If you earn your living by playing music, waging war, gardening or driving a car, watch your back! The “robots are coming for your jobs” mantra hovered over the symposium for three days, and participants had to deal with a disturbing thought: “What if I am soon replaced by a set of cables and buttons named Tom?” All jobs could be automated sooner or later. The good news is that certain occupations will stay out of Tom’s reach for still some time.

Cleaning Lady

Yes, cleaning ladies. There is a widespread belief that jobs requiring physical labour will be the first to fall into robotic hands. However, there are exceptions. Using the vacuum cleaner, arranging books, picking up toys from the floor, and cooking pasta is, for now, too much for one robot to take on. “Paradoxically, automation will not get to the cleaning ladies for many years,” says leading
AI researcher Dileep George. “We can envision single-purpose robots for specific tasks, but we have not yet developed the technology to face variable situations and multiple activities.”
An all-encompassing cleaning robot is not yet technically feasible; it might not be wanted, even if it existed. In the ‘50s, sociologist Warner Bloomberg conceived of a fully-automated home-based roasting process. As explained in a study conducted by Anna Salomons from Utrecht University and David Autor from MIT, the idea never took off. “No matter how intelligent new technologies are, if they do not generate human demand, they become smart garbage,” University of St. Gallen business Professor Caspar Hirschi wrote in an essay for Primer, a collection of background pieces prepared for the 48th St. Gallen Symposium and available online.

Potus et al.

“The President of the United States,” someone who used to work one door down from the Oval Office answered when asked which job will never be replaced by robots. His differences with Barack  Obama’s successor have not changed the views of Denis McDonough, Obama’s former chief of staff: A robot cannot be trusted with the nuclear codes. “Politicians are safe, provided they do uniquely human things,” he laughs. “Cognitive things? That is a different question.”
Even if a robot capable of dealing with the unpredictability of politics was invented, would people vote for him? “Robots can lead to augmented decision making, but I do not think we would ever accept being governed by them,” argues Chlöe Swarbrick, the youngest member of the New Zealand Parliament. “If the robot gets it wrong, who would you blame? The robot?”

Huarache Maker

Huaracheros (traditional Mexican shoemakers) design and make huaraches, hand-crafted leather sandals whose design predates Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. “Each huarache is different. They are valuable, because they are unique and have a story behind them,” explains Celia Ramírez, who coordinates a centre for entrepreneurship in Jalisco, Western Mexico. She is now training a group of women to upscale their production of huaraches, increasingly popular among trendy young people. Bob Bland, fashion designer and founder of the Women’s March, also points at the challenges faced by robots when working with “anything soft”: “I saw entire companies come in with all this technology and treat us, fashion professionals, as if we were stupid. They came to see that it was not possible to replicate what the humans were doing,” recalls Bland, “and certainly for artisanal techniques it is even more so. I have yet to see a robot able to sew a simple dress.”

Intellectual

The Cambridge dictionary defines an intellectual as “a person whose life or work centres around the study or use of ideas, such as in teaching or writing.” Could a robot ever be a recipient of a  Nobel Prize in Literature? For John Ralston Saul, one of Canada’s most prominent thinkers and a former president of PEN International, the answer is a clear no: “Machines are irrelevant. They are basically shards of memory, that interweave elements and try to draw conclusions,” Saul points out. “But they are completely missing the mutability of imagination, and the nature of intuition and common sense.”
An intellectual defending the relevance of intellectuals is no surprise, some would argue. Yet Akash Gupta, founder of GreyOrange, an Indian start-up in the field of robotics, also acknowledges the limitations of the machines he creates. “Robots might be able to have conversations, but these will be very objective, not emotional. That will be very hard to achieve,” he admits. Intellectuals can breathe a sigh of relief.

Jon Martin-Cullell