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Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerization?
turkeydance writes: What job is hardest for a robot to do? Mental health and substance abuse social workers (found under community and social services). This job has a 0.3 percent chance of being automated. That's because it's ranked high in cleverness, negotiation, and helping others. The job most likely to be done by a robot? Telemarketers. No surprise; it's already happening. The researchers admit that these estimates are rough and likely to be wrong. But consider this a snapshot of what some smart people think the future might look like. If it says your job will likely be replaced by a machine, you've been warned.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/407978049/how-a-machine-learned-to-spot-depression
It uses computer vision and voice analysis to diagnose depression and PTSD about as well as human psychologists do. They haven't yet programmed it to provide actual therapy. Maybe it will say things like "tell me more about your family" and "please go on", like ELIZA of yore.
Your list is quite good. I have a few thoughts about it:
- Mental health and substance abuse counsellors should be included though, the reasoning is basically the same as you've given. It's poorly defined, and there's little metric for success or failure within our system. People also prefer to talk to other people about things like that, so it will likely be impossible to automate.
- One of the reasons that programmers and engineers will be the last is that the last and most advanced automation will have to be computer based, and someone has to work on that problem for it to be solved.
- I think construction could be automated a great deal, but only if we begin to design our structures with the goal in mind of being able to automate their construction.
Agree somewhat. There are a fair number of human jobs that can probably be automated in the fairly near future as "AI" has been getting better, especially for problems like visual/speech recognition which traditionally was a barrier to automation.
An AI that actually can innovate and is self-aware/etc would be a barrier to eliminating many jobs. At some point I think we'll cross that threshold and we'll see almost every job go away almost overnight (since such an AI could be used to improve itself and rapidly develop specific automation solutions for every job). However, that is of course a major advance and it is really hard to say how soon it will come.
1. Maintenance workers
Yes, they are all humans, but while you don't replace them with robots, you just need less and less of them. In the 1950ies and even in the 1970ies for instance, a computer had to untergo regular maintenance. The tape drives and the programming card feeders had to be cleaned and readjusted, worn out bearings had to be replaced, all the others had to be lubricated, boards with defective elements were pulled, the elements soldered out and new elements built in, the boards were put back etc.pp.
Those maintenance jobs are almost gone. Today, you let your hard drive run until it fails, then you replace it with a new one. The data is on RAID anyway, and the new hard drive will be filled with data automatically. All the compute boards are now a single main board and some bars of memory, and replacing them is easy. And have you ever repaired a network switch? No, you get a new one from the spare parts storage and just replug everything. Thus a single person now can do maintenance for a whole data center during a shift, when in former times, you need dozens - and that was only for that single mainframe running the central database.
And in general, the main time between failures has gone up for almost every computer component. Most of them don't fail anyway until they get replaced because they become obsolete.
2. Design and engineering
Yes, the actual design of a new component is human work, but design as a career has a big disadvantage: design per se is no steady work. Once done, a single design is finished, and now it can be used over and over again. And there is no guarantee, that a new design is necessary after you finalized the last one. Or at least, there is no guarantee that you get paid for a new design because the old one is good enough. And many tasks in a design bureau are now computerized anyway. No technical draftspersons anymore for the finalization, whose task is now done perfectly by AutoCAD and the like. Drawing an RC-circuit is now a single point and click, and not a 10 min task to get everything rectangular and nicely fitted into the page. Need just the electrical installation of a construction plan? I'll send the approbriate layers to the printer instead of calling the assistant draftsperson. And the fan-in and fan-out of a circuit or a sub-component is now calculated on the fly and the right connectors with the right capacity to PWR and GND are automaticly put into my new chip design. My mother worked as a typograph, and I remember, when I was a child, she was sitting at her desk, cutting the galley proofs to length to arrange them on a page and glued them in place, intermixed with the drawings and the marginals and the footnotes and the headlines. Now this whole typesetting process is highly automated, text flows freely around other typographic objects, and we just point and click to change everything from one-column to two-columns.
3. Programming
For programming in general, see 2. Most of the tedious, but steady parts of programming are now done by prefabricated software components, by libraries, by integrated developing environments, by code generators. We have code profilers, we have test case generators, we have automated versioning. A single programmer can maintain larger and larger code bases. We have large databases of code samples, easily browseable. We have online communities for complicated questions.
4. Construction
Actually, construction needs less and less people. Many parts are prefabricated. Others are standardized, and easily mounted on site. You don't see people building window frames on a construction site. Windows are built in highly automated plants and then shipped on site, mounted with construction foam, and then everything is done. We don't mount individual planks, we have large wooden panels. We don't use the hammer to drive in a nail, we have pneumatic nailing machines. We don't do individual cabling anymore, we do structured cabling, where we ju