IT is not yet a problem in the Philippines but it is increasingly becoming a big one in some countries. This is the rise of robotics in manufacturing, in farming, in services, in transportation, in warehouse operations, etc., where machines appear to be doing better than human workers.
A study released last week by Oxford Economics. a British research and consulting firm, showed that robots have already taken over millions of manufacturing jobs, as in the car industry. Robots or machines with specific abilities programmed into them are increasingly being used in such activities as museum guiding, in food preparation, in classroom lecturing. There are now self-driving cars and trucks. There are machines instead of human soldiers advancing on enemy positions.
Robots or intelligent machines have been developed along with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a branch of computer science. Computers have been known to defeat human experts in chess and checkers. They are now used extensively in mining of data, in medical diagnosis and in assisting doctors find the right treatment, in searches for information such as Google, in image recognition as in police watching for wanted people at airports, in financial institutions investing in stocks and managing properties, even in creating art such as paintings and poetry.
More and more robots have been developed with the rise of Artificial Intelligence. There are today some 2.25 million robots, mostly in manufacturing, according to the Oxford Economics report. One fifth of the working robots are now installed in China. About 1.7 million manufacturing jobs have been lost to robots since 2000 – about 400,000 in Europe, 260,000 in the United States, and 550,000 in China.
The Oxford report included a “Robot Vulnerability Index” which ranked the most and the least vulnerable regions of seven advanced economies of the world – the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. Each additional robot installed in low-skilled regions led to almost twice the job losses in higher-skilled regions of the country, the study found.
The Philippines is not yet as concerned about robotics and job losses as these advanced nations. Our problem in this country is much more basic – how to create more jobs for our growing population, so that our people do not have to seek employment in other countries to support their families.
Someday, we may have to face the same problem posed by robotics in the more economically advanced nations. We are confident we will do well when that time comes, for robots are displacing largely less skilled people. That should lead our officials to step up our educational system so it will turn out more of the highly skilled professionals that cannot quite be replaced by robots.
