Automation is not Reserved just for the Unskilled Laborers

When people talk about automation in the world of work, they assume that it is the unskilled blue-collar laborers that will be the victims of it. As factories and warehouses depend more and more on machines to operate, thousands upon thousands of people who depend on their hands and feet for a living will be out of work, with nowhere to go since other menial jobs they are qualified to do are also disappearing. In this scenario, the wealth gap between the uneducated, vulnerable to automation, and the educated, evermore in demand due to their ability to thinking critically and innovate, will only become wider and wider.

But is it fair to assume that it is only who the society currently sees as unskilled or semiskilled who will become the victims of automation in the workplace? There is no denying that factories and warehouses, which depend on repetitive labor, will become more efficient and less costly when human beings, who make mistakes and get tired from doing repetitive work for hours, are replaced by robots that can run all day long doing the same thing. But perhaps the same force of the idea of replacing less efficient humans with more efficient robots also applies when the workers are not menial laborers but highly educated?

A pharmacist is a great example of a highly educated professional vulnerable to automation. A good chunk of a pharmacist's job consists of reading a prescription written by a doctor and then going to the storage area of the pharmacy to find the right medicines. In essence, this part of his or her work is no different from a warehouse worker who is responsible for picking out the right items from aisles of stacks. While media outlets report on the latest robots that automatically move items around a warehouse, few consider whether the same robots and automated processes can also be applied in the back of a pharmacy.

Of course, there are essential differences between a warehouse and a pharmacy that makes automating the former more cost-effective than the latter. The large size of a warehouse, especially the kind operated by major e-commerce firms with hundreds of thousands of items under one roof, makes it sensible to invest a relatively large initial cost to buy and install robots that can replace hundreds of workers otherwise needed to do the same job. Thought in the long term, the costs of buying and maintaining robots become much cheaper than the equivalent humans. For pharmacies manned by one or a few people, the cost incentive is just not there.

Perhaps the reluctance of automating a pharmacy extends beyond cost considerations. The general public respects the well-educated, like pharmacists, who put in years of education that many cannot tolerate just to reach their specialized positions. Without explicitly putting it into words, the same general public views many menial workers toiling in the depths of factories and warehouses as invisible and even disposable, who do not evoke the same feeling of respect that pharmacists and other educated people do. Hence, the general public is more sympathetic to job losses suffered among white collars than blue collars.

Yet, whatever the general public thinks of warehousemen and pharmacists, for businesses to thrive, ultimately the logic of cost and benefit wins out, especially in an age when labor shortage among the highly educated is a growing problem in much of the world. While pharmacies employ a much smaller number of people than a warehouse does, a qualified pharmacist demands a much higher salary and takes much more effort to train and recruit than a warehouse worker would. Even if automation does not lead to the kind of scalability and cost saving in a pharmacy that can be achieved in a pharmacy, in the long run, labor shortage may force automation to happen anyways.

That transition of highly skilled positions to automation is necessary if we are to make high-end services they offer to more people at much more affordable prices. A large pharmacy does not need more than one pharmacist who is there to check on robots picking the stockage area to fulfill prescriptive orders. The pharmacist is freed from labor intensive part of the work, and can focus on the customer-facing, and some would say, much more essential aspect of explaining how to use the medicines that patients are receiving. And if every pharmacy only needs one pharmacist, that means more pharmacies can be established, many in previously underserved areas, with the same number of pharmacists.

It is time, then, for society to both think about and accept automation in more workplaces, even those strictly involving the employment of the highly educated and specialized professions like pharmacists. Once the general public moves to accept that it is not only the unskilled and semiskilled workers that are to be replaced by robots, society can rethink the value of certain specialization, and where possible, reallocate highly educated resources in ways that can benefit a larger segment of society, without being constrained by what the highly educated is "supposed" to do based on common conception.