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Half the Work People Do Can Be Automated, Says McKinsey (techinasia.com)
Half the work people do in their jobs can be automated, according to a study published by McKinsey Global Institute. From a report: Instead of assessing the impact of automation on specific jobs, the study went to a more granular level by looking at the activities involved in various jobs. The logic is that every occupation has a range of activities, each with varying potential for automation. McKinsey found that 49 percent of the activities people are paid to do in the global economy can be automated with "currently demonstrated technology." That involves US$11.9 trillion in wages and touches 1.1 billion people. The study encompassed over 50 countries and 80 percent of the world's workers. China, India, Japan, and the US accounted for half of the total wages and employees. Not surprisingly, the two most populous countries, China and India, could see the largest impact of automation, potentially affecting 600 million workers -- which is twice the population of the US.
What is the unemployment threshold going to be?
When unemployment caused by automation, robotics, etc reaches 10%?
15%...
20%..?
In the coming decades more and more people worldwide will become unemployable, and they will have nothing to do or any way to make a living?
How are governments and communities going to respond?
Of course half of human work *can* be automated (I'd wager even more than that) -- but isn't the question really whether it's practical to automate those things?
My job can be automated as soon as someone can create some software that takes multiple sets of ill defined and incomplete specs* and can create a working, tested piece of code that not only does what was written down, but also does what was intended to be written down but never was.
* And in my current line of work there is a set of specs from the final customer, a set of specs from the company that builds the hardware and a set of specs from the company** I am working for that supplies the actual automation. And all of these specs are ill defined and incomplete in their own ways.
** And within that company the group that designs the physical wiring doesn't really converse with the sales critters that bid on the job, or with people like me who end up writing the control software***
*** Maybe they need a "Bender" module to emulate all the swearing I am doing at everyone else?
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A stupid article. Almost everything can be automated, the crucial question is whether it is cost-effective to do so. It is not surprising that a lot of the activities that can be automated concerns workers in China and India, because in most cases, it's simply more convenient not to replace an $2/h organic automaton with a robot.
Here is your anecdote. A friend of mine was working on the manufacture industry. They had a branch in India, and his role was to mentor the product manager of the Indian factory. For a long time, he insisted that the factory in India bought this expensive machinery that they had been used in the Arizona for their production. The factory in India refused to do so by showing that paying 10 people to do the same job, for 100 years, would still be cheaper than actually buying the machinery.
Moral of the story: stupid article, move on.
Automating things is itself work, and when a process or job changes it must be re-automated. If the automation wasn't done in a manner that's easily updated to accommodate minor changes, then the effort to "re-automate" something may approach the level of effort it took to automate it in the first place. So while lots of work may be automatable, the effort require to keep all that work automated on an ongoing basis incurs some amount of overhead.
Why would the wealthy change how capitalism works? It serves them just fine! All they need is enough money to build a barrier between them and the starving and a way to import goods directly from other countries. Drones should be advanced enough to move goods from international shipping hubs by then, and land right in their compounds.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
And 90% of McKinsey jobs can be automated with a good bullshit generator
I tell teenagers who want to go into IT or computers for a career to only do it if they really want to. If they are doing it for the high salaries, they are taking a big risk.
You will still have a need for low-level customer-service work and high-level design/research work in 20 years.
The mid-level stuff that your run-of-the-mill programmer and system administrator does today will be largely be automated.
Hopefully, new, fun, decent-paying tech jobs that use similar parts of the brain that we haven't even thought of will fill the void.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I for one would welcome a robot doing half of my work. That would be the half of my work that consists of meetings.
This study says that for the average job, half of it can be automated (the repetitive part).
Fifteen years ago, I would spend one hour writing software, then two hours testing it. Now the testing is mostly automated. I write code and when I check it in the automated system runsva bunch of tests. It then alerts me of any problems revealed by the automated tests. Automating half of my job has meant I can spend more time creating new software and less time testing, while producing higher quality because I never forget to run one of the tests.
Unfortunately, that's the half that can't be automated with "currently demonstrated technology".
Most "currently demonstrated technology" has a logical framework. Most of what goes in meetings has no logical basis. Ergo, it ain't happening soon.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
The work I'm actually most concerned about being automated is upper-middle class office work. Otherwise, unless the rules change completely and we stop using money and property as a store of value, economic activity will slowly wind down as people can't buy things and don't feel secure.
I work and have worked in large companies almost exclusively over a 20 year career. In environments like this, you will always have a distribution of abilities and skills. However, doing IT systems engineering work, I tend to agree with this report's findings. There are tons of jobs that could easily be automated with a little work. In banks I've worked at, as an example, there are people whose sole job is to accept documents mailed and faxed in for mortgage verification, enter the information into a computer, and take a fixed switch...case type action based on inspection. There used to be tens of people processing checks on two or three shifts. These jobs and hundreds more are the equivalent of an assembly line skill level, just working with paper or electronic files. Outside of the paper-processing world are tons of questionably-useful jobs in sales and marketing -- things like coordinating trade shows and putting out press releases. Across the organization are things like liaisons, project managers, business analysts, and other jobs that simply involve taking information from one group and passing it along to another. Yet, these jobs pay middle class salaries and give average-ability people something to do, regardless of how much raw revenue or cost saving they add.
I think a lot of the instability we see now is what's currently happening in companies - these simple jobs are either being eliminated or offshored in the desire for companies to save a few bucks here and there. The typical occupant of these jobs is a product of the last 30-40 years' obsession with sending everyone to college instead of giving them a trade or skill-based education. I went to a large state university, and back then just as now, they were pumping out thousands of generic business majors into the job market, most of whom were/are the typical C student partying their way through school. Here's the difference between then and now -- back then, that C student would just roll up to the career counseling office during their senior year. Recruiters from big companies would interview them, they'd get a couple offers, and accept some random entry-level position. Now, no one's hiring the C students and even the A and B students are having trouble finding that first job. (I was a B student, but that was in a hard science and I worked full time.) Fast forward, and that C student is working their way up the ladder with salary increases along the way -- paper pusher associate, senior paper pusher, supervisor of paper pushers, Manager of Bulk Pulp Transport, Director of Document Services...
The problem now is that the ladder is broken for an increasingly large swath of the population. Once the career progression is gone, that kills the salary increases that occur over time and allow for things like buying a house. 30 year mortgages are painful in the beginning but are supposed to get easier as you age because your income is expected to increase. Car manufacturers can't sell cars to people who don't feel comfortable enough in their jobs to take out a car loan or spend a little extra for a non-base model. And, companies can't sell products to their employees if the employees are worried about whether the axe will fall tomorrow. This squares with everything we've been hearing about Millenials - they don't want a car mainly because they can't afford one, they don't want to own a home because they're not secure in their employment, etc.
In my mind, this is why we got Trump. His rhetoric about rolling the clock back to the late 1940s was an easy sell for blue collar workers, but I think enough white collar workers took a hard look at their situation and remembered stories from their parents/grandparents about times when companies showed loyalty, when th