Technology Invading Nearly All US Jobs, Even Lower Skilled, Study Finds (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader shares a Reuters report: Forget robots. The real transformation taking place in nearly every workplace is the invasion of digital tools. The use of digital tools has increased, often dramatically, in 517 of 545 occupations since 2002, with a striking uptick in many lower-skilled occupations, according to a study released Wednesday by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. The report underscores the growing need for workers of all types to gain digital skills and explains why many employers say they struggle to fill jobs, including many that in the past required few digital skills. There is anxiety about automation displacing workers and in many cases, new digital tools allow one worker to do work previously done by several. Those 545 occupations reflect 90 percent of all jobs in the economy. The report found that jobs with greater digital content tend to pay more and are increasingly concentrated in traditional high-tech centers like Silicon Valley, Seattle and Austin, Texas.

Comments

Re:Not compatible with our current economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Henry George provided the solution to this over a century ago. Land Value Tax + Citizen's Dividend.

An economy based on trading labor for capital while ignoring the role of land is unsustainable when labor is just an abstraction for energy.

Re:That's the point

[Rick Schumann]

*nodding* The whole point of tools is to be useful and helpful to humans doing work. All of these things of which you speak are tools, and for the most part all of the things they're talking about under the general heading of "it's coming to take our jobs!" are also just tools. Unfortunately, 'feel-good fluff pieces' don't get ratings for news programs, or hits to news websites (I'd say 'doesn't sell newspapers' but we apparently don't have enough of those anymore to matter), so it's always the extreme, the shocking, and the awful; as a general mnemonic, let's just all all the above (and whatever else fits in the category) $CLICKBAIT, shall we? That's right, we've all been baited, and too many people are falling for it.

You're referring to new jobs

[rsilvergun]

That get created as a result of automation and technological improvement. Yes, that happens, but the last time it did was after the industrial revolution. 80 years after it. It took that long for tech to catch up and employ the people put out of work. We had 80 years of social strife and rampant poverty in the meantime. They called it the guilded age. It lead to to world wars.

Re:Is this good or bad for the bottom 16%?

[Jeremi]

Perhaps automation means this 16% of the population will be able to find work due to much of the thinking being removed from what they need to do.

Seems to me it would be just the opposite -- this 16% will be permanently unemployable, because any task they are capable of learning how to do, a robot is also capable of doing better, faster, and cheaper.

And as automation/AI improves, the "minimum intelligence to be employable" threshold steadily rises; so that e.g. at some point (hopefully after I retire), only people with IQs of 140 or higher will be employable, and then shortly after that, no people will be employable at all :/