Will Social Services be Changed by Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
I have often wondered how artificial intelligence and robotics might change social services, especially direct services to individuals with disabilities, seniors, and persons are risk. In a June 25th The Economist published a special report on artificial intelligence (AI) The authors described the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on work and society. This report documented how AI and robotics has impacted work from areas such as manufacturing through to professional services such as medicine and law.
Drawing on an article by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne on AI’s impact on jobs, they provided estimates of automation on 702 types of jobs. They estimated that 47% of jobs are at high risk for automation. Some jobs were surprising – they estimated that Accountants and Auditor were at very high risk of having their jobs substituted by automation or AI. Not surprisingly, given all the publicity on autonomous vehicles, transportation related jobs – truck drivers to taxi cabs were also at high risk of machine substitution.
Not all jobs that are affected are lost as they found that the number of legal assistants whose work has largely been replaced by computerized legal databases, have actually increased by 1.3% per year over the past 13 years. This is because easier access to more information has encourage courts to request more discoveries because information can be accessed more cheaply and easily.
In social services for positions such as direct care aides or teacher’s assistants, our intuition tells us these positions are not as easily replaced by computers because they are based on face to face relationship based work. Since 1996, in England, the number of nursing assistants has risen 909%, teaching assistants by 580% and care workers by 168%. These changes are due in part to changing demographics (more seniors and more children with complex disabilities) and changes in policy such as funding for intensive behavioral supports for persons with autism. These positions are more robust in the face of automation and robotics.
Returning to my original question, will social service jobs be substituted or heavily influenced by AI and robotics. The development of data analytics will make better information available on the effectiveness of treatments much like it has in medicine. We will be able to identify evidence based treatments through data analytics which will in turn change practices. The growth of front-end nursing and direct service jobs will likely continue because of an aging population. However, this trend feeds into the job polarization pattern that is driving income inequality. Over the past twenty years, low and high skill occupations are growing while middle skill positions are disappearing. The polarization of jobs is accompanied by income polarization so that high skill positions are more highly paid and low skill jobs remain poorly paid.
Can AI and robotics replace the face-to-face relationship oriented positions of direct care workers? For the time being, we have not developed robots with the intelligence and agility that can substitute the relationship and manual skills required of these positions. This by does not mean we won’t develop automated robots that will be able to parts of direct service jobs. There are already very able robots and machines able to do housekeeping, one part of many direct care positions. In Japan, they have developed simple robots to dispense medications. Face recognition software is so advanced today that it is often more accurate than humans. Androids or robots will be able reliably identify who they are giving the medication to. Face recognition automation could be used for care functions such as monitoring and supervision. Likewise, autonomous vehicles could easily replace many of the transportation tasks in direct care.
It is most likely that parts of the direct care work will be replaced by automation so that care work could be more focused on the people and relationship side of the work. This could enrich our work immensely since it is the face to face part of our work that has the largest positive impact on the people we work with.
— Peter Farnden, CEO, WJS Canada