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IBM CEO Says Don't Fear The Robots Coming To Take All Our Jobs

This article is more than 8 years old.

Virginia Rometty really rather has to say this given that it's her company, IBM , that is introducing the robotics that creates the biggest threat to many knowledge workers. She thus needs to get the technology out there, in use, so that people can see how useful it is, before people wake up to the job losses that are going to come in the wake of the technology. For it really is true that the robots are going to come and take all our jobs. And it's also true that this isn't going to be the disaster predicted by people like Martin Ford. Quite simply because this is how the macroeconomy works. Technology destroys the jobs that it automates. This then frees up that labour to go off and satisfy some other human need or desire. And as long as we don't run out of those, then there's no problem, is there?

What Rometty actually said is here:

“This is not about replacing people. It is about augmenting what man does…this helps us do things we couldn’t do,” Ms. Rometty said Tuesday at the Gartner Symposium, a gathering of CIOs and business technology professionals.

IBM made news today with the announcement of a new 2,000-person consulting unit, the Cognitive Business Solutions Group, that will help businesses make use of Watson , a decision-support platform the company hopes to apply to a range of industries such as health care. The thesis is that there’s too much information for even a well-educated professional in health or law or just about any area to master, and the artificial intelligence and other algorithms at the heart of Watson can provide answers far more quickly than can the human mind.

Imagine the use of Watson in the medical field. Much diagnosis is looking at the symptoms and then running down a decision tree as to what might be causing them. There's various diagnostic tests that can be done at certain points and the results of those indicate which fork of the tree needs to be taken, that then determining what is the next question that needs to be answered. That's something that a properly programmed computer should be very good at. But what is then going to be the impact upon medicine of general use of such a machine?

Well, we've just automated much of what we spend many long years training doctors to do. We will, of course, get better diagnosis of what ails us. But we'll also see that skill that the doctors currently require rather fade away. Because the diagnostic skill is now in Watson. That means we don't need such highly trained doctors, nor so many of them. That is, the machine replaces the labourer. Doctors' jobs will start to vanish: the speed at which they do probably determined by the political skill they can deploy as a profession to make sure that no one who is not a doctor is allowed to use a Watson. Yes, automating medicine is going to mean fewer doctors.

At which point we might decide that this is a disaster. For of course our now unemployed doctors aren't all going to get jobs making Watsons. Unemployment will skyrocket, surely?

No, because that's not the way that general economy works. The starting point of economics is that human desires and wants are unlimited. Meaning that if we can satisfy one or more of them without human labour then that frees that labour up to go and assuage some other itch of desire. And doctors are generally pretty bright people, freeing up bright minds to work on other problems, now that the machines can deal with the routines of medicine, seems like a pretty good idea really.

And the only end to this process is when we run out of, if we ever do, human desires and needs to be satisfied. And at that point, who cares whether anyone has a job? We've all got all we want, by definition. So what does a job matter?

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