Some Filipinos may face the prospect of losing their jobs to robots, both the hardware robots and the software kind.
There are an increasing number of companies nowadays, though albeit in specialized job markets, that are recruiting workers though not of the human kind.
Robots are no longer confined within the science fiction world, as they take on the role of doing actual work that used to be performed by human beings. For now, these are mostly highly specialized work that require repetitive actions or high precision tasks.
Already, an automotive assembly plant based in Laguna has invested some PhP30 million to automate some portions of the assembly line.
Luis Marcelino, a Senior Vice President of Toyota Motor Philippines told News5: “Robotics and automation have a big effect on our operation now. Basically, two areas that are impacted are safety, and another is productivity. Just imagine, the whole day if a team member or a human being does the painting the whole day, he cannot stand eight hours doing it, so at some point he will get tired. So, it will affect the efficiency of his work.”
But it’s not just in terms of robots as machines. Nowadays, computer programs and system software are being crunched, some via artificial intelligence, so that the repetitive tasks of, say, clerks, telemarketers, data entry agents and other business process workers, can be automated.
Fortunato De La Peña, Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology said: “We really do not want to be very pessimistic, but the kind of work that we have been doing now, like the usual call center work, might be overtaken by technology. There are many things being done by people that can be replaced by more of these automation and artificial intelligence.”
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