Ashley is a typical millennial who has been a customer service representative for 5 years. Even if the job is routinary, Ashley loves just the way it is. Although sometimes, she gets bored doing the same thing every single day, and other times, she feels unproductive and inefficient. But when his company began to invest in automation, Ashley began to see some changes in how they run the business — and Ashley is not happy with these changes.

Ashley is the face of millions of employees in all industries all over the world, who is alarmed with the rise of automation, fearing of losing her beloved job over automated machines. In a report by the Brookings Institution, titled, “Automation and Artificial Intelligence: How Machines Affect People and Places, it is said that automation is a threat to 25% of jobs, especially the “boring and repetitive ones”  in the US alone. The study highlights the high-risk jobs which are automatable like: office administration, production, transportation, and food preparation. Thus, this exponential growth in automation has led to fear of job displacements of millions of workers. However, the fact still remains that: machines, no matter how smart they become, still need humans to make them work.
 
Automation’s main goal is to decrease human intervention, especially in industries with repetitive tasks. This aims to increase quality and efficiency, as well as to reduce costs in the workplace. And so, by lifting off routinary work, employees become more focused on more important and complicated roles. Thus, the myth behind automation as a threat is totally untrue.
 
In the same report by the Brookings Institution, it showed six basic tendencies in the interaction between humans and automation:
 
1. Automation Substitute for Labor – If a machine can do a task currently done by humans, it will do it with greater precision, speed, and at a lower cost—but there are limitations to such substitution.
 
2. Machines Substitute for Tasks, Not Jobs – A job is a collection of tasks, and even under the most aggressive scenarios, it is unlikely that machines will substitute for all tasks in any one occupation.
 
3. Automation Complements Labor – Workplace activity that isn’t taken over by automation is complemented by it—making the remaining human tasks more valuable.
 
4. Automation Increase Demand, Creating Jobs – Automation-driven cost and quality improvements can increase demand to a degree that offsets any would-be job losses.
 
5. Capital and Labor Augmentation Spurs Innovation – When machines handle routine, time-consuming activities, human capacity is freed-up to create new products and new tasks.
 
6. Tech Possibility is not the same as Tech Reality – There are many reasons why technological adoption falls short of potential, so it is a mistake to equate technological potential with likely projected outcomes.

While they say automation kills jobs, let us not forget it does create jobs. As Economists, Daron Acemoglu (MIT) and Pascual Restrepo (Boston University) suggest, “the future of work and the workforce will depend on the balance between labor replacing technologies – those that supplant human brawn or rote repetition – and, in their language, labor reinstating technologies, that generate new tasks at which humans have a comparative advantage”.

 
In this time where automation has become the next biggest thing, there is nothing to be afraid of. Machines can only do so much as it is programmed. While humans are programmed to evolve every now and then, to become better at anything, which makes them indispensable. Ashley and the million others in the working sector should not fear automation. 
 
It’s true that automation has slowly been changing the world. But it is also true that it has made the world a better place — to live and work in. 
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