Hawking: Automation and artificial intelligence could replace 77% of jobs in China

[51CTO.com original article] World-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has recently warned the world again. He warned that artificial intelligence and increasing automation will replace a large number of middle-class jobs, leading to greater social inequality and possibly causing serious political turmoil.

Hawking wrote in a column in the British newspaper The Guardian: "Factory automation has already made many traditional manufacturing workers unemployed. The rise of artificial intelligence is likely to spread unemployment to the middle class, leaving only care, creation and supervision jobs for humans."

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Hawking is not the only one who holds this view. More and more experts are worried about the impact of technology on the labor market in the next few years or decades. They believe that AI has greatly improved industrial production efficiency, but for ordinary people, it means unemployment and uncertainty because their jobs are gradually replaced by machines.

Technology has already destroyed many traditional manufacturing and blue-collar jobs, and the next step could bring a similar disaster to the middle class.

According to a report published in February this year by Citibank and Oxford University, 47% of jobs in the United States may be replaced by robots. In the United Kingdom, the proportion is 35%. In China, the proportion is as high as 77%, and in OECD countries, an average of 57% of jobs will be automated.

Three of the world's 10 largest employers are replacing workers with robots.

Hawking said automation will "accelerate the already growing economic inequality around the world, as the internet and various platforms allow a small number of people to make huge profits by employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it will also cause huge damage to society."

He believes that this economic anxiety is one of the reasons for the rise of the right wing and the prevalence of populist politics in the West. He said: "We live in a world where economic inequality is gradually widening, not narrowing. Many people find that their living standards and even their ability to make a living are threatened. They are looking for a way out. Trump's election as US president and Britain's exit from the EU may be due to this reason."

Hawking further warned that this problem, along with population explosion, climate change and disease, puts "us at the most dangerous moment in the history of human development." He said humanity must unite to overcome these challenges.

Hawking has previously expressed concerns about artificial intelligence for another reason: that it could surpass and replace humans. "The full development of artificial intelligence could lead to human extinction," he said in late 2014. "Artificial intelligence will develop rapidly on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans are limited by the slow pace of biological evolution and cannot compete with it, or will eventually be replaced."

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