’t be afraid; be prepared.”

  —Garry Kasparov,

  thirteenth World Chess Champion

  and author of Deep Thinking

  Andrés Oppenheimer

  THE ROBOTS ARE COMING!

  Andrés Oppenheimer is a foreign affairs syndicated columnist with the Miami Herald, the anchor of Oppenheimer Presenta on CNN en Español, and the author of seven books. He is a cowinner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize as a member of the Miami Herald team that uncovered the Iran-Contra scandal and a winner of the 2005 Suncoast Emmy Award. He won the Inter American Press Association Award twice (1989 and 1994) and is also the winner of the 1993 Ortega y Gasset Award of Spain’s daily El País and the 1998 Maria Moors Cabot Prize of Columbia University. He was included in the 1993 Forbes Media Guide as one of the “500 most important journalists” in the United States. He lives in Miami, Florida.

  Also by Andrés Oppenheimer

  Innovate or Die!

  Saving the Americas

  Bordering on Chaos

  A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, APRIL 2019

  English translation copyright © 2019 by Ezra E. Fitz

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published as ¡Sálvese Quien Pueda! in paperback in the United States by Vintage Español, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Andrés Oppenheimer.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525565000

  Premium Edition ISBN 9781984898913

  Ebook ISBN 9780525565017

  Cover design by Perry De La Vega

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v5.4_r2

  ep

  For Sandra

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Andrés Oppenheimer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1. A Jobless World?

  2. They’re Coming for Journalists!:

  The Future of the Media

  3. They’re Coming for Service Workers!:

  The Future of Restaurants, Supermarkets, and Retail Stores

  4. They’re Coming for Bankers!:

  The Future of Banking

  5. They’re Coming for Lawyers!:

  The Future of Law, Accounting, and Insurance Firms

  6. They’re Coming for Doctors!:

  The Future of Health Care

  7. They’re Coming for Teachers!:

  The Future of Education

  8. They’re Coming for Factory Workers!:

  The Future of Transportation and Manufacturing

  9. They’re Coming for Entertainers!:

  The Future of the Acting, Music, Sports, and Leisure Industries

  10. The Jobs of the Future

  Epilogue: The Top Ten Job Fields of the Future

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  Ever since a study by the University of Oxford predicted that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence over the next fifteen to twenty years, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the future of work. How many people will become unemployed because of the increasing automation of jobs? This is not a new phenomenon, but never before has it developed at such a fast pace. Technology has been killing jobs since the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. But up to now, humans have always managed to create more jobs than those that were wiped out by technology. The question now is, can we continue creating more jobs than we are eliminating?

  The media bring us one example after another of how technological disruption often creates new companies, though at the cost of decimating others that employed many more people. The Eastman Kodak Company, an icon of the photographic industry that employed 140,000 people, was pushed into bankruptcy in 2012 by Instagram, a start-up with just 13 employees that knew how to beat Kodak to the punch when it came to digital photography. Blockbuster, the giant movie rental chain that employed 60,000 people around the world, went bankrupt shortly before that because it could not compete with Netflix, another start-up with 30 employees that started shipping movies directly to people’s homes. During its golden age, General Motors had a staff of some 618,000 workers, whereas now their number is down to 202,000. What’s more, the car company is now being threatened by Tesla and Google, which are ahead in the development of self-driven cars and employ 30,000 and 55,000 people, respectively. Will GM’s employees suffer the same fate as those at Kodak and Blockbuster?

  Growing numbers of jobs are disappearing. We see this every day in our lives. In the very recent past, we’ve witnessed the gradual extinction of elevator attendant
s, telephone operators, factory workers, and garbage collectors who swept the streets with brooms in their hands, all of whom are being replaced by machines. In the United States, parking lot attendants and their collection booths are vanishing fast, as are airline tellers and their check-in desks at airports. At many restaurants in Japan, conveyor belts have taken the place of servers, and a number of sushi restaurants have replaced their chefs with robots. Today it’s not just people performing manual labor who are seeing their jobs threatened, but also white-collar workers such as journalists, travel agents, real estate salesmen, bankers, insurance agents, accountants, lawyers, and doctors. Virtually no profession is safe: all are feeling the impact—at least somewhat—from the automation of work.

  My own profession, journalism, is among the most threatened. The Washington Post is already publishing election stories written by robots, and almost all major American newspapers publish sports scores and stock market figures generated by smart machines. Journalists will have to ride the wave of this new reality and reinvent ourselves, or we will soon find ourselves out of the game. And the same thing will happen in almost every other profession.

  Even those who are themselves responsible for the technological revolution—people like Microsoft founder Bill Gates or Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—are now admitting for the first time that unemployment caused by technological advances—technological unemployment—could become the biggest global challenge of the twenty-first century. As Zuckerberg said during his 2017 commencement-day speech at Harvard University, “today, technology and automation are eliminating many jobs,” and “our generation will have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like autonomous cars and trucks.” And long before many people were talking about this issue, in 2014, Gates was already admitting that “technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set…20 years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower.”

  How are the big corporations responding to all of this? The vast majority of them are claiming that far from killing jobs, they are increasing productivity and hiring new people by automating their operations. Should we believe them, or are they just feeding us fairy tales and half-truths? And if what they’re saying is in fact true, which are the jobs that will disappear and which others are going to replace them? Where will the effects of automation and artificial intelligence be felt the most, in the industrialized world or in the emerging countries in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America? Most important, what should each of us be doing to prepare ourselves for this tsunami of labor automation that is sweeping across the globe?

  To answer these questions, I followed the same methodology I used in my 2014 book Innovate or Die!: I traveled to major world innovation centers, interviewed some of the best-known creativity and business gurus, and then drew my own conclusions. This time, I started my journey at the University of Oxford in England, where I interviewed the two researchers who shocked the world in 2013 with their study predicting that 47 percent of current jobs will disappear in the near future. From there, I traveled to Silicon Valley, New York, Japan, South Korea, Israel, and several countries in both Europe and Latin America to study the future of some of the key industries of the twenty-first century.

  What I learned in this journalistic voyage at once surprised and scared me. Fortunately, while history is rife with examples of technologies that have annihilated entire industries, these same technologies have created brand-new industries that produced more jobs than they erased. But there is no guarantee that this same trend will hold true going forward as automation and artificial intelligence take growing numbers of jobs and the rate of technological acceleration increases. I have little doubt that technological unemployment—and the question of what we will do with our lives in a world where robots will do much of the work—will be one of the world’s most pressing issues in coming decades. Don’t be fooled by the relatively low 2018 unemployment rates in the United States: it’s an issue that—whether it’s because of the disappearance of jobs or the gradual fall of wages—will affect each and every nation on earth.

  In many ways, it’s already upon us. Growing disaffection among workers in traditional twentieth-century industries has led to the emergence of nationalist, protectionist, and anti-globalization movements in the United States and a number of European nations. Donald Trump won the 2016 U.S. presidential election in part by exploiting the anxieties of workers in technologically threatened industries and blaming undocumented immigrants for taking American jobs or driving American wages down. But it wasn’t immigration that was killing jobs and reducing wages: it was the automation of labor. In fact, the number of undocumented immigrants had declined significantly since the 2008 financial crisis. And the impact of growing automation and artificial intelligence will become only more visible as time goes on. If we do not find a solution to the coming disruption of key industries, the world will become an even more tumultuous place. My hope is that this book will help create a greater awareness of the challenges that new waves of technological unemployment will bring about and help us better prepare ourselves to face this new reality, both as individuals and as nations.

  1

  A JOBLESS WORLD?

  OXFORD, ENGLAND

  As I started working on this book, the first stop I made was to the University of Oxford to interview Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, the two researchers at the Oxford Martin School who raised alarm bells in 2013 when they published a study predicting that 47 percent of jobs could disappear over the next fifteen to twenty years due to automation. The study landed like a bomb in the academic and economic worlds, not simply because of its premise but more so because the two researchers accompanied their work by ranking 702 occupations and their respective possibilities of being eliminated over the next two decades. It marked the first time in recent memory that an academic paper had forecast the possible disappearance of hundreds of specific jobs, and it spread like wildfire, leaving many of us who work in offices—lawyers, accountants, doctors, bankers, business executives, and journalists, among others—shocked to learn that our own positions were at risk of disappearing, either completely or in part, in the coming years.

  Frey and Osborne’s study coincided with a number of reports predicting a new revolution in robotics and artificial intelligence that would eliminate tens of millions of jobs across the workforce. Meanwhile, Google announced that it had bought eight robotics companies, including Boston Dynamics, which produced military-grade metallic monsters such as BigDog and Cheetah. These acquisitions were the “the clearest indication yet that Google is intent on building a new class of autonomous systems that might do anything from warehouse work to package delivery and even elder care,” The New York Times warned in 2014. In May 2013, the global consulting firm McKinsey had published an extensive report titled “Disruptive Technologies: Advances That Will Transform Life, Business, and the Global Economy,” which warned that new technologies would leave unemployed not only millions of manufacturing employees but also between 110 million and 140 million office workers and business professionals by the year 2025. All of a sudden, people were starting to ask themselves, are we heading for a jobless world?

  From that moment forward, the headlines became increasingly dramatic. “Forrester Predicts That AI-enabled Automation Will Eliminate 9% of US Jobs in 2018,” read one in Forbes. “Automation Could Kill 73 Million U.S. Jobs by 2030,” said another headline, in USA Today. “Robots will destroy our jobs—and we’re not ready for it,” predicted the British daily The Guardian.

  FREY, A SKEPTIC OF TECHNO-OPTIMISM

  The first thing that struck me when I arrived in Oxford, which is an hour outside London by train, was the disparity between the futuristic research of Frey and Osborne and the medieval environment in which they had conducted it. Oxford is a monastic city dating back to the twelfth century, and it was saved from destru
ction during World War II because Hitler wanted to convert it into his capital city in England had he won the war and therefore had ordered his air force not to bomb it. In the fourteenth century, many of its monasteries had already become universities. Today the city includes thirty-eight institutions of higher education linked by a sort of academic federation known as the University of Oxford, which operate largely in medieval convents, as if they had been frozen in time.

  In that atmosphere, just a few steps from the Oxford Divinity School, built in the mid-fifteenth century, is the Oxford Martin School, a futuristic research center founded in 2005 so that all professors of the Oxford academic community could conduct studies designed to help bring long-term improvements to the world. James Martin, the British billionaire who donated the funds to create this institute, had specified that its mission would be to tackle issues of global significance by supporting programs that “have an impact beyond academia” and haven’t been funded by public or private sources. Since its inception, the Oxford Martin School has sponsored nearly fifty studies by some five hundred Oxford professors. Most of these studies have been focused on the future, as well as on the social challenges that new technologies will bring about once the robots—as we’ve seen in science fiction movies—begin to think for themselves.

  Carl Benedikt Frey is a Swedish economist and economic historian who has been studying the process of technology’s “creative destruction” for several years. He told me he’d been eager to study whether the technological optimism radiating from Silicon Valley was justified. He had wondered about the accuracy of the widespread belief in academic, business, and political circles that technology would inexorably improve the world. Something told him that while this had been true in the past, it might not be the case in the future, because robots and artificial intelligence may begin to replace growing numbers of jobs and cause a serious social problem.