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5 White Collar Jobs Robots Already Have Taken
bizwriter writes University of Oxford researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne estimated in 2013 that 47 percent of total U.S. jobs could be automated and taken over by computers by 2033. That now includes occupations once thought safe from automation, AI, and robotics. Such positions as journalists, lawyers, doctors, marketers, and financial analysts are already being invaded by our robot overlords. From the article: "Some experts say not to worry because technology has always created new jobs while eliminating old ones, displacing but not replacing workers. But lately, as technology has become more sophisticated, the drumbeat of worry has intensified. 'What's different now?' asked Leigh Watson Healy, chief analyst at market research firm Outsell. 'The pace of technology advancements plus the big data phenomenon lead to a whole new level of machines to perform higher level cognitive tasks.' Translated: the old formula of creating more demanding jobs that need advanced training may no longer hold true. The number of people needed to oversee the machines, and to create them, is limited. Where do the many whose occupations have become obsolete go?"
clickbait article is clickbait
Financial and Sports Reporters
Online Marketers
Anesthesiologists, Surgeons, and Diagnosticians
E-Discovery Lawyers and Law Firm Associates
Financial Analysts and Advisors
I think Season 1 Ep 3 of Black Mirror just about nailed the future of the global workforce smack on the head. The rarified elite will control 99.999% of the global wealth while the rest are used as a captive consumer base, forced to watch ads and rewarded in credits for providing energy to help provide "green energy" by toiling on exercise bikes all day and/or by being used as entertainment in reality tv or porn.
Financial and sports reporters - the examples are the types of stores that are full of facts and figures, and are better done by computers anyway. It's kind of like bemoaning computers taking away the human job of compiling telephone directories (remember those?). Not a lot of human touch needed there.
Online marketers - Really? Creating email subject lines? And I've stumbled onto those sites. They are only effective because they make it hard to click on anything OTHER than an ad. Not exactly stealing a desirable human job there.
E-discovery - i.e., Google for lawyers. And Wikipedia says they have 53K employees. Wait, I thought we were eliminating human jobs!
Financial advisers - good riddance. Most of them are just trying to get you to go for the investment with the highest commission, not the best for you. Computers will follow suit, but whatever.
Here's one they missed: radio DJs. You've heard these stations that are totally automated. No human touch, dry as a bone. The ones you want to listen to are still emceed by humans.
1. High volume data reporting such as sports and fiance where people are just looking for numbers. I mean... who cares? These are things that previously were often just charts. And really, which would you rather read? A chart that gives you the numbers of some natural language engine that turns the numbers into a bogus article? Give me the chart any day. And that never took much labor.
2. Scanning emails to to do targeted advertising. How is this a job anyone got taken away from them? For one thing, if something is going to read my emails, I'd prefer it be a robot rather then a human being. And beyond that, this is a job that wouldn't even exist without robots. After all, who is going to pay someone to go through all those emails to look for key words and then match those key words to targeted advertising? Dumb.
3. I'm not terribly worried about a supped up version of WebMD. But if that system can actually do that job... then that is amazing and a blessing. Look at all the people struggling with paying for medical bills. National budgets are getting strained with the expense. And then so many communities don't have first class hospitals to get access to such people even if they can pay/they're subsidized. This technology if it works will save lives and lower medical costs which is something we sorely need. The first two things listed were bullshit and the third if viable is fucking amazing.
4. Discovery in law suits is possibly the most boring thing anyone in law can ever be assigned to do. Whenever this happens they always put the most junior interns they can get their hands on to do it. It is a bullshit job that no one wants to do and a horrible waste of a law degree. Also... this could make court costs more reasonable... which is also good.
5. The problem with human financial analysts is that they get emotional. They get scared or they get greedy or they get lazy or they drawn into some fad. What is more, they're expensive again if you want a good one and that's just out of reach of most people. AI financial assistants will have their own problems. But something is better then nothing.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
He IS a defender robot. He is here to protect you. Grandma is protected at the bottom of the stairs.
#DeleteChrome
In the 50s it was container shipping that caused all the fuss that made the papers.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Create automation that replaces politicians, CEOs, and economists and watch the fixes fly!
We just need a set of context sensitive executive decision makers (deluxe model uses an actual radiation source for random numbers.). They can have options like 'steal from social programs', 'tax the poor', 'Give banks a handout', 'blame the other party', etc. CEO versions can include 'give employees food stamp applications', 'layoff', 'plunder the pension fund', etc.
Google "define computer"
Answer: "[...] a person who makes calculations, especially with a calculating machine."
That role was the first to go - the others are just side-effects.
There are huge problems in the world that desperately need solving. But most of the people who need those problems solved are too poor to pay for a solution. And most of the solutions depend on a major increase in knowledge (e.g. scientific research) which is very cumbersome to fund via a free market.
There's a huge class of huge problems that have known solutions, but neither the will or competence to implement them. It's also not a matter of wealth since developed world societies have nailed down a lot of problems despite starting at deeper levels of poverty.
it's not clear that's any better than just having the government fund the work directly.
Sure, it is. Government is absolutely shit at figuring out what is good research. One thing we need to remember here is that there used to be a huge, privately funded science powerhouse in the developed world. That got scrapped because it was easier and more profitable to siphon public funds than to do work that had actual risk to it.
In one possible future, it would be easy to find meaningful work solving the world's big problems but most jobs would be in the public sector - and taxes, on the rich at least, would be very high.
Not really. Welcome to the world of perverse incentives. Your bureaucracy goes away, if you actually solve the problem your bureaucracy was set up to solve.
In another possible future, the big problems wouldn't get solved and most people would be reduced to performing frivolous little chores for a small number of extremely powerful rich families in order to avoid starvation - but rich families would live out fabulous lives of idle luxury.
I think this is the actual future your ideas steer us towards. But fortunately, I have another solution. How about we just get out of the way of the people trying to work and the people trying to hire?
What never fails to concern people is that 100 years ago, 80% of humans worked in agriculture and earned $5k per year, and today we are replacing jobs that pay $100K per year at X rate with technology (or imports etc.)... Can we deduce from those two facts that the future is in jeopardy? "Poverty used to be in decline, but now wealth is in decline!" That's the argumentum in terrorem or "doom and gloom" fallacy.
The people quoted in TFA are having trouble speculating what the new jobs will be. Recall the hysteria in the 1970s and 80s about the number of USA jobs moving to Japan, or the 90s-2000s jobs moving to China. 80,000 jobs doing X were lost was a constant headline over 4-5 decades. Yet my state has
If the 80,000 jobs lost to Y during X period was an accurate predictor of concern we'd have reached 90% unemployment a decade ago. Technology both replaces and creates jobs, like App Developer or 3D computer animation artist, or smartphone assembler, that no one imagined. True, most of the new jobs being created today are being created in emerging markets, but as China develops more cell phone assembly jobs, USA sells China more Buicks.
If someone with a time machine had gone back to meet me 30 years ago and shown me film of me using a cell phone to browse the internet and speak to my kid in Europe, and told me the technology cost me $30K per year, I'd have believed that. And today that "imagined value" means I'm living like a person making $29k more than I actually am.
The BLS has not been the greatest predictor of which jobs will be in demand, but has predicted employment markets in aggregate pretty well. "The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predicted a 15% increase in the employment for all animal care and service workers between 2012 and 2022; however, employment of zookeepers was predicted to grow more slowly than other positions (www.bls.gov)." http://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest...
Gently reply
Back in the 1960's, there was a TV show called "The 21st Century", which was narrated by Walter Cronkite. He kept going on about how much more leisure time people would have in the 21st century. What the futurists of the day forgot to consider was that if you put everyone out of a job, nobody is going to have money to spend, and thus there would be no market to sell to.
If there is money to let ISIS exists, there is money to let them live without being terrorist.
Do you really think we could afford WWI or WWII ? This doesn't mean they didn't happen. War is the number one justification for spending money countries don't have.
...the industrial revolution!
When the buggy whip makers went out of business, the car industry was already in full swing. They were already outputting enough cars to replace the buggies. The buggy whip makers could actually see the workers working to make them obsolete. At this time, it was wellknown how many jobs the automobile industry was creating. And it was wellknown that the new automobile not only replaced the horse carriage, it actually made it better, allowing for more trips, for more load hauled, for higher speed. The car helped to make the whole transportation business to grow more productive, and not just a few percent, it was a multitude of improvement. The demand for transportation at the same time was also growing because transportation got so much cheaper that goods or persons which would never have been transported so far and so often before, now could. Replacing the buggy with the car as the means of transport actually increased the transporting market.
Buggy whip makers didn't need to imagine the new jobs. They knew what the new jobs were, as they could see their neigbours already having them.
But if you just replace a worker by a machine, there is not necessarily a new job opening waiting. The manufacturer of the machine already has the people to make the machine, as he was able to built it. And it's not as if his business has to be growing, as the market for his worker-replacement-machines is limited to the number of workers his machines can replace. It happens that not only the worker who is replaced by the machine is out of the job, also the people installing the machine are also out of a job, because their job is now finished. And maintaining the machine surely will require either less man-power or less qualified man-power than the man-power it is replacing. Otherwise there would be no point in actually replacing them.
Automatisation of jobs in general does not create new jobs. It just frees up human labor. If that allows for huge gains in productivity (and we are talking huge gains. The mechanical loom improved the productivity tenfold, and so did the spinning machine), there might be new markets and thus there might be new demand, creating new jobs. But just replacing the human by a machine does not. Having cheaper sport news does not increase the market for sport news. The replacement of the financial advisor by a computer does not increase the demand for financial advise, because the requestor does not get a tenfold improvement on his ROI. As a maximum, he saves the few percents the human financial advisor got as his premium. The same is valid for legal expertise. People will not want to have more need for legal advise just because it is cheaper. Most people prefer not to be involved in legal quagmires at all. Compare that with the demand for cars! People love to buy cars. Or at least, they used to love it. But the demand for new cars is already shrinking at least in some parts of the world. Young people in Europe list the desire to own a car quite low in their priorities already. A similar trend can be seen in the U.S.. And which new job is replacing the car manufacturer's job? Simply none. Completely different than it was when the welder's job at a car factory replaced the buggy whip maker.
I used to agree with you on the basic income, but now I'm not so sure. The mistake a lot of socialists tend to make is assuming that humans will go do some thing useful with their time if they have no need to work to survive. I think this is not a valid general assumption, and if it isn't then socialism eats itself (interestingly in the same way capitalism eats itself due to greed), not due to an inability to supply the needs of the population, but due to social breakdown. These days I'm starting to think the best solution is to democratise knowledge on a grand scale. In the end the real driver of growth is not a guy who knows how to make houses but only accepts a limited few 'apprentices' into the guild that produces them. It is when the knowledge required to make houses is distributed to everyone. It is bizarre to me that while our technology economy is based on the body of knowledge put together over centuries by others that we use for free, it has now become almost dominated by this notion that if I come up with an idea nobody else in the entire world should be able to use it but me for the next twenty years. I remember reading about how Jonny Ives felt Samsung had stolen time he could have spent with his family by infringing Apple patents. I just find this level of arrogance amazing. Sure, say they 'stole' billions of dollars from you and moan about that, but trying to elevate your ability to make rounded rectangles into some kind of Herculean sacrifice that can never be sufficiently rewarded, even with $100million in your bank account, just shows the problems our economy is going to face as technology becomes more important and those who own the rights to it become more intoxicated with their own egos. The heart of the equality argument in the face of automation is the ownership of knowledge. That is where we need to be looking for solutions.
Read the The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley to get an idea of the doom and gloom being predicted for centuries. Matt takes the view all these gloom predictors were wrong and the industrialization is an unadulterated success for humanity. He seems to think humanity consists of Europe and USA. This review sums it up nicely
The job destruction is also accompanied with wealth transfers and power transfers. Finally the job destruction finally lapped up the shores of Europe and USA by 1980s. Slowly middle class of America is waking up to what has been done to them. Their jobs are gone. The "wealth" they have as home equity is a fickle fictional paper gain. Their pensions are gone. Their investments in 401K funds is being used to transfer more power to the top 0.5% of the rich.
Typically very smart and hard working people end up in the top 2% by income and usually end up in the band 98th percentile and 99.5percentile. (To reach the top 0.5% you must have inherited wealth or take huge risks and be lucky). The wealth transfers from third world to industrialized nations had run its course, wealth transfer from the bottom 80% to top 20% has run its course. Till then these guys were very happy and egging it along. Now there is no real wealth left below 90%. The momentum of the economic policies set in motion by them is taking money from the 90 to 98 band and moving it to the top 0.5%.
If you finish college and get in to the 99% cut off entry level salary and stay exactly at the 99% cut off all through your career, it is not enough to get you into the top 1% by wealth (5 million according to IRS and 8 million according to the feds). Till about 2000s, top doctors, lawyers, accountants routinely made it to the top 1% without inheritance. Not any longer. Citation provided
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Apparently the first time they didn't do a very good job of replacing the teachers...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?