WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW BY SOLA BODUNRIN

THE ROBOTS ARE HERE (The Story Continues)

Unless you have been living off-grid for the past decade, you have probably made a number of purchases from online retailers such as Amazon, Alibaba, AliExpress, Jumia, Konga, eBay and many more. Of course, millions of other people have been doing the same thing. The need for retail and restaurant workers is already being eliminated by automated technologies. 

As a result, brick-and-mortar stores have been dropping like flies all over the world. With each closure, many people also lose their retail jobs. In the United States alone, over 12 million retail jobs is projected to be lost as a result of automation. 

And those retail jobs aren’t going to be replaced with Amazon jobs. That’s because the company needs far fewer low-level employees than its brick-and-mortar competitors. While the latter need salespeople, cashiers, security guards and various other employees, Amazon mostly just needs workers to pick up its products from its warehouse shelves and put them on its trucks. And it’s already working on replacing those workers with robots.

Now, let us add automated Amazon delivery drones into the mix, quickly bringing the company’s cheap products right to your front door. That is going to make it even tougher for retail stores to compete with the online giant.

As for the stores that survive the e-commerce onslaught, they will be transformed by automation as well. Already, many grocery stores have replaced cashiers with self-checkout systems, and companies are now eyeing other jobs as well. Retail companies have started developing ‘Bots’ that are equipped with touch screens, speech-recognition technology and wheels that allow it to roll around autonomously. They are already in operation at some of the company’s stores, where they track inventory and help customers find items.

Meanwhile, automation is rapidly taking hold of the other main branch of the service sector: the restaurant industry. Touch-screen ordering tablets are already replacing counter staff and waiters at restaurants like McDonalds and Pizza Hut. Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, food preparation robots have already debuted at the Zume Pizza chain, which has cut its labor costs in half. Of course, cutting labor costs is a euphemism for getting rid of workers. By 2030, over 150 million fast food jobs is projected to be lost worldwide. 

Undoubtedly, Automation will soon take over many of the more mundane tasks of the legal profession. Factory, retail, restaurant and transportation workers – these are all low-income jobs on the socioeconomic ladder. But, ‘do you think that high-end jobs will be safe from the threat of automation, right?’ Well, some might be safer, but many of them will also be in peril. Others will be significantly transformed.

As a general rule of thumb, the more routinized a job is, the more likely it is to be automated. In other words, the more your job involves doing repetitive actions, the more likely a robot or a computer is to start doing it for you in the coming years. That’s why many lower-end jobs are going to be eliminated; a machine can flip burgers just as well as a human. But the same holds true for many higher-end jobs.

For instance, let us consider the legal profession. Many of the tasks currently performed by lawyers, paralegals and legal secretaries are pretty formulaic. Whether they are preparing real estate contracts, rental agreements, divorce settlements or wills, these tasks usually involve taking a boilerplate legal document - slightly adapting it to the needs of the client and filling in the blanks with the correct information. With the help of algorithmic software, online legal platforms like RocketLawyer, LegalZoom and LawDepot can do this work automatically by just asking clients a few simple questions.

More sophisticated tasks are also beginning to be automated. In 2016, BakerHostetler, one of the largest law firms in the United States, “hired” a robotic lawyer named Ross. Powered by IBM’s Watson supercomputer, Ross can sift through thousands of legal documents in hundreds of databases and make independent decisions about which ones would be most useful to winning a particular case.

As a result of automation, 31,000 law-related jobs have been lost in the United Kingdom alone, and another 114,000 will probably disappear in the next two decades. Meanwhile, in the United States, two out of three lawyers could either lose their jobs or see them radically changed in the next 15 years. For example, instead of writing legal documents themselves, human lawyers will just be proofreading and editing documents written by robots like Ross.

This is all troubling news if you’re working in the legal profession – but there’s a bright side if you’re a consumer. In the past, only affluent people could afford legal services, such as writing prenuptial agreements. Automation will lower the costs of these services, making them accessible to lower-income people.......

Please leave your thoughts and opinions in the comments box provided below.

Have a fruitful day!

Olusola Bodunrin is a graduate of Philosophy from the University of Ado-Ekiti. He is a professional writer, he writes articles for publication and he anchors – ‘What You Should Know’ on SHEGZSABLEZS’ blog.

‘What You Should Know’ is a column that offers to educate and enlighten the public on general falsehood and myths.