US Workers Face A Higher Risk Of Being Replaced By Robots (cnn.com)

There's a surprising prediction for the next 15 years from the world's second largest professional services firm. An anonymous reader quotes CNN: Millions of workers around the world are at risk of losing their jobs to robots -- but Americans should be particularly worried. Thirty-eight percent of jobs in the U.S. are at high risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence over the next 15 years, according to a new report by PwC. Meanwhile, only 30% of jobs in the U.K. are similarly endangered. The same level of risk applies to only 21% of positions in Japan.
61% of America's financial service jobs "are at a high risk of being replaced by robots," according to the article, vs. just 32% of the finance jobs in the U.K. (Those U.S. finance jobs tend to be "domestic retail operations" like small-town bank tellers, whereas U.K. finance jobs concentrate more in international finance and investment banking.) The firm's chief economist sees a world where new jobs are more likely to go to higher-skilled workers, and he ultimately predicts "a restructuring of the jobs market... The gap between rich and poor could get even wider."

Comments

Machines replacing bank tellers?

[fl_litig8r]

You mean machines that will accept deposits and dispense cash from my accounts? That's just crazy talk.

Re: Machines replacing bank tellers?

[wierd_w]

It makes perfect sense.

If your working contribution costs more to automate than it takes to pay your wage, you will be safe from automation (at least until automation drives down the costs of further automation sufficiently to resolve this case).

If your wages are on par with, or greater (amortized over time) than the costs of replacing you with automation, your job is at high risk of being eliminated to automation as a cost saving measure.

Combined, the only "safe" class of workers are those in a situation where automation is, for some reason other than cost, unable to replace them, which is a category that gets eroded quickly due to increasingly capable robot and software designs.

Human society NEEDS to be ready for the inevitable reality where NOBODY works, and the only people who "Make money", are those who OWN robots, or have a share in companies, and milk their investments.

Money ceases to be an essential functional commodity in such a circumstance, as people will invent alternative methods of exchange to obtain necessary services.

Either money has to be distributed for no labor expended by a governing body (basic income strategy), or true post-scarcity future economic models need to be created. There are no alternatives where really rich people get everything and everyone else just dies. (Sorry plutocrats, but that is how you destroy the human race, not live immortal, pampered lives.)

Re: Machines replacing bank tellers?

[roman_mir]

Eat the Rich

- there is always somebody poorer than you.

Re: Machines replacing bank tellers?

[BarbaraHudson]

Food and water are needs that are not going to go away. There has to be some mechanism for people to acquire these basic needs. A basic income would be a logical name for such a scheme. I wonder if anyone's ever tried it before? Oh, wait - it was tried back in the 70s in Canada and was a success.

The only reason it was canned was because, despite the evidence to the contrary, people thought it would make people lazy.

Our Future.

[geekmux]

Regardless if people fight the idea or not, automation and AI decimating the concept and capability of human employment is no longer science fiction. And when US states started crying out for $15 minimum wage rates, the initial response back from corporations was to look towards automation, because that option was now worth the investment.

Coming to the conclusion that automation and AI would target countries with higher wage costs seems to be rather obvious. The real question is what will be done to control unending Greed from turning the planet into a Welfare state.

We keep talking about UBI, which is another concept that will become inevitable as automation and AI decimate human employment. The problem lies with funding UBI, which will likely be done through taxation. Unfortunately, corporations are some of the worst entities when it comes to actually paying taxes by employing armies of lobbyists to minimize or hide those obligations, with the end result being trillions sitting in offshore tax havens today. Since this will never change, unending Greed will all but guarantee that UBI will become nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the masses.

You can forget the American Dream. You can forget the Human Dream. The reality of automation and AI is a global Welfare state, all because of Greed.

Re:Our Future.

[DarkOx]

Coming to the conclusion that automation and AI would target countries with higher wage costs seems to be rather obvious. The real question is what will be done to control unending Greed from turning the planet into a Welfare state.

Which will never work, UBI will never work. Why because people will never be satisfied with what they have. They will always want more. The planets resources remain limited. If its no longer a question of how hard they have to work for X; the answer to "why should I not have finer clothes, travel further faster, be warmer or be cooler, eat something nicer, etc will be that I should!"

There may be a short era of good feels, a generation that grew up working a no longer needs to and is simply satisfied with a life of comparative ease; but their grand children will demand free super sonic airline tickers, I promise you!

I am not going to pretend to know where any of this is headed. I don't think its UBI and I don't think its welfare state 2.0. I would be more worried about the collapse of states. You point out corporations are already paying armies of lobbyists to avoid taxes. You really think a group of top tier capital owner class types wont employ an army or robots that looks much more like the armies of the past and simply refuse to pay the taxes? What does for example Amazon need the government for once they can hire/build their own fully automated asset protection?

Re: Our Future.

[burtosis]

Don't be a moron. This has nothing to do with minimum wage possibly getting set at a reasonable number. They are going to do it either way and you know it, so stop pushing your absurd political agenda.

The op was making the quite valid point that a reasonable minimum wage only accelerated the problem. This was brought to you by the single ruling party of the invisible hand.

Re: Machines replacing bank tellers? process-drive

[petes_PoV]

The Moravec's paradox of jobs

This is just another aspect of de-skilling. Since the 1990's the fad has been for people to perform "processes" rather than jobs. The idea being that so long as you adhere to the "process", all your actions will be of the same high quality as your co-irkers. Ha!

But as soon as you are able to write down a formal description of your job, you have effectively written a computer program for doing it. So the most easily replaceable jobs will be the ones that require little judgement, little experience (esp. when there is no possibility of having to deal with exceptions) and simple interfaces to other "cogs" in the great machine.

So if you can replace a personnel officer with a computer, then companies will do it. Just feed in the parameters for the sort of people you wish to hire. Merely give the machine stock replies to the most common workplace complaints. Give it an algorithm for employee assessment - and let it it do its thing. It won't replace the entire personnel dept. But if it can perform the mundane operations, it should considerably cut the number of actual people required to support the company.

And it it this reduction - rather than complete replacement - of mid-level and managerial posts that is where the job losses will occur.