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.

Comments

Simplistic

[Great Big Bird]

This is incredibly simplistic, like all kinds of analyses like this. Anything that really requires a mind rather than a simple result of calculation or mechanical action will likely not be replaced without some big advance. More likely, we will just have better tools for certain jobs making them more higher level — it can let them get stuff done easier - so they can do more.

Re:Simplistic

[ShanghaiBill]

Anything that really requires a mind rather than a simple result of calculation or mechanical action will likely not be replaced without some big advance.

Some things that used to take a human no longer do. For instance, image recognition has improved a lot in recent years. Banks use computers to read and process handwritten checks because they make fewer errors than humans do.

Re:Simplistic

[Rich0]

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.

Re:Simplistic

[shmlco]

"So lawyers and Doctors are safer then anyone else."

Tell that to RocketLawyer. Or to the Robot Anesthesiologist, or to the guy who's inventing an easily implantable lens that could completely take out the eyeglass and contact lens industries. Expert radiologists are routinely outperformed by pattern-recognition software, diagnosticians by simple computer questionnaires. In 2012, Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla predicted that algorithms and machines would replace 80% of doctors within a generation.

Re:Simplistic

[Kohath]

That's why this analysis will soon be performed by robots.

Re:Simplistic

[NicBenjamin]

Question:
When you talk to actual people, and not your friend wikipedia, and you say "lawyers and doctors;" do they assume you mean the hordes of JDs punching their time-clocks deep in the bowels of a massive firm and a highly paid specialist who they see once a lifetime to get test results; or do they think you mean Trial Lawyers and their General Practitioner?

As I said in another post on this thread, a lot of medical specialists will be replaced by computers. But only in settings where patients can't notice. The GP will send you to a test site where a working class dude with an Associate's will run his diagnostic computer. Then he'll send the result to your GP, who will read it to you. You'll go to surgery where a single surgeon will oversee both the robotic surgeon and the anesthetics machine. If (at any point) you figure out that the whole process would have required an MD at the testing facility, an MD Anesthesiologist, two other surgeons on the team, each costing 500k per year; as well as a half-dozen more nurses at $40k per year, you will freak out and go to some other hospital.

It's the same in law offices. You'll always have a lawyer you talk to when you need a lawyer. You won't know that in the 80s to do what he's doing for you he would have needed a couple paralegals, a newly-minted bunny lawyer to do the boring legal research in paper books, etc.

Re:Simplistic

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The one major complication to keep in mind is that robots/automation almost never literally 'replace' you. Rather, they allow for a different way of doing things that no longer requires you.

Robots built to replicate human capabilities are, despite continued effort, relatively pitiful. Competent bipedal locomotion, a couple of dexterous hands, fallible but very, very, adaptable image recognition, etc. are a fairly tricky package to put together on a reasonable budget. Outside of tech demos, that's why you don't bother to build the robot to resemble the worker, you restructure the task to play to the strengths of the robot(see basically all contemporary manufacturing processes). This task restructuring can also involve the user: replacing a telephone operator, say, would have been impossible until relatively recently; you need speech recognition software good enough to do the job and computers cheap enough to run it. So we didn't: Pulse code dialing allows line switching to be done with relatively simple electromechanical devices, which is why operators were on their way toward the exit more than a century ago, despite AVR 'agents' still being considered lousy and terrible to work with today.

You will almost always be misled if you try to predict odds of replacement based on 'what the job requires' rather than 'what the job produces'. Beating the people currently doing a job at the skills that the job requires is difficult, frequently impossible or uneconomic. Achieving whatever goal their job exists to fulfill(or achieving something else that eliminates that goal); is almost always how it gets done.

Re:Simplistic

[Shakrai]

The ones least likely to be replaced are a) socially prestigious, or b) in jobs that require direct interaction with humans. So lawyers and Doctors are safer then anyone else.

The lion's share of MDs could be replaced by machines. We tend to worship the ground they walk on in the United States but at the end of the day medicine is just a trade, no different than plumbers or electricians, and nurses do the bulk of the work in your typical medical practice. The percentage of truly innovative Doctors is no different than the percentage of truly innovative coders, for most it's just rote memorization and long established best practices.

There are countries that recognize this fact, where MDs are paid less than teachers and society doesn't treat them as Gods walking amongst men. Of course, in fairness to American MDs, Doctors in those nations don't have to deal with crushing malpractice premiums and student loan debt.......

Re:Simplistic

[Great Big Bird]

I don't mind such a robotic system as long as it can be double checked by the pharmacy. Trust — but verify.

Re:Simplistic

[BarbaraHudson]

The problem with the website in OP with their 4 keypoints (and the 80% from the optimisic investor in your quote) - is they dont take into account the damage done if a computer gets it wrong.

This is current with UAVs, we have autopilots, but is anyone prepared to board an automated 787 without any pilot onboard?

It will probably eventually be safer and more convenient. Same as automated elevators, traffic lights, etc.

Re: Simplistic

[Pubstar]

As someone who works at Help Desk, the human touch is needed sometimes. Only a human that can force themselves to think illogically and understand some of the calls that I receive asking for help.

Re:Simplistic

[Anonymous Coward]

If there was a dirty thankless job that could be done better by a robot, it's the job of a prostitute.

Re:Simplistic

[scamper_22]

While this is true, when you actually look at people working, the number of jobs that 'truly require' a mind is much smaller.

Even jobs that people think require a great mind like say a doctor. In reality, the way a lot of doctors operate in the real world, it is rather routine.

A lot of diagnosis work can be pretty well automated. Simple stuff. For example, I'm on Thyroid medication. I get a blood test once a year. I've seen this happen first hand now. The blood lab does the work. The doctor gets an automated analysis of the results showing acceptable levels of thyroid... and the corresponding dosage. This entire process could be automated. Even things like radiology, which is very costly, could deal with a lot of automation. I worked briefly in the field about 8 years ago, and back then we were working on automated detection of anomalies in MRI/PET scans.

Two things have to be taken into account here.
One is that so much of a doctors work is routine that a lot of that can be automated. Then if there is an exception, you can have that handled by a human. Or you can do a human review on a positive case. For example, you can have 80% of MRI/PET scans automated for analysis. But before you decide on surgery, have it confirmed by a human radiologist.

The other is to actually look at real work. Theoretically, doctors can spend lots of time with their patients and this extra touch can lead to better analysis and treatment. Look, I'm in Canada, land of universal healthcare. Almost every doctor I've seen (both walkin and family) over the past 10 years has been running a tight ship. 15 minute appointments. Get straight to business.

I don't know if they could theoretically do better if they spent more time, but this is the reality of healthcare. I'd guesstimate you could automate a lot of the diagnosis and treatment. Of course like I said above, serious issues would need to get more serious approvals.

For automation to make sense, it simply has to make sense for a large number of cases. I don't think the automated system needs to beat the very best, because how many of the cases are actually done by the very best?
Again, back to
You also have other jobs that could be automated. Most of the tax system could be automated. I've been seeing it more computerized for years and years, but we're nowhere close. But really, there is no reason my taxes could not be automatically done. They have my income slips. All my investments are with major financial institutions who should be able to calculate my profit/loss...
If they simplified the tax code, it could probably be automated even better.

The more you actually dwell on it, the number of jobs that truly require a mind are simply not that many. Most can be automated. Even judgment style jobs can be automated and probably perform better than the average of human practitioners in the field.

Re:Simplistic

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, other than the US - China. France. UK. Singapore. Germany. Canada. India.

You know... places with money.

Sorry to hear you live in a third-world shithole where barter in the form of chickens and blowjobs is the accepted currency.

Re:Simplistic

[0100010001010011]

Radiologists are already on their way to being obsolete. There's a simple chain of events that leads up to automation:

1. First it's hard and nobody can do it but a few PhDs
2. Then it's difficult and it requires a BS or MS.
3. Then it's a trade.
4. Then it's unskilled labor
5. Then it's automated

Wait until all these 12 year olds that started learning Python hit college and industry. There are a lot of stupid for loops that will eventually turn into big code.

I was a lazy 8th grader years ago that learned to program my TI-83. Then my TI-89. My 'studying' for my engineering tests was writing TI-Basic in the basement library. Technically I probably cheated on most tests I took in undergraduate but my "Studying" was trying to figure out how to get [Routh-Hurwitz Theorem](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Routh-HurwitzTheorem.html) into for loops on a 160×100 display. It sucked but during the tests I had debugged so many different scenarios I knew the equations by heart and just used the programs to double check my math. (And saved me when I missed carrying a 1 early on). Now I'm automating away engineers. People that sat at a keyboard and put it into the computer. They're the modern day equivalent of punch card operators. It doesn't mean they're going to get fired, they're just going to work on a task worthy of a human brain.

Arduino is going into small farms. People are programming their chicken coops. We're about to automate away 'big farming' for a lot of niche markets. A small CSA and farm will be able to automate a lot of boring repetitive 'farm tasks'.

Radiologists will be replaced by Chicken Sexers on Amazon Mechanical Turk if an algorithm doesn't get there first.

Swipe left for compound fracture, swipe right for non-compound fracture. Get a good set of training data and pay everyone $0.01 to guess. Pay the top 20% of them $.10 to guess on harder questions. Repeat the cycle until you're paying $100.00 to get an X-ray read by a few thousand people. The Government has taken to crowd sourcing people to guess events Turns out if you ask a lot of people a question the average ends up being correct.

It's worked for counting jelly beans in a jar for years

Re:Simplistic

[cheesybagel]

What will happen is the same thing it happened with trains. Everything will be automated but there will be at least one pilot just for 'emergencies'. Two if its long-haul.

Re:Simplistic

[ShanghaiBill]

Everything will be automated but there will be at least one pilot just for 'emergencies'.

That will happen in the beginning. But as people become comfortable with automation, it will be dropped. Would I fly in a pilotless plane today? Nope. But once they have flown 100,000 flights without any incidents, then sure. Most aircraft accidents involve pilot error, so once the bugs are worked out, the pilotless planes should be safer.

Re:Simplistic

[eheldreth]

I was torn between responding to you and moderating you down. The idea that telemarketers don't care about their jobs is one of the most arrogant and classicists things I have read in a long time. My area is very poor and unless you both have a collage degree and are lucky enough for it to be in a field that's currently hiring your options around here are work fast food, work in the mines, or work for a telemarketer. While it does attract young people and college students a lot of those folks are single mothers trying to support their family. If you really believe that single mother doesn't care if her job exist you've been living in some sort of dream land.

all will be tried to be robotized.

[turkeydance]

most will work. some will fail, but all will be tried.

Re:all will be tried to be robotized.

[fermion]

Many jobs can be automated, but not be cost effective. I imagine that as the cost of the fast food worker rises, for instance, the research on replacing that worker with a robot will also increase. It will be seen if robots are tolerated in what right now is a face to face encounter.

The telemarketer has already been replaced by robots, but robots are not tolerated so these jobs are still secure. It is the same reason that these jobs are still present in the US instead of completely exported to other countries. Consumer demand.

I still think that lawyers are doctors are going to see the greatest impact in wages and jobs. The salaries for first year lawyers, for example, have been fixed or falling for a decade according to published reports. As more data is collected on patients, and that data is correlated to outcomes, the heuristics and stochastic will reach a level where only the best diagnosticians will remain employable.

Here's a mental health robot

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Mental health workers?

[Karmashock]

That's a little sad.

You're talking about a profession that in many cases has either no training or dubious training. Anyone here have a family member that has an addiction problem? I have a cousin that is a heroine addict and a brother that is an alchoholic. My brother is also bipolar and god knows what my cousin is at this point... because the drugs do damage the brain.

But the point is that I've some experience with these people and they're often very nice, sometimes they're quite smart... but this is not what I'd call a "science" or even "medicine". A lot of it is witch doctorism. And that can make people feel better. But that is because the believe it works.

Here is a better list:

1. Artists: Computers are terrible at art.
2. Any kind of design or engineering work. Computers will be used as tools but they're not going to do the actual design work. They might automate the implimentation of previously designed concepts. We see that with CPU design where in something designed once is replicated by computer. But the actual design was done by humans.
3. Maintenance and repair work. Repairs are almost never carried out by a machine. You can find a factory that is 100 percent automated and it actually still has human repair techs keeping the robots working.
4. Programmers are not getting automated. The reasons are many but mostly the issue is that we've yet to come up with a machine that can self program or can accept instructions to write a program and then translate that into code with any competence.
5. Construction work on buildings is unlikely to get automated. You're seeing people do prefab and even talking about 3d printed houses etc but even if you include that there is going to be a lot of human labor happening around that.

I could go on... the fears of everyone losing their jobs to robots are ill founded. They're actually going to save us from having to do jobs we hate. Name a job a computer does that you'd actually want to do? There aren't any.

Re:Mental health workers?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Mental health workers?

[monkeyxpress]

I understand what you're saying, but I have worked with a lot of people in my career, including in an engineering company that still manufactured products locally (i.e. had factory workers). The reality is that most people are just not that smart, and when you spend all day hanging out with top programmers with degrees you really lose sight of just how big the ability gulf is.

The thing I observe is that the robots are not replacing workers, they are simply driving down the marginal cost of workers because that is the only way most of these people can compete. This is simply what happens in a market economy if the workers cannot own the means of production or up-skill themselves.

I don't know what the solution is but it is a pretty grim existence if you are not in the top 10-20% right now (which lets be honest, most people on slashdot are).

Re:Mental health workers?

[shmlco]

Construction work? Try this...

http://www.wired.com/2012/09/b...

Do enough of it, and the module construction itself can be automated and robotized. Or seen modern shipbuilding these days? Prefab modules assembled and welded by robots.

And so what if there's still "a lot" (weasel words) of labor around that. There's still less of it, and every decrease cascades into additional hits on labor. See the following piece on the potential impact of robot trucks on the long-haul trucking industry.

https://medium.com/basic-incom...

Re:Mental health workers?

[MrBigInThePants]

"I could go on... the fears of everyone losing their jobs to robots are ill founded. "

You could, but it would not enlighten anyone. You are talking in absolutes and margins like they are all that count because you are arguing a straw man.
The "fears" (from people not writing clickbait articles) are not around "everyone" losing their job. They are around too many people losing their job.

Do you know what would happen to ANY of the modern first world economies if 20% of their workforce is no longer needed? Fucking disaster.
And most at much less than that!

So here is a list that has actual meaning in terms of this subject.
  - Less people working means less people buying all that rubbish that is the only thing keeping our debt fueled economies from collapsing.
  - More automation means (even) more companies outsourcing entire factories overseas: INCLUDING many of those jobs you mention above.
  - Since more stuff is made in 3rd world countries which means your trade deficit worsens.
  - The above depresses economic growth in said country and thus causes jobs losses in support industries which cause further job losses...etc
  - More unemployed means more pressure on government money and less tax to pay for it. It also can mean civil unrest and crime spikes.
  - Income inequality skyrockets as the the rich invest worldwide but the rest must earn locally - which further slows the economy.
  - All this also depresses wages which also reduces spending which brings us back to DOH!

And this is not theory. This process has already taken place in many areas of manufacturing already. The OECD has just released a report on the impact of income inequality on economic growth.

And this is not an exhaustive list by any means and many of those bullet points are heavily summarized.

Re:Mental health workers?

[Karmashock]

... hmmm... I think we need to expand on this a bit.

I did not say that people without skills would be doing well. I said that people with certain skills should be able to deal with automation just fine.

As to owning the means of production, automation actually facilitates that.

You do realize that there are a lot of machines already that can make really sophisticated stuff right?

Take a rather cheap CNC machine... I can make all sorts of things with that. Basically anything but steel. And I can make the mold for metal casting using that or 3d printers.

You were never going to see that communist dream under the old industrial model because the machines were too big and the organization to maintain the system required so much cooperation that people would really need to be paid to do it. And that requires a hierarchical industrial structure which means you're not owning shit.

The new system could see smaller less expensive production machines being affordable enough that they can be owned by a lot of people.

Now... will you be able to make a living selling crap out of your printer or CNC machine? Probably not. But then neither with the big factories turning out that same sort of stuff. Or at the very least, the market will be a lot smaller and a lot more competitive.

The future of the economy is going to be very volatile. People keep using these 100 year old economic ideas as if they're going to be relevant forever. They ignore that they weren't relevant 100 years before they were relevant and quite a few ideas that were sound at the time are already obsolete.

Communism especially is something that has to go through a full redesign because it assumed a now obsolete industrial model that is not applicable to the present or future.

That is not an argument in favor of capitalism... which I do actually support... but rather a criticism of applying a largely static ideology and economic theory to what is an increasingly divergent reality.

Re:Mental health workers?

[Karmashock]

Your example involved massive human labor in china to build a large building using prehab blocks assembled by PEOPLE in a factory.

So your example is actually an argument in favor of my position.

it is therefore now my example.

*yonk!*

Thank you so very much.

As to the problem of any industry losing a need for labor etc... we used to have 80 percent of labor in agriculture because we needed 80 percent of our population working on farms to feed the rest.

That number in some cases might have been as low as 60 percent... but the fact is that today it is around 5 percent. And if we go back even farther in history it was a solid 100 percent.

now you say "oh but factory workers are losing jobs to robots" *clutch pearls and whine*... No shit.

And they're going to lose a lot more jobs before this is done. I wouldn't be surprised if that fell to 5 percent of the total labor force just like agriculture.

And yes... you're going to see that run through the cubical farms etc. Does that mean you won't get a job? Perhaps. But that is YOUR generation. When farm jobs started drying up we had a lot of people that couldn't find work. They were farm workers and they didn't really have skills to work in factories.

So, you could get some bad generations where there are people without the skills to work in new businesses.

That doesn't mean their kids won't get jobs unless the schools are run in the most incompetent way possible damning the next generation to be too useless to be employed.

Here is the bottom line. Automation is happening. You are not stopping it.

So adapt. Proactively address the situation understanding that automation is happening.

Or die.

I didn't make the rules. Don't get mad at me. I'm just telling you what is happening. I am the messenger here. You can either accept it or shoot the messenger and make it clear that in the future people should just tell you what you want to hear.

This is happening. Adapt.

Re:Mental health workers?

[Karmashock]

Yeah but if you had a machine that did the same thing and you could just OWN it... you could get that every day.

There are a few things people do:

1. They sense where there are tight muscles and focus on them.

2. They have a variety of methods for dealing with things and they use their judgement and senses to shift between them.

3. A human will generally push a LOT harder on your body than will some machine. The machines need to be safe. And because they're blind and stupid they can't push as hard on you safely. A machine that was modeling your back and had several tools it could use to put pressure on you in different ways might be able to push a lot harder while not injuring you.

Re:Mental health workers?

[sundarvenkata]

I have a cousin that is a "heroine" addict

I am addicted to heroines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroine) too! Which one?

Re:Mental health workers?

[Kjella]

3. Maintenance and repair work. Repairs are almost never carried out by a machine. You can find a factory that is 100 percent automated and it actually still has human repair techs keeping the robots working.

The repair business is way down. Say 25 years ago small electronics repair was a big thing, radios, TVs, computers, stereos and so on. Except for warranty repair - which is suspect is more and more synonymous with warranty replacement or the replacement of complete subsystems - nobody really does that anymore. It went from replacing capacitors to replacing cards to just replacing the whole unit, while the skill level dropped from engineer to glorified delivery boy.

Nobody I know mends their clothes or socks or shoes anymore, they come cheaper off the assembly line. Really all the kinds of small household items I'd be more inclined to replace than start finding duct tape and glue. Maintenance is a little better, I still need people to paint walls but a quick search indicates robots want to take that job too.

More and more has embedded diagnostic sensors and service programs where you're really just following a list of instructions, granted the actual work is still done manually but by much lower skilled staff than before. The less electronics is involved, the more likely your job is safe. Also fixed items that you can't easily replace like electric wiring, water/sewage pipes or air conditioning. Make sure you need actual skills, not just swapping parts as otherwise it won't pay well or be very fun.

Re:Mental health workers?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've failed to make any rational point yourself, shy of jumping up and down screaming "He's a witch!"

You've got some serious disconnects between cause and effect going on.

As to 20 percent of the labor force being out of work... it has happened many times before. We're still here.

As to less people buying stuff... that doesn't make any sense.

See, with 20% of people out of work, fewer people have money for anything except the most basic subsistence needs. Imagine you're a truck driver, and suddenly most freight starts moving by train. You're not a train driver, and you're not going to get a job as a train loader. So, while you're freshly out of work, a large number of others are also out of work.

Suddenly, they don't have money. They'll spend less. That's how it works: if you have no money you won't be spending it.

Of course, they may have mortgages to pay, and if they can't they'll lose their houses, so there's that.

Now throw in, say, taxes and retirement savings. Those two are going to drop, so investments (retirement savings and other) will be reduced. Taxes will need to go up to fund the necessary minimums. Support programs will require more money.

Incomes down. Outgoings up.

It's all a roll-on effect. Small businesses will disappear, taking more jobs with them and there won't be as many replacements.

Re:Mental health workers?

[Sique]

I have several issues with your analysis.

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

Re:Mental health workers?

[Karmashock]

I'm not talking about some guy repairing your vacuum clearner from the 1950s. I'm talking about the guy that repairs the robots at the factory.

Do you honestly think they're going to throw out a 2 million dollar robot and buy another one every time it has a problem?

Comments like yours make my brain hurt. Read what I said again. You're commenting on something I wasn't talking about.

Re:Mental health workers?

[Your.Master]

There's a bunch of what you say that I agree with*, but then you start going to crazy-town with your talk of "crypto-communists". Especially right after you proclaim "welfare for life" as a solution for the displaced people, which is the very essence of "to each according to their needs".

* In particular, I see "fewer jobs" as an intrinsically good thing. Yes, we all understand that leads to a wealth distribution problem. There are multiple possible outcomes.

Re:Mental health workers?

[Sique]

As to fewer people... sure. The point is not to give you a job.

That was the original question: Which jobs will be replaced by robots (e.g. not given to you)? The whole point of the article is what career to chose if you don't want to be replaced by robots. And the grand parent offered some ideas, which I doubted. While those jobs may be not directly replaced by robots, we just need less and less of them. For your career, it is mainly irrelevant if you get replaced by a robot, or if your job just becomes obsolete. You will get fired.

Re:Mental health workers?

[david_thornley]

What happened during the Industrial Revolution is that most of the population moved from agriculture to industry. It was more of a pull than a push: factories could absorb large numbers of people, and paid better than agriculture. Few people wound up structurally unemployed, because it didn't take much to be useful in a factory. This was the age of unions.

The move to service jobs was more of a push: factory jobs went away, and people took what jobs they could, often considerably worse jobs than what they'd had. Unions lost their strength, at least in the US. The lower middle classes lost quite a bit in this transition.

Now, we're seeing service jobs being threatened by automation, and no clear idea where the new jobs are going to come from, or what they're going to require, or how many people can be retrained. Fundamentally, the question is what humans can do better than machines, and humans have been losing ground there for decades. What happens when 20% of the population is not significantly better than machines at anything? 40%?

Mental health and substance abuse social workers

[Catmeat]

Mental health and substance abuse social work looks to be doubly golden. Because the takeover by machines will surely increase the number of unemployed people with mental health and substance abuse problems.

Re:nope

[PPH]

And it would be a hell of a psychologist.

The emacs psychotherapist doesn't even like me using the word 'hell'. I'm afraid feeding an AI with even a small subset of YouTube would drive it into a blind rage.

no training??

[SethJohnson]

You're talking about a profession that in many cases has either no training or dubious training.

This is a field that requires a masters degree and certification.

You're probably thinking of faith-based social organizations that attempt to provide counseling services. Those agencies do not provide effective treatment for the ailments you mentioned. At best they might be able to provide some marriage counseling assistance.

Re:no training??

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

This is a field that requires a masters degree and certification.

It's also a field that is remarkably ineffective at delivering results. I think they are not at risk of automation, they are at risk of elimination as a profession.

Still haven't provent their point

[Required Snark]

Telemarketers are human?

Design vs. Implementation

[Corporate T00l]

Head as far towards design and away from implementation as possible. As a designer, automation will make you more and more powerful. Design a house, run automated integrity checks on it, have it printed with the house-sized 3D printer. Even better, design the marketplace for trading house designs. Design the 3D printers that make houses.

On the other hand, applying a skill repeatedly, even if there is some judgement involved, is on a long term trend downward. Lawyers who repeatedly draft the same contract over and over again are already being automated out of existence. Those who can create new contract patterns, however, continue to be in demand.

Another way to think about this is in terms of creating the new vs. applying the old. I once got the chance to visit the Bauhaus archive in Berlin; the design skills and output they produced 100 years ago would still be applicable today despite the radically different consumer landscape.

Re:Very likely.

[sydbarrett74]

First-level help desk certainly. Up to 50% of the calls involve password resets. And many companies have been implementing solutions like Specops and Verismic to eliminate this class of incident. The added advantage is that with fewer reps needing password reset privileges, security is increased.

Basic income / maybe make full time 32-30 hours a

[Joe_Dragon]

Basic income / maybe make full time 32-30 hours a week.

Need to look at the OT think or we can have some one doing the work of 2-3+ people working 60-80 hours a week covering there old jobs / that are some what automated.

Pr0n actors, scriptwrites musicians in the 2020s

[BarbaraHudson]

The porn industry will be the first to replace actors with digital actors that look "even realer than life. Won't even require the digital overlay that was simulated in Running Man. And you can have it any way you want, just like Doug Quade in Total Recall. 37.4%? I doubt it.

Writers are rated at a 3.8% change of being automated. How hard can it be for software to turn out porno plots? Really?

Musicians and singers - 7.4%? Can anyone ever remember the cheesier-than-elevator-muzak from those cheap pornos?

It will create more opportunities for optometrists (13.5%).

Now someone make the inevitable pr0n overlords, please :-)

Obviously

[nospam007]

"What job is hardest for a robot to do?"

Obviously management.

All that yelling, the ignorance, the incompetence, the rudeness, the anti-social behavior, the complete disregard for the feelings of the employees is hard to duplicate with software.

Re:Computer Programmer 48.1% Statistician 21.8%???

[tompaulco]

A database administrator? You ask them to grant you the required permissions to do your work and then you ask them every now and then to restore some data, why the database is performing so terribly and if they have any idea why the database crashed again (if it's an Oracle database anyway).

You don't seem to be talking about a real database administrator. Maybe a MS SQL database installer, I mean administrator. I've known people who put data into a GUI who think they are database administrators. Plenty of people who do the job you described above also fancy themselves database administrators. It goes far beyond that.
The good news about automating Computer Programming jobs is that for every programming job that gets automated it takes 1.01 Programmers to maintain the automation.

OMG we're all gonna die!

[Qbertino]

Imagine your garments being woven and sewn entirely by machines! Imagine if all the farmers would be replaced by machines that sow and harvest everything - there would be rampage, murder, rage, and death! Humanity would end! OMG, we're all doomed! ... Errrmh, ...
Ok, scratch that. Never mind.

Machines taking over the dirty work. Awesome.
More time for me to dance tango, do yoga and live to become 120 years old.

Sorry, folks, but I'm welcoming the new robot army with open arms. No excuse me while I continue my job as a webdev, clicking together Wordpress apps and doing the type of work that would've needed a team of seven 10 years ago.

Automation vs doctors and lawyers

[sjbe]

Tell that to RocketLawyer.

Just because someone has digitized some routine legal forms and advice isn't evidence that lawyers will be replaced. I have no reasonable expectation that the vast majority of what most lawyers do is readily amenable to automation. If you think it is then I don't think you really understand what is involved in their job. Rocketlaywer reportedly has about $20 million in revenue. That is NOT a big company and they aren't the first to do this. We're not talking earth shattering stuff here.

Expert radiologists are routinely outperformed by pattern-recognition software

Not really true except in rather narrow circumstances. I've actually worked in radiology clinics doing some engineering work and spoken to some radiologists about this very topic. They use software to help identify suspicious growths and the software does a pretty good job and sometimes catches things the human misses. But it's used as a supplement to help the radiologist because the radiologist will see things that the software does not. Together (human plus computer) does better than either alone.

diagnosticians by simple computer questionnaires

The examples you are thinking of are controlled tests with narrow parameters. Not out in the real world in real practices. People lie on medical history questionnaires all the time. There are women who go in for mammograms who will lie about having breast implants when asked even though they will show up plain as day on the xray. People leave off vital medical history constantly and no questionnaire will get the answer right if you feed it bad data. Test requisitions by medical professionals routinely do not include important medical history or even accurate descriptions of what to look for. My wife is a pathologist and she routinely gets requests to look for something that the doctor isn't at all concerned about or with no medical history or description of the problem or with the site of the biopsy wrong or incomplete. These problems can be addressed but not by any technology you or I are likely to see anytime soon. Medical expert systems will be a significant aid to doctors in developing differential diagnoses but they will not replace doctors and you shouldn't expect or want them to.

Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla predicted that algorithms and machines would replace 80% of doctors within a generation.

Oh, well then it must be the truth because a venture capitalist said so. They've never been wrong before [/sarcasm]. I am close to certain that 80% of doctors will not be replaced by machines within the lifetime of anyone reading this. Doctors will be aided greatly by machines but the human body is incredibly complicated and much of what doctor's do isn't terribly easy to automate. Furthermore even supplementing doctors with machines would require vast improvements in medical record documentation in a lot of cases. I don't know if you've looked at medical records lately but most aren't computerized and even those that are are frankly quite a mess with loads of inaccurate information. Why? The people entering the data make a lot of mistakes, leave things out, etc. This problem isn't even close to being solved.

No doctors will not be replaced by machines

[sjbe]

The lion's share of MDs could be replaced by machines.

Not in your lifetime they couldn't. If you think otherwise you don't actually understand what they do. Doctors aren't just differential diagnosis engines. And even if they were a differential diagnosis (which is all a diagnostic computer can give you) will just give you a set of choices and probabilities. It won't give you a definitive answer because frequently there isn't one. The human body is far more complicated than any program we have access to and you need someone who can think through problems and more importantly deal with people. Computers can help but medicine isn't just about technology.

We tend to worship the ground they walk on in the United States but at the end of the day medicine is just a trade, no different than plumbers or electricians, and nurses do the bulk of the work in your typical medical practice.

Nurses do the routine work. You don't pay a doctor to do or diagnose the routine stuff though they certainly can do that. You pay them because they will catch the unusual stuff that a nurse would miss. Doctors are specialists of a sort. If you want to take your trade analogy you could hire a general handyman to work on your plumbing but if it is anything difficult or complicated you probably want someone looking at it who is better educated on the problem at hand. You don't pay a surgeon big $ to do a routine procedure. You pay a surgeon big $ to be there in case something unusual happens. When you code on the operating table the value of their time skyrockets. My wife is a pathologist specializing in skin. Dermatologists are allowed to read their own biopsies but most send the excisions to her or someone like her for a diagnosis because she will catch things they will almost certainly miss. Melanoma for example can mimic a variety of common benign problems which a nurse or even a general practitioner doctor might easily miss. Nurses can do a lot of the things doctors can do but when they run into something subtle or unusual then THAT is when you need a doctor.

Work expands to fit the time permitted

[sjbe]

What radiologists do today is not what radiologists will do in 20 years.

That is a VERY different statement than saying radiologists will be going bye-bye.

Yes. My wife is a hospital internist and she says that 80% of her job could be done by someone with less education or automated

You could say that about pretty much everyone's job. That doesn't mean it is economic to do it. I'm an accountant and an engineer myself. Most individual tasks I do could be done adequately by someone else with less education given a modest amount of training. But I don't have endless money to hire other people or purchase automation to do those tasks. Furthermore I actually create some of the automation to make me more effective myself but it doesn't reduce the amount of work. Even if I automate 80% of what I do I will still have 80% of the other tasks that I need to do that would be doable by someone else. The work expands to fit the time allowed. I have effectively an endless to-do list. I just only actually get to the stuff I can actually do in the time allowed.

DeepBlue/Watson is going to replace a large amount of what specialists do because it'll do it better and more accurately.

Not until a LOT of problems get solved that currently we are in no danger of solving. For something like Watson to be useful you have to be able to feed it accurate and useful data in an efficient manner. Medical records are currently in an almost comical state of disarray and are riddled with missing and bad information. Furthermore few medical records systems can talk to each other and there is no indication that will change in the near future. Furthermore what specialists do isn't simply being a differential diagnosis engine. If that were all they did we would have automated it with expert systems years ago. My wife is a pathologist and I can assure that Watson isn't going to replace her before she retires. Supplement maybe but certainly not replace most of what she does.

Re:Truck Drivers, Obviously...

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

Keep in mind that Europe's numbers are mostly young people who can't find jobs in the first place.

Europe's primary unemployment problem is with young workers, priced out of the market by regulations. Europe's long-term unemployment problem is a separate problem that affects older workers.

You get fired from an UAW or UMWA job at 55 and you are almost certain to end up banging around in retail or other near-minimum wage occupations

So you're saying someone works a union blue collar 40h/week job and never bothers to learn any new skills or complete their college degree in 30 years. How is that a problem with automation? If you're a web programmer at IBM and you get assigned a new colleague to your team who's been with the company for 30 years, and he tells you "I only do COBOL and I don't want to learn anything new", how would you react?

No society can tolerate that kind of attitude. In socialist societies, they would simply force you to keep your skills updated. In capitalist societies, we assume that people are aware that they can be fired any day and need to keep their skills updated.

In the meantime you'll have to downgrade almost everything, because you aren't making $60k a year anymore.

Yes: if you lose your job, you didn't get insurance, and you don't have savings, you need to downgrade. Again, I fail to see how that is anybody's responsibility but yours.