Slashdot Mirror
Machines Are Going To Perform More Tasks Than Humans By 2025 (cnbc.com)
In less than a decade, most workplace tasks will be done by machines rather than humans, according to the World Economic Forum's latest AI job forecast. From a report: Machines will overtake humans in terms of performing more tasks at the workplace by 2025 -- but there could still be 58 million net new jobs created in the next five years, the World Economic Forum (WEF) said in a report on Monday. Developments in automation technologies and artificial intelligence could see 75 million jobs displaced, according to the WEF report "The Future of Jobs 2018." However, another 133 million new roles may emerge as companies shake up their division of labor between humans and machines, translating to 58 million net new jobs being created by 2022, it said. At the same time, there would be "significant shifts" in the quality, location and format of new roles, according to the WEF report, which suggested that full-time, permanent employment may potentially fall. Some companies could choose to use temporary workers, freelancers and specialist contractors, while others may automate many of the tasks. New skill sets for employees will be needed as labor between machines and humans continue to evolve, the report pointed out.
Name one job that doesn't use a machine? Sure, most require a human to operate machines. A computer is a machine, a can opener is a machine, a typewriter is a machine... almost every job already requires a machine.
Now, automated machines is a different thing- they might not have replaced humans yet but even coopers and blacksmiths in ye olde medieval Europe used machines, Machines have been around since man put a stone in a sling.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
whatever will we do when the internal combustion eliminates the plowman and the horseshoe. Our agrarian based society will collapse. waaaah!
get real, you have no idea what jobs will exist in 10 years.
automation and IT creates jobs
The tools that came out of the DevOps revolution are now going enterprise-wide. It's only a matter of time before most SA jobs become dead-end and then are eliminated. Organizations no longer need a bunch of Unix or Windows admins who are basically power users who can follow instructions. We've circled back a generation to where to be a SA who gets paid well and has job security you'll need to be able to script that system like a boss.
And to some extent the agrarian system did collapse, and beginning with the Industrial Revolution in Britain, you started to see many agrarian workers heading to the cities to work in the factories and related forms of employment. But we're rapidly running out of places where displaced workers can go to find new work. When even service industry jobs like cashiers at department and grocery stores are becoming extraneous, where is it you imagine those people are going to go? For the skilled workers in many fields employment is guaranteed, at least for now, but as we've seen with low-skilled blue collar workers in industrial settings, automation means they end up going from relatively high-paying jobs to more service-oriented jobs, and now that even McDonalds is becoming increasingly automated, even that far less than ideal replacement work is fading away.
At some point, as automation begins to out perform even the cheap labor of developing countries, it isn't just Western low-skilled and service industry workers who are going to find themselves unemployed and unemployable by robots and AI.
The farm hands of the 18th and 19th centuries had options, even if those options were far from ideal. Where precisely do you suggest a single mom with two kids or some 55 year old divorcee getting back on their feet go when all the tills at Walmart are replaced by scanners and two or three floor managers to keep things rolling along smoothly?
This isn't the Industrial Revolution. We've been watching the process of increasing automation for nearly fifty years, and from where I sit, I can see major industrial centers like Detroit basically depopulating. For the moment the system is buoyed by a need for service industry workers, but in part that low unemployment will simply drive automation even faster as businesses give up on finding employees and invest in automation. And then, at some point when unemployment starts to rise those traditional back stops will no longer be there.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Though that might hold for most things based on the fact that there'll simply be more people as time goes by for quite a while yet, it won't hold generally.
For a start, depending on how broadly you define your industries, you can always cheat.
The people who made cars are... well... gone.
The people who ran music shops... gone.
The people who took orders at McDonald's... gone.
The people behind my bank counter... gone.
Now that doesn't mean that they can't have hired more bank tellers internally to the bank in other roles, it means that there aren't many bank tellers left. All those people who sat behind a bank branch handling cheques? Gone.
Replaced by a handful of computer technicians and people making machines to accept cheques, and people servicing that infrastructure, sure. But the role has gone. And I very, very much doubt that banks are hiring more people to fulfill that role even if they are hiring more people overall.
If you account for "natural inflation", in that there are just that many more customers, branches and people around, then some industries are indeed dying off. Say, staff-per-customer. That's plummeting in some industries. And there's a reason for that.
Whether the *number* of jobs grows isn't the bet here. It's the proportion (i.e. less humans, more machines, proportionally).
Even IT... I can manage a thousand machines from one desktop. I couldn't do that 20 years before. It simply wasn't possible. But I might have the same team-size as I did back then. The problem is, the other guy is nothing but a keyboard jockey, and proportionally I'm servicing twice as many users as I was back then too.
Thus, though the number may not have changed, the proportion and skills has drastically shifted to the machines instead of the people.
Travel agencies died with the advent of online travel price comparison sites (flights, hotels, etc.). Their replacements may have generated more IT jobs, maybe even more sales jobs, but it didn't make more jobs in the actual travel industry, just the opposite.
Whatever way you look at it, that's a hit. And it's predicated on one problem... that as things get more automated, more of those industry jobs go to IT (whether coding, server support, datacentre rookie, or just plain tech support). And more and more of IT is getting automated. You don't even speak to advisers on websites any more, little AI chatbots cut the simple questions out.
Before long there will be a significant hit to other areas. Big supermarkets and shops probably spend more on their online services now than they do on ground staff... it's ground rent that's killing them and pushing them out of the high-street. Do you know how many big-name high-street retailers have gone out of business in the UK in the last 10 years alone? To be replaced with websites.
And last time I changed car insurer, it was all done online (there's an industry that's almost dead offline), and LITERALLY the backend/company/underwriters that actually insured me for my old and new policies from two different brand names were the same place. Same web interface. Same underwriting clauses. Same technical data access. But two different "brands" offering the same insurance policy at completely different prices.
If anything, that's a perfect example that shows you what will happen - an enormous shift to IT-running of these places, everything operated on the basis of algorithms, no human-face at all (even the customer support lines are way understaffed and refer you to the website more than anything) and then an enormous consolidation of those services from all kinds of places into one place that they all outsource to.
It's slow. There are ALWAYS jobs if you want to go looking for them. But it's inevitable, measurable and inexorable.
I'd go for Insurance as the industry. And I'd say that once things like PPI claims etc. are past their expiry dates, those numbers will plummet. Because, as an industry, they just don't nee
The question, of course, is what the humans will do when there half as many jobs.
The opposite question is more likely: what will people do when jobs outnumber available workers? Retirees will outnumber workers in the U.S. in 2030. Healthcare and related industries will attract young talent. Good luck in trying to find someone to remodel your kitchen or mow your lawn.