Order a roast beef sandwich from an Arby car in East Los Angeles and you can talk to Tori, an artificially intelligent voice assistant who will take care of your order and send it to line cooks.
“He’s not sick,” says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed AI voice in their Arby’s franchise this year in Ontario, California. “She is OK. And its reliability is great.
The pandemic not only threatened the health of Americans when it attacked the U.S. in 2020, but could also have posed a long-term threat to many of its jobs. Faced with labor shortages and higher labor costs, companies are beginning to automate jobs in the services sector that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines could not easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand.
Past experience suggests that these waves of automation end up creating more jobs than they destroy, but that they also disproportionately eliminate less skilled jobs on which many low-income workers depend. The growing pains resulting from the US economy could be severe.
Were it not for the pandemic, Siddiqi probably wouldn’t have bothered to invest in new technology that could alienate existing employees and some customers. But it has gone smoothly, he says, “Basically, fewer people are needed, but those people now work in the kitchen and other areas.”
Ideally, automation can redistribute workers into better and more interesting jobs, as long as they can get the right technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But even though this is happening now, it is not moving fast enough, he says.
Worse, a whole class of jobs created may now be at risk when manufacturing began to deploy more automation. “Robots escaped the manufacturing sector and entered the much larger service sector,” he says. “I considered the contact work to be safe. I was completely surprised. “
Improvements in robot technology allow machines to do many tasks that were previously required of people: throwing too much pizza, transporting hospital bedding, inspecting indicators, sorting goods. The pandemic accelerated its adoption. Robots, after all, cannot get sick or spread diseases. Nor do they ask for free time to attend to unexpected emergencies.
Economists at the International Monetary Fund found that past pandemics had encouraged companies to invest in machines so they could increase productivity, but also kill low-skilled jobs. “Our results suggest that concerns about the rise of robots amid the COVID-19 pandemic seem justified,” they wrote in a January paper.
The consequences could fall more heavily on women with less training who disproportionately occupy the low- and middle-wage jobs most exposed to automation and viral infections. These jobs include salespeople, administrative assistants, cashiers and hospital assistants and those caring for the sick and elderly.
Employers seem eager to put the machines down. A survey conducted last year by the World Non-Profit Economic Forum found that 43% of companies planned to reduce their workforce as a result of new technology. Since the second quarter of 2020, business investment in equipment has grown by 26%, more than double the global economy.
According to the International Federation of Robotics, a trade group, the fastest growth is expected in mobile machines that clean the floors of supermarkets, hospitals and warehouses. The same group also expects an increase in robot sales to provide buyers with information or deliver room service orders to hotels.
Restaurants have been one of the most visible adopters of robots. In late August, for example, the salad chain Sweetgreen announced that it would buy the start of Spyce kitchen robotics, which makes a machine that cooks vegetables and grains and listens them in bowls.
Nor are they just robots: AI-based programs and services are also on the rise. Starbucks has been automating behind-the-scenes work to keep track of a store’s inventory. More stores have moved to automatic payment.
Scott Lawton, CEO of the Arlington-based restaurant chain, Virginia, Bartaco, had trouble last fall getting servers back to their restaurants when they reopened during the pandemic.
So he decided to do without them. With the help of a software company, his company developed an online ordering and payment system that customers could use using their phones. Now diners only need to scan a barcode in the center of each table to access a menu and order food without waiting for a server. Workers bring food and drink to their tables. And when they finish eating, customers pay for their phones and leave.
Innovation has shaved the number of staff, but workers are not necessarily worse. Each Bartaco location (there are 21) now has up to eight assistant directors, about twice the pre-pandemic total. Many have been old servers and go around the tables to make sure everyone has what they need. Annual salaries are paid from $ 55,000 instead of hourly wages.
The tips are now shared among all other employees, including dishwashers, who now typically earn $ 20 an hour or more, much higher than their pre-pandemic pay. “We don’t have the labor shortage you’re reading in the news,” Lawton says.
The rise in automation has not stopped an impressive rebound in the U.S. labor market, at least so far.
The U.S. economy lost 22.4 million amazing jobs in March and April 2020, when the pandemic storm hit U.S. hiring since it quickly recovered: employers went recover 17 million jobs by April 2020. In June, they posted a record 10.1 million open jobs and complain they can’t find enough workers.
Behind the hiring boom is an increase in consumer spending, many of which have gone through the crisis in an unexpectedly good financial way, thanks to both federal relief controls and, in many cases, the accumulated savings in working from home and skip daily commutes.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, hopes employers are likely to look for workers for a long time.
On the one hand, many Americans are busy returning to work, some because they are still concerned about the health risks and daycare issues of COVID-19, others because of the generous federal unemployment benefits, which they will expire nationwide on September 6th.
In addition, a large number of Baby Boom workers are retiring. “The job market will be very, very tight for the foreseeable future,” Zandi says.
For the time being, the short-term benefits of the economic recovery are overwhelming job losses resulting from automation, the effects of which tend to appear gradually over a period of years. This may not last. Last year, researchers at the University of Zurich and the University of British Columbia found that so-called jobless recoveries over the past 35 years, in which economic output recovered recessions faster than employment, could be explained by the loss of jobs vulnerable to automation.
Despite strong hiring since the middle of last year, the U.S. economy remains 5.3 million jobs below what it had in February 2020. And Lydia Boussour, Oxford’s leading economist Economics, estimated last month that 40% of missing jobs are vulnerable to automation, especially food preparation, retail sales and manufacturing.
Some economists worry about automation pushing workers to lower-paying positions. Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University estimated in June that up to 70% of U.S. wage stagnation between 1980 and 2016 could be explained by machines that they replace humans who perform routine tasks.
“A lot of the automated jobs were in the middle of the skill distribution,” says Acemoglu. “They no longer exist, and the workers who used to do them are now doing jobs with less skill.”
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AP Economics writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this story.