A Study Finds Half of Jobs Are Vulnerable To Automation (economist.com)

The Economist reports of a new working paper by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that assesses the automatability of each task within a given job, based on a survey of skills in 2015. "Overall, the study finds that 14% of jobs across 32 countries are highly vulnerable, defined as having at least a 70% chance of automation," reports Economist. "A further 32% were slightly less imperiled, with a probability between 50% and 70%. At current employment rates, that puts 210 million jobs at risk across the 32 countries in the study." From the report: The pain will not be shared evenly. The study finds large variation across countries: jobs in Slovakia are twice as vulnerable as those in Norway. In general, workers in rich countries appear less at risk than those in middle-income ones. But wide gaps exist even between countries of similar wealth. Differences in organizational structure and industry mix both play a role, but the former matters more. In South Korea, for example, 30% of jobs are in manufacturing, compared with 22% in Canada. Nonetheless, on average, Korean jobs are harder to automate than Canadian ones are. This may be because Korean employers have found better ways to combine, in the same job, and without reducing productivity, both routine tasks and social and creative ones, which computers or robots cannot do. A gloomier explanation would be "survivor bias": the jobs that remain in Korea appear harder to automate only because Korean firms have already handed most of the easily automatable jobs to machines.

Comments

Not surprising

[Trailer Trash]

100 years ago 95% of the US labor force was in the agricultural sector. Now, it's just a few percent. We don't have 90%+ unemployment, though, because now we have jobs that we didn't even know existed 100 years ago.

Hopefully most of all current jobs can be automated so we can find new things for people to do.

Re:Not surprising

[apoc.famine]

I really don't understand how people can continue to make this argument. It does not appear that this time is going to be like the previous times. And it ignores the massive social upheaval during the switch that happens every time as well.

In the past, when we've automated low skill jobs, we've pushed people into higher skill jobs in the process. Farmers ended up working in factories. Factory workers ended up working in offices.

But right now, we're automating the higher skill jobs. And there is a very distinct limit to how highly skilled a large percentage of the workforce can become. We're on the cusp of automating away what a large percentage of office workers do every day. What are they going to do instead? Train to be doctors? Oh, wait, we're throwing machine learning and automation at medicine too, and that's showing a lot of promise.

We are fast approaching the time when we're going to be making robots and machine learning ("AI") that do almost anything better than the average human could do it. What do the average humans do then?

When we put all of the agricultural laborers out of a job, what are they going to do instead? What else are you going to train a migrant produce picker to do that can't also be done by a robot?

When we put several million truck, taxi, and bus drivers out of jobs, what are we going to train them to do? Stock shelves in the store? Cut hair? Make coffee?

When most of the accounting jobs go away, what do they do?

We've got no shortage of things for people to do. The problem is that inevitably, robots and machine learning are going to be able to do most of those things better and cheaper.

Re:Not surprising

[vux984]

"Hopefully most of all current jobs can be automated so we can find new things for people to do."

That only works if somehow they are also things robots can't also do better and cheaper.

If you develop AI/automation that generically approaches or exceeds median human capability, then it doesn't really matter what 'new jobs' you invent, because robots will do them cheaper and better than most people can.

Most people won't be able to find work at that point; it doesn't matter how many jobs there are. Either they'll be jobs they aren't able to do, or they'll be jobs the robots can do cheaper and more efficiently.

Think about it.

Heres another example. Most of the world's land mammal mass is in cattle, bred for slaughter. billions of them. Suppose we come up with vat-meat-substitute that is cheaper, needs less space, and tastes as good. What happens to the cattle?

Are we going to find a new use for the population? Sure a small number will survive, perhaps let wild, others in small organic farms for wealthy people to 'eat the real thing'. But the rest? There's nothing for them to do, we can't retrain them to help operate the vat-meat plants, they can't write novels... we'd pretty much wipe them out relative to their current number.

Humans are no different. If we come up with something that can outperform what the majority can do, the people displaced will not be able to find new work... without a fundamental change in how we think about work and wealth distribution there will be a revolution, war, and massive loss of life.

Look backwards.

[0100010001010011]

Rail museums are fascinating once you realize all the bits that humans had to do. Prior to the self lubricator being invented it was someones job to go around and make sure all N hundred points were properly lubricated. You had to have people physically down on each switch. The locomotives themselves had a 50% duty cycle.

All of it has been 'automated'. No one is pining over not being able to fire a tinder box. A modern locomotive may take a handful of people to do what used to take hundreds if not thousands.

The same goes for every other industry from food production to transportation. Humans are industrious creatures in that we'll find something else to do and new ways to be lazy. 50 years ago making your living in eSport or drone racing would have been unheard of.

It is the pace of the change that matters

[Laxator2]

Whenever a story about automation comes up most of the replies are of the type:

"It happened 100 years ago and then again 50 years ago, it we ended up better. We'll figure it out this time."

What these posts don't say is that the _pace_ of the change was much slower back then. Also, we keep on comparing mostly physical industries (e.g. railways) with the current tech industries.

In the tech industry the pace of the change is much faster and during the 80's 90's and 00's it was accelerating. I remember growing up in the 80's when studying electrical engineering and making money from repairing TVs was a perfectly good way to make a living.

Then TVs became almost disposable and computers came along and in the late 80's and early 90's many people made a living writing stuff in BASIC and Pascal. Try making a living from those skills today, only 15-18 years later.

The point is that in the past the major changes took longer or at least as long as the turn of the generations. You could learn a trade and it kept you going until retirement.

However, nowadays you can expect 3-4 major changes throughout the employable years of a person, and not everyone is able to keep up the pace with such change.

Re:They are going to pay me for not working anyway

[Kiuas]

The trillionaire owners and rulers of the future who will be asked to fund UBI will dodge that responsibility like they do taxes today, so certainly don't expect UBI to pay any better than welfare today.

You're missing something quite important here: consumption. Companies need customers, and if and when due to automation a significant chunk of consumers can no longer work because they have no marketable skills, consumption will come crashing down, which will hurt the companies and thus the bottom lines of the trilionaires. Think about the major tech companies for example: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, etc. In a world where the majority of people would be making just enough money to survive these companies would collapse, because the goods and services they're selling all require consumers that can actually be marketed to effectively, meaning consumers with disposable income.

Put another way: the benefits of automation (reduced manufacturing & logistics costs) will help no-one if as a result of automation and reduced purchasing power the consumer-base will collapse and is replaced with a massive amount of people living on just the bare necessities because that will slash demand for most consumer products and services and cause a lot of these companies to go under which in turn will reduce the demand for B2B products and services.

This is not a matter of empathy for the poor, this is a matter of game theory. The economy is essentially a giant game that requires people to be buying things for it to stay viable. The more corporations embrace automation and cut the amount of jobs, the more inevitable it will be that the amount of UBI/income transfers per person will have to go up in the future. That is unless one maintains that the rich will suddenly stop caring about making money and will be fine with seeing their profits collapse.