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375 Million Jobs May Be Automated By 2030, Study Suggests (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNNMoney: The McKinsey Global Institute cautions that as many as 375 million workers will need to switch occupational categories by 2030 due to automation. The work most at risk of automation includes physical jobs in predictable environments, such as operating machinery or preparing fast food. Data collection and processing is also in the crosshairs, with implications for mortgage origination, paralegals, accounts and back-office processing. To remain viable, workers must embrace retraining in different fields. But governments and companies will need to help smooth what could be a rocky transition.
Despite the looming challenges, the report revealed how workers can move forward. While the introduction of the personal computer in the 1980s eliminated some jobs, it created many more roles. Workers who are willing to develop new skills should be able to find new jobs. The authors don't expect automation will displace jobs involving managing people, social interactions or applying expertise. Gardeners, plumbers, child and elder-care workers are among those facing less risk from automation. The report says that 39 million to 73 million jobs in the U.S. could be destroyed, but about 20 million of those displaced workers can be shifted fairly easily into similar occupations. Globally, up to 800 million workers could be displaced.
Despite the looming challenges, the report revealed how workers can move forward. While the introduction of the personal computer in the 1980s eliminated some jobs, it created many more roles. Workers who are willing to develop new skills should be able to find new jobs. The authors don't expect automation will displace jobs involving managing people, social interactions or applying expertise. Gardeners, plumbers, child and elder-care workers are among those facing less risk from automation. The report says that 39 million to 73 million jobs in the U.S. could be destroyed, but about 20 million of those displaced workers can be shifted fairly easily into similar occupations. Globally, up to 800 million workers could be displaced.
Now obviously that 375 million is worldwide. But to put that number into perspective, isn't the population of the U.S. around 325 million?
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The way we're going, by 2030 we may living in caves again.
Maybe we can mine for clean coal while we're there.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This seems to happen every 50 years or so. OMG technology will take our jobs. Oh wait it took jobs that we didn’t want to do and it created a new market for more jobs.
There use to be a job for the human computer who did calculations all day.
We get the electric computer that replaced that job. However this meant more businesses could afford these computer causing a rise of software developers who had more jobs then the human computer had.
Except for fighting the future, embrace it, it will mean you can be on the next big thing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
When will we have good adaptive learning algorithms and weak AI in highly functional yet cheap humanoid form? 50 years? 100? 150? Because that day is coming, and will be the day humans cease to be useful for any menial tasks, mental or physical. Slavery of a new sort will displace workers, a morally sound, corporate backed, DMCA covered, and every bit as creepily terrifying as it is profitable.
I requested G section and when it was granted, G section put me onto training straight away for my new position;
I love it how these economic-sounding pronouncements about worker obsolescence make it sound like merely a bureaucratic operation plus a dash of worker initiative and the jobs problem is solved.
I like economics, but I'm increasingly convinced that economists are mostly the ecclesiastical division of the capitalist class. Their role is to endorse greed and dislocation of workers as necessary and good works and rebuke critics who question the outcome.
Nope. Pure speculation. Chances are that by then there will be jobs we aren't even imagining now. It's also a natural cycle - a lot of jobs from the 80s and 90s don't exist *now*. Such is life, it usually balances out more or less. I know millennials were hoping the government would subsidize their lives, but rest assured, there will be plenty that needs doing in the future, and just like every other generation that has ever existed, they will have to work even if they aren't a CEO or saving humanity on a daily basis or if they don't 'like' it sometimes.
Exactly right.
Here's how it's going to go:
First they will come up with computing systems effective enough to do jobs that aren't tightly constrained. That's coming along right now; mostly in the nature of stacking of simple systems to gain stacked competencies.
The training for individual competencies is going on all around us right now. The difficult task of integrating them remains, and there are many more to go. But it is going.
Then, and only then, will the rush to build anthropomorphic chassis commence. Within just a few years (four or five at the most) of that – after all, it's a straight-forward engineering challenge, completely unlike the nature of putting the task competencies together – we'll be deluged by integrated systems that will be able to do just about anything we're able to do, job-wise.
The light at the end of the tunnel is definitely a train.
Our society will have to completely change the nature of what we expect from our citizens, and what we provide for them, and how we provide it. If we don't get that done in time, there's going to be a lot of blood on the tracks.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I started in engineering 30 years ago. I'd say that almost 100% of what engineers did back then is gone. But the engineers are still here and the song remains the same.
One of these things is not like the others.
When you automate a few, or even all, sock factories, the workers can go make sweaters and underwear, etc. The economy as a whole doesn't make a radical shift. There's some hardship for a small number, but the flex is there.
When you automate everything, the workers won't have that option. The entire economy will shift. There won't be new jobs for workers – because just like the old jobs, general purpose systems will be able to do those as well. There will be no case for hiring a human for such jobs. None.
Unless you have some concrete proposal for the re-employment of the vast majority of the workforce, your vision remains on the highly unlikely side – McDonald's will not put a worker in place of a machine that costs much less and is more reliable; there's absolutely no business case for it. Neither will anyone else. In the present economic system, doing so is a straightforward invitation for competition to undercut your costs and overwhelm your competence.
These systems will be able to do all such jobs. The only question is just how sophisticated they will get... and betting that they won't get very sophisticated is a dubious bet. We're seeing higher levels of competence every day now, and there's no sign of it slowing down – quite the contrary, it's still accelerating.
A major social and economic shift will result. It could be very painful if we're not very quick on our feet. All of the "work ethic" inculcation people are driven by is going to turn from an advantage to a serious detriment in the space of just a few years.
You watch. Unless the whole machine learning sector drags to a halt (not looking that way at all, btw), this stuff is all inevitable. It's almost certain to cause an immense cultural and economic shock.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It won't be some rich techbro. It'll be a mass of very desperate people.
UBI, or some economic equivalent, is inevitable. They're going to have to aim for an economy of plenty. How that actually looks is impossible to say right now, but UBI is definitely one of the possible paths. The alternative is the government looking for a tarring and feathering.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We also ruined alot of farmhand and candle makers and box creator jobs too back in the 19th century.
But as someone unemployed competing agaisn't Indians currently for jobs that adjusted for inflation pay less than what I was worth 17 years ago it is discouraging. My country the US is so far far right that any income redistribution is considered communism and is vehemently opposed as entitlement snow flakes to do just that.
What are people supposed to do to have a secure average life?
I loved Star Trek TNG as a kid. People loved to work for the purpose. No poverty. No one needed money. People worked out of pleasure. We resolved the past injustices and devoted ourselves to the good of others and to scientific progression. I wonder if this will be a reality or will the critics say we end up as Russia and Venezuela as people will only benefit others out of greed?
I wish we had a solution? Or will Chinese and Indian labor eventually become as expensive as American desperate labor just like Japanese used to be considered cheap 30 years ago and things will be more balanced to western economies?
http://saveie6.com/
it took 80 years for those jobs to materialize after the last big industrial revolution. During those 80 years we had wide spread poverty due to unemployment plus two world wars (and innumerable smaller conflicts). It was pretty much an all around shit time to be alive unless you were a member of the aristocracy.
So yeah, the ship will probably eventually right itself. After a lot of pointless misery that could be easily avoided if we just plain _tried_. Let me put it another way: unemployment and social unease due to widespread automation is a complex problem; and when, in anyone's life, has a complex problem been best addressed by ignoring it. And yes, you're entire post is suggesting we ignore it, even if you don't know that it does.
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A whole bunch of them are currently railing against the Republican tax plan as a $1.5 trillion dollar combination boondogle and giveaway to the aristocracy. But our mass media is owned by that aristocracy so unless you're listening to something like Mother Jones or one of the left wing youtubers you wouldn't know that.
The elites figured out in the 80s they needed think tanks to give them some legitimacy. That's all this is. But if you can managed to bypass the think tanks and watch the stuff coming out of the public Us you'll find plenty talking about how the deck is being stacked against the working class. This is also why our right wing constantly attacks professors and educators.
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The largest losses won't be among tech and factory workers. It will be retail and driving.
Retail already has big bloody chunks torn out of it by online sales.
The rush to automated rides, trucks, and personal vehicles is breathless.
Moral of the story: Find something better to do.
What do these names have in common?
Smith, Potter, Taylor, Spinner, Weaver, Webster, Dyer, Thatcher, Tyler, Miller, Baker, Cheeseman, Spicer, Cook, Fisher, Carter, Clarke, Skinner
They are all common jobs that lots of people do, of course. Or were, 100 years ago. They've all pretty much been automated. Of course we could now list 50 jobs that are common today that didn't exist 100 years a good o. In fact, over half of the US workforce works in jobs that didn't exist 100 years ago.
Yes jobs will be automated, as has been the case since the 1600s. And what's happened for hundreds of years is that as people no longer need to pick cotton, they instead design UIs, or test apps, or maintain automated looks that produce thousands of dollars of fabric per hour. The increased productivity of maintaining the automated look instead of weaving by hand is why median real household income has increased by 500%.
Nope. Pure speculation. Chances are that by then there will be jobs we aren't even imagining now.
Like Florg Tweaking, Florg Alignment, Florg Replacement and Florg Synthesis. And then someone comes up with an algorithm that can boop any type of florg automatically and that field's gone, too.
No, seriously. Try to imagine new jobs. Doing what? Ranking Florg boopers by accuracy?
that would be a good start. Otherwise they're going to get desperate, they're going to get mean and they're going to get organized and it's going to end they way it did last time: World Wars and pogroms against some vulnerable minority.
/. is likely to be joining that aristocracy any time soon. We're working class, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it means we need to start taking care of each other. The aristocracy sure as hell ain't gonna do it.
We have a solution. It's socialism. Give people the fruits of those machine's labors instead of letting an elite aristocracy monopolize them. I realize it's frustrating to let people have things they didn't 'earn' (funny how it's not when they inherit wealth, but that's something we're taught's OK while we're impressionable kids) but we're either going to get over that or we're going to bow down to our new kings.
And no, nobody who takes time out of their day to read or post on
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A driving force of Japanese robotics R&D is to solve their elder care problem. Eldercare is certainly in their crosshairs. Perhaps we can export all of our displaced accountants and mortgage bankers to change bedpans.
Actually, unless someone troubles to risk creating AIs for cooking the books, only honest accountants and bankers really have to worry. Does that mean its not a problem at all?
At the very least, there will apparently always be jobs writing about how automation is going to put everyone out of a job.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
That should be "automated loom".
Loom operators today make about $32,000/year. Rather better than the 10 cents a day Weaver's made.
They made the mistake of assuming that the displaced are at fault and that nobody else is.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
What if itâ(TM)s a high paying job and the workers replacement job pays a third? Thatâ(TM)s just as bad.
In my experience, the people we currently having 'managing peole' are usually the least capable of doing so. Just like Human Resources is NOT there to help employees - because they aren't. Of course these jobs that add very little to the final product won't be robotized. For the same reason our congress critters and senators won't let it happen.
I don't know how it will help the economy in the future considering the huge number of jobless people growing everyday. This is just increase the joblessness ratio. Automation isn't the answer to everything.
I love the computer the computer is my friend
I started in engineering 30 years ago. I'd say that almost 100% of what engineers did back then is gone.
Indeed. I am an engineer, and 35 years ago I sat at my desk and wrote Fortran. Today I sit at my desk and write C++.
When I grow up, I wanna be a robot! Daddy says that's where all the jobs are.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Does insisting on a human being paid to scan my shopping make me the only Luddite on slashdot?
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
What is the endgame?
Heat-death of the universe. Next.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The process of computing (i.e adding lots of numbers) has been automated for years, weaving for over a century and grinding flour for several centuries.
When you consider the number of people that would be needed to replace machines if everything stopped, I wonder how many we'd need?
So when it comes to automation replacing jobs, why does the list of things we need more of never include "birth control"? If less humans are needed to handle current workloads, wouldn't one of the coping mechanisms be well, less humans? Maybe because it's not PC and people will accuse you of "genocide", but I think birth control is our last best hope(it's also why the only charities I ever donate to are ones that include birth control, it's not my fault if you cannot breed responsibly, I just want to make sure you have that option)
Monstar L
> When you automate a few, or even all, sock factories, the workers can go make sweaters and underwear, etc.
Too late to make that argument. Sweaters and underwear were automated a long time ago. Along with the production of fabric to start with. As I've pointed out elsewhere on this page, someone keeping an eye on an automated loom has an average salary of $32,000. A weaver made ten cents a day. The more automated the work becomes, the more goods are produced per worker. More goods is more money coming into the factory, is more money to pay the workers.
I have a friend who "bottles water" for a living. Wholesale gross profit on each bottle of water is a penny or so. Imagine how much she could earn filling bottles manually. If she filled 500 bottles per day, her employer would gross $5. They could pay her $1-$2 / day. In fact "filling bottles" has been fully automated. Her and her half dozen co-workers produce hundreds of thousands of bottles or water every day. That's a decent amount of value produced, so she can make a reasonable paycheck.
> When you automate everything, the workers won't have that option.
About half of everything (all jobs) WAS automated in the last hundred years. The same the hundred years before that. For example typesetting is completely automated - it's called desktop publishing. And the advant of desktop publishing (fully automated typesetting) created a bunch of new jobs, which mostly pay more than typesetting did, because "web designer" is more productive work than "typesetter".
> The entire economy will shift.
Yep, it'll keep shifting. I was born in the manufacturing economy. I grew up in the service economy. I started my career in the information age. Now I work in the Web 2.0 / data science economy. About every 20-30 years years the economy shifts significantly, and it'll keep doing that as it has for hundreds of years.
We won''t need to imagine them. There'll be an AI to do it for us.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If occupation A is automated, and all the ex-As move into similar occupation B, isn't it pretty likely that B is going to be next - by the middle of next week, probably?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
How much job automation will be driven by corporate legal and HR when they realize that a robot cannot be accused of sexual harassment? This will push automation even into the highly "social" jobs that involve a lot of interfacing with either customers or other employees, because these are the most legally vulnerable.
I don't know... I'm suspecting that some of these articles are already being written by bots.
Who knew that that many hookers would be put out of work?!?
Just another day in Paradise
Started with Fortran (around '81), Pascal, C and then C++ Now I sit at a desk and troll ShanghaiBill.
Just another day in Paradise
https://www.mckinsey.com/globa...
The 5 MB PDF:
https://www.mckinsey.com/~/med...
...who's going to have the money to buy the stuff that these robots make? What will happen to our consumerism and advertising driven economies then? Will /. be able to survive? Is this how the robot apocalypse will be, i.e. an economic depression rather than Skynet and killer androids?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Doesn't that mean that automation will shift fairly easily into those folks new Jerbs?
Not to worry folks, we'll all be bosses.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"39 million to 73 million jobs in the U.S. could be destroyed, but about 20 million of those displaced workers can be shifted fairly easily into similar occupations. Globally, up to 800 million workers could be displaced."
Translation: 800 million jobs globally are being removed by automation, and only 25 - 50% of them are coming back.
Perhaps we can stop with the "could be a rocky transition" bullshit already and wake up. Automation and good-enough AI is going to be a massive disruptor to human employment, it's coming faster than anyone can predict, and we don't have a fucking clue as to how to resolve that problem.
And please don't tell me UBI is the solution when taxation is the obvious answer to fund it. You can't even get the wealthy elite to fucking pay taxes today, what the hell makes you think you're going to actually be able to collect taxes for the global welfare state of unemployable humans 20 years from now? Simple answer is, you won't. UBI will remain a pipe dream for the unemployable masses.
The future looks dark unless we figure out a way to solve for Greed, and eradicate this battle between the 1% and the 99%. Trillionaire is not a metric of success for the human race.
And how many billions of jobs are automated today? Probably at least 100 billion, depending on how you define "job".
For the last 200+ years, our consistent answer to every human that was displaced by some form of automation was "go get an education."
Since automation and good-enough AI are now coming for educated jobs, please stop ignorantly looking at history as if our tried-and-true wisdom will continue to be valid.
50 years from now, there won't be much of a reason to even educate a human for the purposes of employment.
A thought experiment. In a nation of 330 million, if there are only 150 million jobs, are the unemployed freeloaders? Really think about it before you answer.
The new thing that's happening is that here soon, production will massively outpace labor. It's a new state of affairs that human beings haven't seen yet. There isn't an -ism to describe it accurately. It wouldn't be capitalism or communism, both are predicated on scarcity. Given a limited amount of valuable goods, how best to equitably distribute them? Remove the "limited" from the equation and they suddenly don't apply.
So what would you do if that were the case? Let's say that automation does eliminate half the jobs in America. There simply isn't anything for you to do. What would you do? Would you hold to your "argh it looks like socialism so it is bad" philosophy and not accept UBI? Would you starve before giving in?
Because it is coming, you know. And it doesn't have jack shit to do with any political left/right point of view. Right now it's pure capitalism driving this. As soon as UPS is able to replace 100,000 drivers with an average salary of 75,000 a year with computers - it will. The competitive advantage it would gain would be 7.5 billion in saved revenue. Think they won't do that?
And every other industry that can, will. If UPS does it, FedEx will have to if they wish to remain competitive. And so on.
What will you do then?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"39 million to 73 million jobs in the U.S. could be destroyed, but about 20 million of those displaced workers can be shifted fairly easily into similar occupations"
So... best case is only 19 million formerly employed people out of work permanently and only 20 million precariously employed in newly-created, probably make-work, likely government-subsidized, low-paid jobs (unless of course, these new jobs are exported to $5/hour places overseas) for which there will be intense, ruthless competition that will bring out the worst in people.
No problem, then, all OK!
The Soviet Union didn't fall because of freeloaders. The Soviet Union fell because it was focused upon spending an unsustainable amount of money on a non-income generating endeavor, specifically its military.
In any case, the Soviets didn't have pervasive automation, which is the case we're talking about here — so even if you were right that freeloaders brought the country down (which you are not) you're just handwaving about irrelevancies.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We've long since got automatic scripts that write news stories. If you read a story about a bump in the stock market or something a baseball game chances are a computer wrote that.
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..and I'm far from alone in that. If I go to a restaurant, any sort of restaurant, I want a human being making my food, not some automated machine. Otherwise I may as well just stay home and eat food I prepare myself.
The way we're going, by 2030 we may living in caves again.
What makes you think the caves will be any more livable than anywhere else? Less'n you treat 'em like space ships, of course, but rock tends towards porosity. How much epoxy are you planning to stockpile?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can't even get the wealthy elite to fucking pay taxes today, what the hell makes you think you're going to actually be able to collect taxes for the global welfare state of unemployable humans 20 years from now? Simple answer is, you won't. UBI will remain a pipe dream for the unemployable masses.
If enough of the wealthy are actually put out by the masses of dying humans, then they'll be arsed to do something. That will happen eventually, but in the interim there will be a whole lot of awfulness.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If they REALLY wanted to be liked and constructive..They would start with automating the house. Like doing dishes, making the bed, preparing meals, doing laundry, windows, floors, carpets, walking the dog, cleaning and refilling the litter box, painting, repairing, etc.. Probably not enough money for the greedy corporations.. Instead they got to fill their pockets $$$ with the most lucrative, easy to steal jobs.. So few constructive things with AI.. sad.
But there will always be a market for people who know how to use a fleam.
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I agree. There's also a dose of "this never happened before, so it can't happen now" going on.
Yes, that's going to cause a major cultural shift all by itself. The obvious: have sex, eat, drink and be merry is going to be very disruptive to those whose worldview tells them that they only have significance as providers and contributors, working. Particularly if they're not well educated, formally or otherwise.
It's an interesting time to be living in. :/
Precisely. That's when it starts. But it'll get worse. A lot worse. If the social safety net isn't there, or our society hasn't accommodated these events some other way, it'll get bloody.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think if you actually look at what's going on, you'll see it's non-linear and goes in fits and starts, which makes it very hard to predict in terms of "in N years, X consequences arrive."
However, once you can see the tanks on the horizon, one should really start thinking about what is to be done when you get there, regardless of if you know there are easily passible open fields, or difficult to navigate swamps, between here or there... or not.
Look how fast incandescent light bulbs went away after being in constant use for some time. Look how few years those awful curly fluorescents held on until LEDs came along. Look how fast mechanical calculators went under with the advent of the microprocessor (or even just the ALU.)
Fits and starts. Non-linearity. Surprise technologies. Sometimes the stuff you can see, that you're inclined to make predictions from, isn't good enough, because more stuff will be arriving before your predicted time / event idea jells. Stuff just up and suddenly evaporates. Payphones, for instance. Steam engines and commercial sailing ships. CRTs. etc. But generally, these types of things give way to something even more efficacious. Which causes progress that depends on the technology in question to accelerate.
We can be sure that if what we see now isn't going to be "the thing" to leverage our predictions, something else, probably even more effective, will replace it. So when what we see rings an alarm bell... we should pay attention.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Unfortunately socialists and communists have pushed to define a "free market" as pretty much the opposite of what it is supposed to mean.
A free market isn't a free market if labor costs are pushed to near zero and people are forced to work for someone for survival. That is slavery.
Or if either buyers or sellers get to essentially dictate the terms because kof monopoly of essential goods or services that is not a free market.
Fraud, theft, threat of force are all things that need regulation and policing in the market place.
Balanced with an understanding that regulation and use of force to enforce those regulations are a necessary evil.
And those things will be produced by automation.
And said supply will be provided by automation.
And more automation will fill those jobs, because it will be less expensive and more reliable and considerably less troublesome on many other fronts.
No arguing, no sick days, no limits on shift time, no shovel-leaning, no "had to take my kid to the whatever" outages, no "whoops, I forgot that step" events, no "I want a raise", no "we're unionizing", no "dude, did you shower today?" events, no rudeness to customers, no sexual harassment lawsuits, no unemployment claims, no injury-on-the-job claims, no "I got stuck in traffic" events, no haters post-inter/intra-office-romance events, no surfing the net on company time, no "you promoted them when I wanted you to promote me" events, no "trained employee took off and went to work for competitor" events... you get the idea. Why would anyone want to hire a person if they didn't absolutely have to?
And those skills will be supplied by automation.
Yes, perhaps. Also for things where demand is very, very low. But that won't affect the overall picture significantly. One must, just for starters, wonder what the economic mechanism is for an unemployed person to be obtaining handmade niche items without a complete restructuring of the economy. Human service is another area that can't be automated. If you want a human service, you'll have to find a way to convince someone to supply that. You're unemployed, though. How will you do that?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.