The robots are coming for our jobs.

According to a report from analyst firm Forrester, a total of 6 percent of all U.S. jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI) and automated robotics by 2021. We’re already seeing the cusp of this wave with the advent of autonomous vehicle fleets from Uber and “humanizing” IBM’s Watson for better customer service.

The Forrester report, cited by The Guardian, says that the robot-revolution will start first with customer service–where Amazon.com’s Alexa (and Echo), Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri and numerous other customer-facing AI-systems — followed closely by the truck and taxi industry — where Uber, Google and Tesla already have a head start, and autonomous-drone delivery is already beginning to make inroads with help from Flirtey and DroneDeploy.

“Solutions powered by AI/cognitive technology will displace jobs, with the biggest impact felt in transportation, logistics, customer service, and consumer services,” the report said. “Early movers who have amassed large data sets will have created a baseline set of AI/cognitive services. Other disruptors will begin to use these services to scale their businesses and steal customers from competitors.”

Businesses turn to robots and AI to cut costs and increase efficiency. It’s just good sense to employ a service that can tirelessly commit a repetitive and boring task–that’s what industrial robots are good at–AI and autonomous robots need to be good at complex, context-dependent tasks that people currently do well: driving, talking to other people, acting on personal or cultural information (such as shopping or medicine).

This industry change will necessarily replace people and change the type of jobs that people will train for in the future.

Microsoft’s AI chat bot Cortana is part of the vanguard of customer-facing expert systems that can digest the content and context of conversational speech. Image credit: Courtesy of Microsoft

The robot revolution also holds hope for jobs as it cuts them

Workers of the U.S.: Abandon ye not hope. While robots and AI may be eliminating almost 8.6 million jobs in the next five years (a figure cited by The New York Post based on the 6 percent job loss from the Forrester report), the rise of robot overlords will open up a whole new venue for technicians, developers and experts.

Last year, Andrew Moore, the dean of the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, spoke to Wired Magazine to talk about the transformative effect of new technology over the destructive implications. Jobs replaced by AI, Moore suggests, would give rise to different jobs.

“Technology does change the mix of jobs. You’re going to see doctors taking more of the role that involves the personal interaction with patients and less of the role of trying to keep huge amounts of evidence in their head. The nurse may become more prestigious than the doctor,” Moore said. “But if you look around, there are also new kinds of creatives roles being produced across the market. There are so many jobs that didn’t exist just a few years ago.”

Wired also interviewed Forrester Research Principal Analyst J.P. Gownder, who used an example of an airport in Dusseldorf, Germany that installed a robotic valet system. This setup replaced human valets but opened up the necessity for technicians and repair crews for servicing these new and complex systems.

“While these technologies are both real and important, and some jobs will disappear because of them, the future of jobs overall isn’t nearly as gloomy as many prognosticators believe,” Gownder wrote in the report. “In reality, automation will spur the growth of many new jobs—including some entirely new job categories.”

The rise of AI also means developers and engineers have a leg-up in this new industry. Machine intelligent systems don’t build themselves and require giant reservoirs of data to work from as well as human reasoning needed to design and guide how these new systems think and interact with humans and other systems.

According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), an association dedicated to the advancement of technology, jobs in artificial intelligence are already beginning to ramp up and trained workers in that field are in short supply.

“If you look hard enough, any industry you can think of has a need for AI and machine learning,” Geoff Gordon, acting head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, told IEEE’s The Institute.

IEEE also noted that a report from Shivon Zilis, a founding partner at the investment fund Bloomberg Beta, cited that the three biggest employers looking for AI expertise include Apple, Google and IBM (companies already mentioned above) but that the demand crosses industry boundaries including business logistics, advertising, medicine, agriculture and transportation.

Of course, this only covers the computer science side of the transformative effect of AI’s entry into the enterprise landscape. A number of implied spaces still exist for training networks, repairing and maintaining the physical infrastructure that underlies them, even roles for interfacing non-experts with expert systems such as consultants and liaisons for CEOs and CMOs to fine-tune AI systems to their needs.

The brave new future of AI may yet see the loss of more than 9 million jobs, but it’s also obvious it will grow an entirely new branch of employment on the technology tree.

Featured image credit: Clever Cogs! via photopin (license)