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

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?

[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?

[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: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.