Types of jobs

 

All work can be divided into four categories: routine and non-routine, cognitive and manual. Routine work is the same day-to-day, while non-routine work constantly varies. Within these two varieties, there is work that primarily requires the use of our brains (cognitive) and work that primarily requires our bodies (manual).

 

Job creation by work category.[6]

 

As we can see in the previous graph, while all four types of work once followed paths of growth, the creation of routine jobs has stagnated since 1990. If you find it unfair that I have set a cutoff in 2015, let’s look at the most current data. As of January 2023, only the sector dedicated to non-routine and cognitive occupations has continued to grow strongly, already surpassing the decline triggered by the pandemic, but the rest of the sectors are still below even pre-covid-19 levels. In a few decades, we may interpret the pandemic not only as the health crisis it generated but as the event that most accelerated the automation and robotization of processes.

 

Job creation since the start of the pandemic by work category.[7]

 

This is very easy to explain, as routine work is easier to replace with technology. We only need to provide clear rules to the machines, and they will then be able to do a better job than us, without break times other than for technical issues, without labor rights such as salary or vacations, and without strikes.

 

Examples abound, but let’s start with something we all probably know. Think of a fast-food restaurant that cooks hamburgers. Can’t a mechanical arm place the hamburgers on the hot grill, then flip them over and finally place them between buns? Can’t something similar be done with pizzas? Of course. Don’t just take my word for it, see it for yourselves in the following video because this is already happening.

 

Flippy, the robot created by Miso Robotics that cooks hamburgers at Caliburger.[8]
 

In 2017, Andrew Puzder, president of CKE Restaurants Inc., became known when former US President Donald J. Trump nominated him for the position of Secretary of Labor, although his bid did not succeed due to his statements regarding the minimum wage. In that sense, Puzder was blunt in stating that for him and other entrepreneurs in the gastronomic sector, it was no coincidence that projects like Caliburger or Eatsa, which is a restaurant where the public does not see or interact with company staff, but rather pick up their food from compartments that resemble gym lockers or postal office lockers, providing a contactless experience. For Puzder, this creative and innovative wave arises there because this area has one of the highest minimum wages in the United States. From his point of view, while technology is getting cheaper, regulations make the cost per worker increasingly higher, which drives automation.

 

The same happens today in a car factory. In 2015 I was lucky enough to visit one of Ford’s plants in Cologne, Germany, where they produced the Fiesta model. This plant currently has approximately 4,100 employees and produces more than 1,700 cars a day. Four thousand one hundred employees. It sounds like a high number for any factory without a doubt, but the reality is that when I went inside, the humans I saw as part of the production line, assembling and painting were very few. Most of the employees I found inside the factory were performing tasks that were not far from being replaced by other robots. I insist that you do not take my word as absolute truth but rather ask you to see for yourselves in the following short video showing how an automotive factory operates.

 

This is how a car is made today, with robotic arms and interconnected assembly lines.[9]
 

As you can see, the factory is mostly composed of robotic “arms” that interact harmoniously, passing a piece between them, assembling each one with absolute precision, and even painting the cars at the end of the production line.

 

Sure, but we are talking about Germany, where they enjoy high education standards and do not currently face high unemployment rates, so this does not represent a major problem for them today. Somewhere would be the rest of the 4,100 employees of the Ford plant that I could not see, perhaps performing some cognitive, non-manual work, as we probably imagined the factory. In fact, just as South Korea is the country with the highest density of robots, with a total of 1,000 robots per 10,000 human workers in 2022, having grown its base by about 3% compared to the previous year; Germany is the European country with the most robots per worker, with 397 per 10,000[10]. However, within the eurozone, Greece, one of the countries with the highest unemployment rate, with a rate close to 12%[11], is the country with the lowest robot density per capita, with only 17 per 10,000 workers[12]. This is relevant because it indicates that more robots do not necessarily mean more unemployment, but we will delve into this later.

 

Let’s get a little closer to home. Lima, Peru, 2017. No one can dispute the cultural value of Peru, its traditions, and its fabulous culinary offer; however, there was something else that caught my attention on several of its streets: human traffic lights. Heavily trafficked corners where instead of placing an electric and luminous traffic light, the State decided to put a person with green and red sticks to guide drivers.

 

Again, let’s not go so far, here in Buenos Aires, and in many other cities in the world you can see traffic officers, correcting complicated situations, even though those corners indeed have traffic lights and signage around them. The problem is that both pedestrians and drivers decide to do as they please whenever they can and break the order we are accustomed to, and that happens practically every day at the central corner of Callao and Corrientes, in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, around five in the afternoon, a time when we can easily identify the traffic personnel approaching the place with their yellow jackets to correct the situation. In fact, if we talk about traffic officers, perhaps we should also talk about police officers. If I ask you to imagine a police station, the result will obviously depend on your previous experiences and what you have seen in the media of your country. However, a common point, regardless of how clean or big the place is, is that you probably imagined some desks and police officers taking notes, making reports that they then place on a large pile of papers. That is not the case with the Dubai Smart Police Station. The new smart police stations in Dubai are basically places with many screens that allow users to make complaints immediately, without needing another person’s intervention. The terminals there allow reporting a theft, a bounced check, a labor complaint, human trafficking, requesting help at our home, and many other procedures such as requesting our criminal record certificate or paying fines.

 

I am not discussing here, yet, the distribution of wealth, the social division of labor, or social mobility, but are those jobs necessary?, are they rewarding?, don’t they alienate the worker?, can’t it be solved by a machine? A traffic light, for example, does not charge a salary and requires little maintenance, while working 24 hours a day. And if someone does not respect it, aren’t there fines? Today they have become photo fines that are automatically taken. In 2022, there were 570,966 violations in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires for running a red light, a number 7 times higher[13] than the number recorded in 2019, before the pandemic.

 

Careful, I understand that what I said may seem controversial, but the problem goes further, and you will see it in the following pages. The idea is that we can think about it together, not impose absolute truths on anyone. We spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, at our jobs, which is equivalent to 23.8% of our available time. If we have at least one hour of commuting to and from work, those 5 hours represent an additional 3% of our time. Added to this are another 8 hours daily for sleeping, 7 days a week, which equates to another 33% of our time. Just like that, and assuming we truly work no more than 8 hours and our daily commute to and from work takes no more than an hour, we already seal at least 60% of our weekly time as working adults. If life passes us by working, it would be nice if at least it were in tasks we enjoy and do not alienate us. Unfortunately, there are studies that suggest that between 60% and 85% of people hate their jobs[14]. While we remember that routine jobs were the basis and beginning of the rise of the middle class after the Industrial Revolution in the world, today we see how these jobs are now increasingly scarce, leaving, a priori, only two types of jobs with optimistic prospects.

 

Let’s now imagine our economy as a plane with four engines, where it can even fly with only two of them working, as long as both keep roaring in unison, preventing us from crashing. But, what happens when one of our remaining two engines starts to fail?[15] And if both fail? The advanced fields of robotics and AI today represent a latent threat to those final two engines because we have managed to start teaching machines to process data similarly to how our brains do.

 

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[6] Dvorkin, M. (2019). Labor Market Polarization across the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Accessed on June 15, 2021, from https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2019/february/labor-market-polarization-us.

[7] Job polarization | FRED Blog. Fred Blog St Louis Federal Reserve Bank. (2016). Accessed on May 10, 2022, from https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/04/job-polarization.

[8] DeMuro, R. (2018). Flippy the Burger Flipping Robot at CaliBurger Pasadena. YouTube. Accessed on April 19, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJVOfqunm5E.

[9] Europe, F. (2013). How to make a Ford Fiesta- in 86 seconds! YouTube. Accessed on June 15, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErSZmor1qok.

[10] International Federation of Robotics. (2022). China overtakes USA in robot density. Accessed on January 5, 2023, from https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/china-overtakes-usa-in-robot-density.

[11] European Union (2023.) Euro area unemployment at 6.6%. Accessed on April 18, 2023, from https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/16324762/3-31032023-BP-EN.pdf.

[12] Daniilidis, K., Guibas, L., Kavraki, L., Koumoutsakos, P., Kyriakopoulos, K., Lygeros, J., Pappas, G. J., Triantafyllou, M., & Tsiotras, P. (2021). Robotics in the AI era: A vision for a Hellenic Robotics Initiative. Accessed on May 15, 2023, from https://doi.org/10.1561/2300000069.

[13] Santander, D. (2023). More than half a million people ran a red light in CABA last year, six times more than in 2019. Infobae. Accessed on May 13, 2023, from https://www.infobae.com/sociedad/2023/05/13/mas-de-medio-millon-de-personas-cruzaron-un-semaforo-en-rojo-en-caba-el-ano-pasado-seis-veces-mas-que-en-2019.

[14] Gallup, I. (2023). Gallup. Accessed on May 20, 2023, from https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx.

[15] Santens S. (2016). Robots will take your job. Boston Globe. Accessed on February 2, 2021, from https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2016/02/24/robots-will-take-your-job/5lXtKomQ7uQBEzTJOXT7YO/story.html.