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

That's the point

[bluefoxlucid]

Around 1920, wooden shipping pallets cut down about 83% of the labor involved in shipping: what took a crew three 16-hour days to load and unload now took four hours. It became efficient to stack goods, wrap them, then transfer them on the truck to go to a port, then the ship, destination dock, back onto truck, warehouse, truck, distribution center, truck, retail center. They might unpalletize, rearrange, and palletize to go to retail so as to tailor from bulk stock to store-specific need.

A piece of wood.

Ikea has changed the shape of one of their mugs twice so as to nearly triple the number they can ship on a truck--cutting out 2/3 of the labor of shipping them.

This is what technology is. When someone says "automation", imagine a wooden shipping pallet. When they say, "It's coming for unskilled jobs!", imagine a dock worker. When they say, "It's coming for smart people's jobs this time!", imagine being a charge authorizor in American Express in 1988 (Authorizor's Assistant), or an accountant, or a market trader (look at all the automatic charting software). When they say, "It's coming for everyone's jobs this time!", look at pneumatic power tools and digital computers.

That's right: it's always coming for everyone's jobs.