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?"

Comments

#1 slashdot article submitters

[sterlingcrispin]

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

Re:#1 slashdot article submitters

[David_Hart]

I agree, PURE click bait...

How did this get past the editors?

Re:#1 slashdot article submitters

[Anonymous Coward]

How did this get past the editors?

They've been replaced by robots already.

Re:#1 slashdot article submitters

[jandersen]

Another place where robots might be a good replacement is at the middle management level - one of the big problem with managers is that they so often combine lack of people skills with absence of useful knowledge and inability to empathise, and introducing robots could improve on all three fronts. It certainly couldn't get worse.

Re:#1 slashdot article submitters

[tehcyder]

Unemployment is created by government rules, laws, taxes, nothing else.

Unemployment is a function of capitalism in order to create fear and a willing pool of people prepared to do awful jobs for rubbish pay.

With no government intervention, corporations would wipe out trade unions and any form of worker protection, and pay even less than they do now, as a near-starvation wage is better than actually starving.

Re:#1 slashdot article submitters

[tehcyder]

With no government intervention, corporations would wipe out trade unions and any form of worker protection, and pay even less than they do now, as a near-starvation wage is better than actually starving.

The unemployed aren't actually starving right now, and they are free to sit in the park on a sunny day. Sounds better than be kept as slaves inside a factory for 24 hours a day.

Yes, but the reason that the unemployed aren't starving is precisely because the government pays them something.

In the libertarian/free market utopia, they would be free to starve to death in the park on a sunny day.

Re:#1 slashdot article submitters

[BarbaraHudson]

As more and more jobs are automated, there will be fewer and fewer jobs available, and more and more people trying to get them.

Let's just look at ATM machines. They made it possible for people to get cash out at any time, so banks needed fewer tellers. Now what happens when all money goes digital - you pay for stuff using a smart card or smart phone? No more ATM machines. Which means those jobs designing and making them, and those jobs servicing them, and those armored car jobs filling them up with money, disappear.

And so do the cash registers. No more taking cash payments and giving change to anyone. Smart shopping carts bill everything in your cart as you go through the exit, so no self-serve checkouts with a supervisor for every x machines. So, no cash money, no need to print it or mint coins - those jobs are gone, as are all the jobs transporting and handling money. No more counterfeiting currency. No more need for safes to hold cash overnight in the store. No more nightly bank deposits.

We're beyond the point where automating jobs creates more opportunities. Once a robot is designed, you don't need more human labor to make 1 or a million. Those million employees at Foxconn who are going to be displaced by robots won't be moving up the food chain.

Yesterday, Foxconn announced (at an employee dance party of all places) that they're planning on buying some robots to replace their human workforce. And by some robots, they mean one million robots over the next three years. So for every one robot Foxconn currently has working at their manufacturing plants, they're going to buy a hundred more.

Black Mirror

[l0ungeb0y]

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.

Re:Black Mirror

[blue trane]

Solution: use the technology of money creation to fund a basic income, so people can pursue their happiness, and explore their natural creativity and wonder.

Re:Black Mirror

[garyisabusyguy]

Yes. but I think that the people using exercise bikes to generate power is just a placeholder for 'something else' that the author hasn't quite figured out yet (kinda like the human batteries from The Matrix)

I tend to look to the past for what we will find in the future and this immediately brought to mind 'A Modest Proposal' with its suggestion for the proper use of 'excess human population'. Just to save you from doing any research, it is the same that was found in Soylent Green (but much better written, Johnathan Swift possessed wit)

Of course, Spock's Brain comes to mind as our robotic overlords become to advanced to be bothered with tending to the 'plumbing' and outsource the more mundane work to our feeble human brains

The expositions of the future used to envision a world where automation resulted in a life of ease for us mere humans, this could still be the case if the concentration of wealth to the upper echelons can be avoided

Re:Black Mirror

[JanneM]

Automation changes the source of production from workers to machines. And that separates the source of production from the source of consumption.

To put it simply, robots produce wealth but does not consume it. Humans consume wealth, but (in this possible future) can no longer produce it. Robots have owners of course, but even if you ignore what happens to the majority of people, a few extremely wealthy people can not possibly make up for the consumption shortfall. Ten-thousand people with 10k each vastly outconsume (by necessity) a single person worth 100M.

So, if the entities making wealth and those using wealth become separate, you need a way to transfer wealth from one to the other. If not, you will see a slow-moving economic collapse, as lack of demand and cost-cutting automation drive each other down.

A basic income, generated from a tax on production (transaction tax, energy tax, direct tax on machinery) is one way, and has the benefit of being simple, straightforward and having low administrative overhead.

Re:Black Mirror

[itzly]

Robots have owners of course

And the owners take everything the robots produce. People who don't own robots can just go fuck themselves. How's that ?

Re:Black Mirror

[tehcyder]

Yes. but I think that the people using exercise bikes to generate power is just a placeholder for 'something else' that the author hasn't quite figured out yet

Killing the humans and burning their bodies is more energy efficient.

But at some point people will notice that their friends and neighbours are being burnt. The point is that you have to pacify the majority or else they turn on those in power.

In Brave New World, the proles had drugs and sex to keep them happy: it's a much better prediction of the future than 1984 in many ways.

Re:Black Mirror

[Totenglocke]

Just because you might do something mildly productive with your time if you didn't have to work for a living does not mean that the majority would. Hell, look at the countless millions who bitch about their circumstances, yet do nothing with their spare time that would improve them (learning new skills, taking a class, volunteering in a position that would help them improve their circumstances, etc). For every person who wrote a useful app / book, you'd have at least 100 just sitting around drinking beer and watching football.

Not so fast

[Tony Isaac]

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.

Garbage

[Karmashock]

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.

Re:That was a ROBOT??!?

[93 Escort Wagon]

He IS a defender robot. He is here to protect you. Grandma is protected at the bottom of the stairs.

Re:No increase

[fustakrakich]

In the 50s it was container shipping that caused all the fuss that made the papers.

Re:What's different now?...

[Sique]

It's not the lack of imagination. Far from it.

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.

Reform IP

[monkeyxpress]

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.

Re:Slashdotters in denial

[danbert8]

Apparently the first time they didn't do a very good job of replacing the teachers...