While the growth lobby continues to argue that Australia needs to run high levels of immigration in order to alleviate so-called skills shortages and to mitigate an ageing population, warnings continue to emerge about the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence, which threatens to replace many of today’s jobs.
The latest warning comes from Jon Williams, an analyst with professional services firm PwC, who argues that governments in Australia need to have a serious debate about how to prepare for the huge pending changes in the workforce. From The ABC:
“I think over the next couple of years, governments have to develop policies that allow them to support the development of new jobs and new industries or we’ll see what we saw in the recent US election, where there’s a huge disaffected group whose job in a factory disappeared and they haven’t been able to replace it,” Mr Williams told the ABC.
“The next five to 10 years will see jobs in the professions, in medicine, in the legal profession, in professional services starting to be replaced by computers and robots and machine learning”…
Williams said the caring professions and those that focus on empathy, intuition and creativity will continue to be in increasing demand, as will the STEM skills.
Last year, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) released a report estimating that in the next 10 to 15 years, more than five million jobs – almost 40% of the current Australian workforce – have a moderate to high likelihood of disappearing due to technological advancements. CEDA also called for governments to reconsider how we deal with reskilling workers as particular fields of employment disappear.
CEDA’s warning about potential mass job losses is curious because earlier this monththe organisation also called for Australia to increase its skilled immigration intake – a policy that would increase labour supply and worsen any future labour glut.
In any event, the whole ‘rise of the machines’ and artificial intelligence does debunk the claim that Australia needs to import large swathes of skilled workers to overcome an ageing population. The reality is likely to be the opposite: too many workers chasing too few jobs as robots and artificial intelligence takes over.
So why, then, is Australia running one of the highest immigration programs in the world, especially given the extreme pressure that it is placing on infrastructure, housing, schools, hospitals and overall livability?
And why are lobby groups like CEDA arguing for higher skilled immigration when they themselves acknowledge the problem around job losses as “a new but very different industrial revolution” takes place?
