The future, brought to you by robots

Sometimes Taylor Phillips feels like he’s wearing a tinfoil hat. 

When he tells people robots could be coming for their jobs, it sounds like a movie premise or a doom-and-gloom prediction. But the risk is real, and Phillips believes it could happen in the next decade.

“You need to start thinking about your job and how easy it is to do. And is there an app or something that can help you do your job a lot easier now? Because that’s where we are today. In 10 years, that app could be doing your job,” Phillips said.

Phillips is the creator of Futureproof Bama, a nonprofit to educate people about the existence of technological unemployment — the replacement of human jobs with machines and software — as well as to help Birmingham and the rest of the state get ready for the major shift he believes is coming for the job market.

The idea came from his own work for a company called AutoGov, where he created an algorithm that can collect and verify information independently to determine whether a person is eligible for Medicaid.

“In doing that, I always kind of had in the back of my mind, ‘Wow, this could potentially displace a lot of people,’” Phillips said.

As he began reading about technological unemployment, Phillips found studies that could spell serious trouble for the Alabama economy. Among 40 jobs the Alabama Department of Labor identified as growth areas by 2024, Phillips said 16 of them have a higher than 50 percent chance of being replaced by software or machines, according to a 2013 U.K. study published by the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment.

“As a state, we are so grossly unprepared for the next 10 years,” Phillips said.

The Oxford Martin study, written by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, estimates that 47 percent of U.S. employment is at “high risk” for automation in the next two decades.

A paper published in March by the National Bureau of Economic Research, written by Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University, said that for every robot per thousand workers, up to six people will lose their jobs.

While many of the people he talks to imagine robots and software taking over factory or fast food jobs, Phillips said the impact will reach both blue and white collars. Jobs highly susceptible to technological replacement include accountants, mechanics, truck drivers, personal care aides, clerks, dental hygienists, customer service, manufacturing and more across agriculture, health care and other fields.

If a job requires a lot of repetitive tasks, Phillips said, eventually there will be a machine that can do it with fewer costs and no human error.

Joseph Baker, the creator of the Facebook group “I Believe in Birmingham,” has a strong interest in the future of technological unemployment and compared it to a new Industrial Revolution. Like individual craftsmen who were replaced by faster and cheaper factories, advancing technology could cause career fields to drastically shrink, leaving thousands unemployed.

“When they are [replaced], that’s going to be pretty darn disruptive because the incentive is going to be there for companies to absolutely automate and take away those jobs,” Baker said. “If you can replace your four $80,000 a year accountants with a piece of software that will do the same thing they do and better, you have a pretty huge incentive to do that.”

Fetch, a Lakeview recruiting company that opened in July 2015, has embraced automation for what they feel is a better way to connect businesses and potential hires. Chief Technology Officer Jason Hutson said their website is driven by an algorithm to match job hunters’ profiles with job postings.

“We’re basically taking the need for recruiting out of hiring,” Hutson said.

By relying on an algorithm rather than human recruiters, Hutson said, Fetch’s overhead is much lower than a traditional recruiting agency, and their lower fees make Fetch more attractive to companies.

“We believe fully in automation,” Fetch founder Chase Morrow said.

Fetch has allowed Phillips to use their office for Futureproof presentations because they see themselves as part of that next wave of business. Morrow said while it’s hard to predict exactly how much automation will take hold, he doesn’t doubt that it’s coming. He pointed to travel agencies as an industry that has shrunk due to the growth of websites offering those same services.

Career fields that tend to have a lower chance of automation or technological replacement are those that depend on “traits of a person that are hard to replicate” such as creativity, social awareness, personal relationships and perception, Phillips said. However, even Birmingham residents in “safe” jobs will feel the effects if technological unemployment reaches the point that Phillips expects.

“What happens when all of those [unemployed] people are gone? What happens when they stop coming downtown because they don’t have a reason? What does downtown become?” Phillips said.

Phillips and Baker both see technological unemployment as a certainty — and a fast approaching one, at that. Nationwide, some who study and discuss technological unemployment believe it will be a short-term problem, as previously unimagined jobs will appear in the wake of new technology to replace disappearing fields. Others believe that machines will become so efficient that there will be a long-lasting decline in the need for human labor, and cities and countries will have to grapple with the needs of a fundamentally altered society.

At Fetch, Hutson and Morrow are optimistic that as automation takes away some jobs, they’ll be replaced with new career fields relatively quickly. In their own industry, Morrow said he would expect to see recruiters moving into more internal roles working for single companies rather than agencies. Hutson said since many of these new careers will require re-training for the unemployed workforce, job training itself could grow as an industry.

“I think it’s where the world is headed for sure, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” Morrow said.

Whether the effects are short or long term, Baker, who was part of the steering committee for the city of Birmingham’s 2013 comprehensive plan, believes the city’s preparation for the future job market is “abysmally low.”

Phillips’ solution is somewhat counterintuitive: Rather than hitting the brakes on technology advancements, he believes Birmingham needs to innovate as quickly as possible.

“If you start trying to fight technological unemployment, the only way to really do it is to say, ‘Let’s stop automating things.’ And if you stop automating, then everybody else in the world is going to start. So if you don’t do it, and you don’t do it quickly, you’re going to get left in the dust,” he said.

If Birmingham can position itself as a home for companies that are advancing technology in different fields, Phillips believes the city will have a chance to capture the next wave of jobs in software development, robot maintenance and other “fringe jobs” that will appear as machines are put to use in more places.

“Finding out what those jobs are is going to be what saves us in the long run,” Phillips said.

“We need a massive, truly massive investment of capital into technologies that are going to be the technologies of this century,” Baker said. “If we’re one of the places that has a lot of research and development and startups in those fields, then we’re going to increase our influence and our affluence.”

With Futureproof Bama, Phillips fully expects his nonprofit might not even exist in 10 years, as automation may have become a reality by that point. In the meantime, however, he’s spending the nonprofit’s first year just getting the word about technological unemployment out to as many people as he can.

There’s more than one option to help prepare Birmingham for technological unemployment, and Phillips said he’s still figuring out which combination of tactics he plans to take. Re-training programs for adults in the workforce could help with short-term job loss by showing them how to transition to new fields if their jobs are replaced. Education programs from elementary school to college could be more effective in the long-term, by teaching Birmingham’s next generation to identify technologically “safe” careers and the fringe jobs that come with new innovations.

Futureproof Bama could also be a tool to find and encourage Birmingham companies that are advancing technology, in order to keep those potential jobs in the city.

The effects and reach of technological unemployment are hard to predict, which makes finding the right response even more difficult. However, Phillips is hoping to spread enough awareness that Birmingham residents can be prepared for the future, whatever that looks like.

“The way you view life and the way you view your job is not exactly how it’s going to be,” Phillips said.

For more information, go to futureproofbama.org.