Why AI and robots will fuel employment demand

Adopting AI and robotics is harder than it first appears

Looking back over my working career, 2023 seems to have been the hardest and most tiring. I have never seen so many weary people at year-end.

How come? Well, like many first-world countries, the UK has a massive workforce shortfall estimated to be in the range 0.6-1 million skilled and semi-skilled people.

Many disappeared as a result of Brexit, but there have been other damaging mechanisms, including the demographic of an ageing population. This is manifest in the difficulty in finding a gardener, handyman, painter, decorator, electrician, plumber, builder, landscaper, etc., along with a dire shortage of the highly skilled engineers and scientists required by modern industry.
It's not that they have just been displaced, they just don't exist! Despite the valiant efforts of educationalists, there are just not enough people to meet the demands of rapidly changing markets. The net result is a stressed workforce in a continuous state of overload.

So, what does 2024 have on offer — not more people, that's for sure! However, AI and robotics present huge opportunities for those willing to embrace and invest in radical change. Unlike many CEOs, captains of industry, and the media in general, I don't see these technologies as an opportunity to replace people one-for-one (or more), and such thinking is damaging to the prospect of any company.

Reducing staffing levels to increase efficiency and profitability is only ever a short term win

Reducing staffing levels to increase efficiency and profitability is only ever a short term win, with innovation and operational flexibility the long term casualties. Effective creativity at a product and market level demands a degree of apparent workforce inefficiency. This appears to be overlooked on MBA and management training courses, and yet it is core to company longevity and prosperity.

Any form of AI/robotics transformation will not be as easy as moving from email to WhatsApp or adopting some "team working environment".

To get the best out of these technologies, people will need re-skilling, and an ability to form symbiotic relationships with radically new machines! If there are to be any redundancies introduced by AI and robotics it will be down to a lack of investment in re-education and retraining.

Then there is the looming problem of the new jobs, sectors and industries created by the new capabilities. From automated analytics, through rapid prototyping, to new product and services, there is a chasm of ignorance yet to be breached, and that is one involving human intuition supported by an understanding of probability and statistics.

But such skills are extremely rare — and exacerbated by a lack of qualified teachers and a dominant student/trainee aversion to mathematics and science because they are perceived to be hard.
What we can also assert about a future need for veracity, bias, accuracy and context checkers for all AI generated results. This could amount to a mini-industry based on "golden" reference cases, plus the comparison of AI systems fed the same input data.

As has been demonstrated in the USA, with AI tools embedded in the legal system, racial bias is a learned behaviour when court records and case histories are used as training materials. Medicine is another field prone to AI distortions, especially when human diagnosis, prognosis and outcomes are taken at face value.

Getting AI and robotics to deliver the right answers, solutions and forms is going to create a demand for a new raft of capable people in partnership with the new technologies. And through networking, we can immediately envisage it becoming a global activity.

Peter Cochrane OBE, DSc, University of Hertfordshire