The Robots Are Coming! Book Summary - The Robots Are Coming! Book explained in key points

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The Robots Are Coming! summary

Name: The Robots Are Coming!
Rating: 4.5 (119 reviews)
Author: Andrés Oppenheimer

Andrés Oppenheimer

The Future of Jobs in the Age of Automation

4.5 (119 ratings)

30 mins

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The Robots Are Coming!
summarized in 10 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Learn how automation is transforming the global economy.

In a headline-grabbing study published in 2013, the Oxford University economist Carl Benedikt Frey and machine-learning researcher Michael A. Osborne made a very sobering prediction: by 2033, up to 47 percent of current jobs could be eliminated from the US economy. The reason? In a word, automation – the process by which jobs are performed, well, automatically, without the need for human labor, thanks to robots, software or other forms of technology.

According to the study, jobs as wide-ranging as sports refereeing, telemarketing, bank loan supervising, insurance underwriting, retail sales and even catering have a 95 percent or greater chance of obsolescence. The list goes on and on, touching nearly every industry.

Meanwhile, just about every remaining job will be significantly affected by automation, and a whole range of new jobs will be created. Some major economic and societal transformations lie ahead. To give you a better idea of what they might look like, these blinks will take a look at developing trends in nine major industries that run the gamut of the modern global economy: manufacturing, transportation, the service sector, law, banking, healthcare, journalism, education and entertainment.

In this blinks, you’ll learn about

the jobs most likely to get eliminated;
the jobs most likely to survive; and
the jobs most likely to be radically transformed.

After decades of hype, industrial robots are poised to replace human factory workers.

In the 1960s, we saw the rise of industrial robots – automated factory machines that manufacture products without human assistance. But six decades later, the robots haven’t taken over yet. There are still millions of people working in factories.

Sure, many of those factories are now in Eastern countries like China, rather than Western countries like the United States. But they’re still around, chugging away – and still powered by human sweat. So it would be reasonable to think that maybe the fears about robots taking over were overblown.

Well, think again. Even in the East, industrial robots are on the rise, and factory jobs are starting to disappear. In China alone, there were 189,000 industrial robots in 2014. That number is projected to reach 726,000 in 2019. Indeed, far from being the last bastion of manual factory work, China is now pioneering fully automated factories. In 2017, a cellphone factory in the industrial city of Dongguan replaced 590 of its 650 workers with robots. It then announced its ambition to further reduce its staff to 20 and eventually to zero.

The Chinese media hailed the factory as a success story, illustrating the progress of the country’s Made in China 2025 economic plan. One of the aims of that plan is to achieve a “robotic revolution,” in the words of President Xi Jinping.

Four factors are helping to fuel that revolution. First, industrial robots are becoming cheaper. Second, Chinese labor is getting more expensive. Third, modern industrial robots’ productivity leaves humans in the dust: the robots can work at higher speeds and with greater precision, 365 days per year, 24 hours per day.

The fourth and final factor combines the previous ones with the fact that Chinese factories often make products for Western corporations. Given the lower cost of industrial robots, the higher cost of Chinese labor and the tremendous productivity benefits of automation, those same corporations are now tempted to build their own factories at home in the West. That way, they can eliminate their international shipping costs.

Put those four factors together, and Chinese factories have a strong economic motivation to automate their operations. That way, they can lower their prices and keep their corporate clients happy.

But numerous factory jobs will probably be lost as a result. Indeed, the World Bank estimates that 77 percent of jobs in China are threatened by automation, many of them in manufacturing.

And that’s just the tip of the automatic iceberg.

Advancements in self-driving technology will soon render truck, taxi and delivery drivers obsolete.

Imagine it’s the near future. You’re a corporation with an army of industrial robots cranking out your products around the clock, eliminating most of your manufacturing labor costs in the process. But you still have one pesky little problem: getting those products into the hands of your customers.

Well, that’s where the robots come in again. The transportation industry is about to be revolutionized by autonomous vehicles. You’ve probably heard about the self-driving cars being test driven on the highways of California – but autonomous trucks are also in the works, with lots of money being poured into their development. Otto is one of the companies leading the way, and it was recently bought by Uber for $700 million.

The need for retail and restaurant workers is already being eliminated by automated technologies.

Unless you’ve been living off-grid for the past decade, you’ve probably made a number of purchases from online retailers, such as Amazon. Of course, millions of other people have been doing the same thing.

As a result, brick-and-mortar stores have been dropping like flies. In the United States, just in the first few months of 2017, Radio Shack closed 552 stores; JCPenney, 138; Macy’s, 68 – and the list goes on and on.

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 jobs on the socio-economic ladder. 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.

The more banking is conducted online with the help of algorithms, the less the industry needs human workers.

Nowadays, when you need to do your banking, it’s possible to go for years without ever having to visit a physical branch of your bank. You can update your information and carry out transfers online, and you can deposit and withdraw money from an ATM.

Now, remember the meaning of the acronym ATM: Automated Teller Machine. The tasks that are performed by an ATM used to be the exclusive job of human tellers. Those tellers still exist, of course, but in lower numbers today than in yesteryear, thanks to ATMs.

Automated technologies will take over the role of monitoring our health, diagnosing and treating diseases.

Have you ever felt sick and Googled your symptoms? Then, like millions of people, you’ve already experienced one of the ways in which automation will transform the future of healthcare.

Before online search engines and virtual assistants like Alexa, you probably would have seen your doctor about your symptoms. Now you can find information about their causes and remedies by simply typing a few words into your search bar or saying, “hey, Alexa, how do I perform CPR?”

In healthcare and other industries, many future jobs will involve providing support to automated systems.

With so many innovative medical technologies already here and even more on the horizon, healthcare is going to be just as revolutionized by automation as the other industries we’ve looked at. Up to 80 percent of the work currently done by human doctors could soon be performed by automated systems.

But that doesn’t mean that 80 percent of doctors are about to be put out of work. As with the legal profession, it just means that more routine tasks – like doing check-ups and conducting tests – are going to be automated. That will free up doctors to do other, more interesting work.

Automation technologies will enable journalists to do more interesting work in more powerful ways.

As technology automates the more tedious routine tasks that people have to do in their current jobs, it will also free them up to do more interesting work in other fields besides healthcare. One of them is journalism.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, programs are already writing news stories – but they tend to be the type of stories that are rather boring for journalists to write. A vivid example of this comes from The Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and leading the charge toward automating certain aspects of journalism. In the 2016 US elections, the newspaper used an AI program called Heliograf to cover about 500 local races.

Thanks to automation, the role of the teacher will shift from transmitting knowledge to cultivating soft skills.

If there’s one thing you’ve learned from these blinks so far, it’s that automation is going to shake up many industries in the years ahead. Some new jobs will be created, but many others will be eliminated, and the old jobs that survive will be radically transformed.

With so much change going on in the economy, people will have to learn how to adapt – updating their skills for their evolving jobs or retraining for brand new careers or even industries, such as virtual reality programming (more on that in the next blink). And that means education is going to be more important than ever before.

The entertainment and culture industries will become increasingly important as people have more free time due to automation.

Imagine you’re a present-day teacher and your students want to learn about astronomy. Well, you could talk to them about it, give them books, show them videos, provide them with a telescope or send them to Google, where they can probably learn much more about the subject than you know, thanks to Google’s search algorithms (another reason why your role as a knowledge-transmitter is already waning).

But imagine if you could blast off into outer space and take them on a cosmic field trip to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Well, you can’t do that for the foreseeable future, but soon you’ll be able to do the next best thing thanks to virtual reality, or VR.

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What is The Robots Are Coming! about?

The Robots Are Coming! (2019) provides a wide-ranging survey of the rapidly approaching – and, in many cases, already emerging – future of automation. In the coming decades, sophisticated robots, computer programs and other forms of automated technology will eliminate many jobs in many fields, and will radically transform the jobs that remain. Andrés Oppenheimer takes us on an insightful and eye-opening tour of some of the key industries to be affected and the major transformations that lie ahead.

Who should read The Robots Are Coming!?

Skeptics who wonder if the robots really are coming
Pessimists who fear the future they will bring
Optimists who hope they will unlock new possibilities for humanity

About the Author

Andrés Oppenheimer is an award-winning journalist, the Latin American editor and syndicated foreign affairs columnist for the Miami Herald, the anchor of Oppenheimer Presenta on CNN en Español and the author of seven books. In 1987, he was one of the co-winners of the Pulitzer Prize for his work as part of a team of Miami Herald journalists who uncovered the Iran-Contra Scandal. He also won the Inter-American Press Association Award in 1989 and 1994, as well as the National Association of Hispanic Journalists prize in 1997.

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Technology & the Future Corporate Culture

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