The National Development Council is using Asustek’s home robot, Zenbo, to gain an understanding of industrial trends and highlight the importance it places on industrial innovation. The council believes that if Zenbo can be refined, it would be a great help to progress in the domestic care sector.
Automation used to be a threat to workers in the manufacturing industry, but today it can also replace service industry workers and will have an effect on employment in general.
The government must not stress the importance of developing new technologies while ignoring the effects it would have on workers and society.
Some experts say the experiences of three industrial revolutions show that technological progress will increase job opportunities, and that even if some jobs disappear, it will create even more jobs.
However, a detailed analysis shows that the ongoing fourth industrial revolution lacks the momentum needed for the creation of new jobs.
During the first and second industrial revolutions, machines replaced workers, but with the beginning of globalization, products that could only be sold locally started to be sold around the world, and the expanding market resulted in an increase in the scale of production, which required higher numbers of workers.
The third industrial revolution accompanied the rise of the service industry and its increase in job opportunities, which made up for the loss of manufacturing jobs.
Using Taiwan as an example, the service industry increased from 38 percent of GDP in 1980 to 59 percent in 2015.
The fourth industrial revolution will not find yet another global market and it will be difficult to find a new industry of the same scope as the service industry.
Statistics show that there will not be enough new jobs to make up for disappearing ones. According to the Mitsubishi Research Institute in Japan, artificial intelligence (AI) will replace 7.4 million jobs by 2030 and create only 5 million new ones, thus cutting 2.4 million jobs from the market.
A World Economic Forum study also shows that new jobs will make up for just 30 percent of lost ones, and the rest of the workers that were laid off will not find new employment.
The service industry was a safe bet for anyone seeking employment, but robots have not only replaced jobs in the manufacturing industry, but they are also making them disappear in the service industry, and this is a threat to employment.
A wider application of artificial intelligence will overturn the logic of market policy; the value of economic growth must be re-evaluated.
The application of artificial intelligence will result in a rapid increase of production value, but the number of employed people will drop rapidly as well, and this will turn the relationship between GDP and employment on its head. Governments will have choose between increasing GDP or employment.
Large-scale unemployment will likely result in social turmoil and perhaps even war. Only a small minority of people will stand to profit from artificial intelligence, while the wealth gap will continue to expand rapidly.
This will be a crisis created by humans and it could be the most important issue that the world will have to deal with this century.
The government should spend more time on exposing and responding to these potential crises created by new technology. It should think less about playing to the galleries and more about having a vision and planning ahead.
Chao Wen-heng is an associate research fellow at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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