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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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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Loom operators today make about $32,000/year. Rather better than the 10 cents a day Weaver's made.
But tomorrow, loom operators will be gone, replaced by intelligent looms that can not only tell when they're having a problem, but solve it as well. That's the fundamental difference in this particular revolution: before, we replaced ten workers with one. Now, we're replacing that one worker with zero workers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Maybe 'fault' is the wrong word, rather that it's the unemployed's responsibility (no matter what) to find employment, and if they can't find work well fuck them because we have ours.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
It gets worse. Automated driving will enable new forms of automation not possible before. There are tons of jobs where someone drives to a client location, does X job, then drives back to the office. Humans were necessary to drive there, do X, then drive back. Once the driving is automated, the human will only be needed for X, and beancounters will start thinking "I wonder if we can automate X..."
First on the chopping block will be moving/loading/unloading type jobs, postal delivery and moving-van type stuff. Later will come meter-readers (if it's cheaper than smart meters), repairmen and similar. Heavily-regulated fields like EMTs will probably come last.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I hate the self-checkout aisle. I'm competent at scanning groceries, but the moment I do something unexpected in the "bagging area" I have to wait for someone to come fix it. I don't know the code number for my produce, so I have to look it up. I have to key it in on a shitty touchscreen. If I bought beer, someone has to come inspect me. I used a reusable bag, and it confused the machine. The whole process takes 5x as long as it would have with a human being. The checker is faster at scanning, has memorized all the produce codes, has an efficient user interface, can check my ID at will, and generally has the entire process together enough in their brain to make it far more efficient. I don't go to the self-checkout anymore.
>So when it comes to automation replacing jobs, why does the list of things we need more of never include "birth control"?
Because that view includes the assumption that only the richest people have any inherent value. Even the poorest person has as much right to exist and have children as the richest.
We should be encouraging a population reduction because we can more easily maintain our lifestyle if we have smaller numbers, not because rich people don't need servants any longer.
https://www.mckinsey.com/globa...
The 5 MB PDF:
https://www.mckinsey.com/~/med...
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.