In the Uncanny Valley of Industry 4.0

"Will work still be the place where we integrate individuals into societies?" asks End of Shift -- The Robots Are Taking Over, a new documentary on the future of work by filmmaker Klaus Martens that premiered last week on German and French public television (I make a brief appearance in it as well). It is a rhetorical question, and although not verbalized by the narrator before the end of the film, it is omnipresent from the first scene on and implicitly precludes all interviews and footage that Martens and his crew captured in Germany, France, Japan, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The topic is acute: An oft-cited Oxford study predicted in 2013 that software and robots will eliminate half of the human work force within the next two decades. This year's OECD report comes to a less pessimistic conclusion, emphasizing the heterogeneity of workers' tasks within occupations. It projects that "on average across the 21 OECD countries, 9 percent of jobs are automatable" (e.g. in Germany 12 percent, in France 9 percent, and in the US 9 percent), and low qualified workers will be most affected.