One In Three Jobs Will Be Taken By Software Or Robots By 2025, Says Gartner

dcblogs writes: "Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025," said Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's research director at its big Orlando conference. "New digital businesses require less labor; machines will make sense of data faster than humans can," he said. Smart machines are an emerging "super class" of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind. Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice test for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text. This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, says Gartner. "Knowledge work will be automated."

Comments

Humans Need Not Apply

[The Raven]

There are a lot of comments here about how this is futurist doom & gloom. And it certainly could be. But the difference between the doom of the past and the doom of now is that we now have working, commercial examples of the robots that could replace humans. It was theory before... now it's just a matter of economy of scale and refinement.

CGP Gray did an excellent piece on this already.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PRMan]

It's worse, universities are still putting out tons of art majors, lawyers, English majors, History majors, etc. that will NEVER find a job. But if you look at all the jobs available (simple programming of factory equipment, for example), there is NOBODY teaching those skills.

Not only are universities charging outrageous amounts, but they are putting out useless graduates that can't get jobs because they are trained for things that no longer exist.

Re:Yes yes yes

[PopeRatzo]

People work more because they want more, they see that shiny new Iphone as a necessity rather than a privilege.

You really believe everyone secretly covets an iPhone?

I saw a 12 year old kid playing with his iPhone. You think he had to go to work to get it?

You didn't address the most important point I made: Why should everyone be expected to work? By making the "labor participation rate" an important indicator, that's what we're saying. What we're told we should have is 100% employment. Unfortunately, three year-olds aren't really good for a whole lot of productivity.

So I'll repeat myself, just for you: What happens when all the goods and services we want no longer require 70% of the population to work? Or 50%? Or 30%? What happens to the rest? Either we figure out as a society how those people are going to live or... I don't want to think about the alternative.

Re:Yes yes yes

[BringsApples]

You're 100% correct. And let me add that there are currently (according to google) 1,645 billionaires in the world. Knowing that, we must insert that there are 7.125 billion (7,125,000,000) people in the world. Looking carefully at what it takes to support the life of a billionaire, we find that each billionaire requires a certain amount of people to support them. So just running simple math here, divide 1,645 into 7.125 billion and you get 4,331,307. Does that mean that every billionaire requires 4.331 million people to support their existence? Well, seeing as how money is nothing without attached-debt, I'd say so. No one can have a bunch of money, without a bunch of people in debt.

So not only are people working harder than they were in the 80's, the rich folks are living much more lavishly than they were in the 80's.