Robots Will Eliminate 6% of All US Jobs By 2021, Says Report (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the U.S., starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers. That's just one cheery takeaway from a report released by market research company Forrester this week. These robots, or intelligent agents, represent a set of AI-powered systems that can understand human behavior and make decisions on our behalf. Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now as well as chatbots and automated robotic systems. For now, they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs like self-driving cars. The Inevitable Robot Uprising has already started, with at least 45% of U.S. online adults saying they use at least one of the aforementioned digital concierges. Intelligent agents can access calendars, email accounts, browsing history, playlists, purchases and media viewing history to create a detailed view of any given individual. With this knowledge, virtual agents can provide highly customized assistance, which is valuable to shops or banks trying to deliver better customer service. The report predicts there will be a net loss of 7% of U.S. jobs by 2025 -- 16% of U.S. jobs will be replaced, while the equivalent of 9% jobs will be created. The report forecasts 8.9 million new jobs in the U.S. by 2025, some of which include robot monitoring professionals, data scientists, automation specialists, and content curators.

Comments

Re:Race implications

[Mashiki]

So, will all those millionaire rappers etc get replaced?

Considering what's done with vocaloid? Yes.

Re:Another way to look at this is..

[GrumpySteen]

That's not how unemployment works. Unemployed people do not increase your GDP and replacing 20 million people with automated systems does not add 20 million jobs for the newly unemployed people to take.

Re:Complete nonsense

[wes33]

"And it would take YEARS!"

from wikipedia: The first automobile patent in the United States was granted to Oliver Evans in 1789, and in 1801 Richard Trevithick was running a full-sized vehicle on the roads in Camborne.

So yes, it *did* take years, more than a hundred; self-driving cars at now at the Camborne stage. Things
move faster now - it will only take 25 years to get them on the roads in numbers.