The
Oxford professor who famously predicted that automation would threaten
47 percent of the U.S. labor force says retail jobs are next.
By Grant Turner/Bloomberg News.
Last year, Amazon introduced its first Amazon Go:
a brick-and-mortar convenience store that sells snacks, staples like
milk and bread, pre-made meals, and meal kits. But unlike a 7-Eleven,
there are no cashiers or checkout lanes in the Seattle store. Instead,
the entire process is automated: sensors track the items customers take
out of the store, and charge them accordingly. Amazon is also working on
another convenience-store concept
in which customers would order online and pick up groceries from their
cars, using license-plate-reading technology, sensors, artificial
intelligence, and machine learning to help facilitate faster checkouts.
It’s a revolutionary vision for the future of retail. It’s also one that
would require radically fewer human workers.
If
Amazon’s cashier-less concept gains traction, it could presage the
beginning of the end for retail employment in the United States.
Optimists argue that these new technologies will eventually create as
many jobs as they destroy, just as farming gave way to the Industrial
Revolution and manufacturing has given way to computing. But others see
the advent of artificial intelligence, coupled with automation, as a
more profound paradigm shift. Oxford Professor Carl Frey, along with artificial-intelligence expert Michael Osborne, forecast in a 2013 paper that automation would eventually threaten 47 percent of American jobs.
That
prediction has been criticized as alarmist by some. But the robot
revolution seems to have picked up in recent years, as America’s malls
and retail workers are replaced by online shopping and self-checkout screens.
And Frey says those jobs aren’t coming back in any form. “The lesson of
the twentieth century has been that most jobs that become automatable
eventually disappear,” the Oxford professor wrote
in an analysis for Citi that was circulated to clients this week.
“Retail is one industry in which employment is likely to vanish.” Frey
and his colleagues predict that 80 percent of cashier and sales jobs are
likely to be replaced by automation, robots, and technology, citing
examples like Amazon’s cashier-free grocery store and e-commerce, which
continues to gain traction even as brick-and-mortar retail companies
bury their heads in the sand.
If Frey’s predictions pan out, millions of retail jobs could be lost to automation in the coming decades. It’s a looming crisis that has received far less attention in the media or from politicians than job losses in the manufacturing sector: as The New York Times recently noted, the 89,000 workers in general merchandise stores that were laid off between October and April is “more than all of the people employed in the United States coal industry, which President Trump championed during the campaign as a prime example of the workers who have been left behind in the economic recovery.”
But it’s not just Washington that’s ignoring the sea change. “There is perhaps no industry as delusional as retail,” tech research firm CB Insights tweeted earlier this month, citing the C.E.O. of Foot Locker, who refused to admit on a recent earnings call that Amazon might be a threat to his company’s business.
According to Frey, competition from the likes of Amazon and other e-retailers is just the beginning. As the cost of automation drops, it becomes a more attractive alternative to hiring and paying retail workers, even at many stores that are less threatened by online rivals. The day may be coming when you enter a store and don’t encounter any employees at all.
Vanity Fair
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