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Only 25 Percent of Occupations In US Are At 'High Risk' For Losing Jobs From Automation, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Automation is coming, but not for everyone. Researchers at the Brookings Institution estimate just 25% of occupations in the US -- in production, food service, and transportation -- are at "high risk" for losing jobs from the advance of automation. "Automation is not the end of work," said Mark Muro, policy director for the Brookings Institution's program on urban economies and co-author of a study published Jan. 24. Most occupations will see specific tasks assumed by machines, but much of their labor will likely be enhanced, rather than fully replaced, through automation, the study found. That's because automation rarely replaces entire jobs, but instead handles specific tasks in occupations that often require hundreds of them.
To forecast the effects, Brookings researchers looked at thousands of specific tasks within each occupation, and the degree to which automation could handle them, coming up with a risk rating for each occupation. The workers most vulnerable are in transportation, production, food preparation, and office administration, which, combined, make up about 36 million jobs, or 25% of the total jobs in the US today. In these occupations, roughly 70% of tasks were considered routine and predictable, prime targets to be managed by machines. The most vulnerable were "packaging and filling machine operators" (100% exposure to automation), food preparation workers (91%), payroll and timekeeping clerks (87%), and light-truck and delivery drivers (78%).
To forecast the effects, Brookings researchers looked at thousands of specific tasks within each occupation, and the degree to which automation could handle them, coming up with a risk rating for each occupation. The workers most vulnerable are in transportation, production, food preparation, and office administration, which, combined, make up about 36 million jobs, or 25% of the total jobs in the US today. In these occupations, roughly 70% of tasks were considered routine and predictable, prime targets to be managed by machines. The most vulnerable were "packaging and filling machine operators" (100% exposure to automation), food preparation workers (91%), payroll and timekeeping clerks (87%), and light-truck and delivery drivers (78%).
WTF? Seriously, what the actual fuck. Do you have any idea what losing 25% of the jobs effectively overnight (that's what "at risk" implies) means? We're a winner take all, if you don't eat you don't work society.
Those people aren't going to go quietly into the good night. Forget violence, a lot will start gunning for _your_ job. It'll be a race to the bottom like you've never seen before where the only winners will be the ones that own the robots pitting us against each other for their profit and amusement. You'll be lucky to make min-wage with a 4 year degree there'll be so many desperate workers.
There's a reason I can get a competent programmer in India for $30k/yr instead of $120k/yr, there's too damn many of them. If you don't want your standard of living to go to hell now's the time to do something about it. And no, buying lottery tickets or hoping your gonna get rich off your MCSE doesn't count.
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The Great Depression never had the unemployment rate go much over 10%. Imagine what would happen to a society with a permanent 25% unemployment rate. Most companies are already one down quarter away from massive layoffs, so don't expect them to absorb the losses. The unemployment would also hit all consumer-oriented businesses, leading to a vicious cycle. We won't cleanly have full employment one day, then a SOTU address saying "Good news, you don't have to come in to work tomorrow. ALL jobs have been fully automated." There'll be a loooong transition period where people are either twiddling their thumbs with no idea what to do with the structurally unemployed, or saying 'fuck you I got mine.' And that transition is going to be 'interesting times' as the Chinese would say.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
This includes sex workers, if we can keep the neo-sex-luddite SJWs from dictating sex bots shall be illegal. They will be worse than the remants of the religious.
A prediction. Write it down.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I was promised UBI.. I don't want to go to work..
they will need to double the numbers of employees to do maintenance and repair on robotics and AI for those automated tasks
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
If you lose your job it is 100% job loss. Never forget that.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
When the time comes and an entire sector is laid off in a period of a year or so, are we going to stick to our "free market" guns and leave these people to fend for themselves (hello crime wave) or will we do the right thing and implement something like UBI?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
At the peak of the Great Depression the US came close to a red revolution. Unemployment at that point was 25%. "Only" 25%.
Unfortunately, 100 percent of occupations held by billionaires and investment capitalists are subject to automation, but they could always retrain as guillotine blade sharpeners and other useful occupations, if need be.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I was informed yesterday that an H1B will be replacing my job.
It's seems so unfair that I need to train him before I go.
25% is actually a very large number when you look at the population. That's 1/4 jobs are at risk of automation. This article is full of shit. If 1/4 jobs were to disappear the economic fallout would be staggering.
Luckily, the other 75% can be kept in fear of losing their jobs to members of the unemployed 25% who will work for not-starvation; so we needn't let this disappointment interfere with reducing the cost of human resources. Progress!
It's only ~37,500,000 people who will lose their jobs! /s
A critical detail.
Over the next ten years, just normal automation. Factory jobs, some agricultural work. A few percent each year.
In about ten years time self driving vehicles will become mainstream. And many other easily automated tasks. At that point 25% may become reasonable over the next few decades.
In some 50..100 years after that computers will be able to program themselves. They will then no longer need humans at all.
But the good news is that bureaucracies will continue to grow regardless of any attempt at automation. 50 years ago there were typing pools and clerks balancing ledgers by hand. All those jobs gone but bureaucracies just grow and grow. So soon, everyone will be a bureaucrat whose job it is to regulate everybody else. As predicted by Parkinson long ago.
https://www.economist.com/news...
(A classic, well worth reading.)
Un paywalled version
http://www.berglas.org/Article...
If you watch it you would have a realistic idea of how automated the various industries already are... Failing to know vs wanting to know, makes a difference. Kinda like with pi on a different level, yeah?
So what percent of the population has jobs in that list of 25% of the occupations?
I think the number is too low because they considered getting machines to do the human's job instead of adapting the job to the machine or at least meet halfway. Often, you can't get the machine to do the same thing, but you can get the machine to do something else that can accomplish the same end in a way that a human couldn't.
The machines don't have to take over our jobs to eliminate them. For example, in some fields the numbers of scientists needed are decreasing rapidly because a few scientists are able to leverage AI to more quickly find a solution to a problem by testing numerous combinations of something instead of trying to think their way to a solution - much like the way the first Chess computers beat people at Chess. The AI is not doing the same thing, but remarkable results are being achieved.
but I wish I could stop saying it: the Luddites were real people put out of work by technology in a society where if you don't work you don't eat.
It took a _long_ time for technology to catch up. The Luddites died jobless. Their kids did too. There were decades of unemployment and social strife following the industrial revolution until the two greatest employment programs in history restored full employment.
The tech that came out of the war (and the mad rush to rebuild the world) kept us going for this long. But the rich don't want another World War. It's their stuff, why would they let us break it? I remember when Pakistan looked the other way when some of their folks attacked India's capital. I was ready for WWIII. Didn't happen. India sucked it down because it would have been bad for business.
This means we're not gonna have wars save us this time. The next industrial revolution is upon us in the form of computerized automation. I've never _once_ heard a credible explanation of exactly what jobs we're all gonna retrain for. That's because there isn't one. You say that it's just that I can't imagine those jobs? That's because by the time they're available I'll be dead and I'll have died dirt poor.
It doesn't have to be that way. We can learn from history for a change. We know technology unemployment is coming. Now's the time to do something about it while we still have some economic power.
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Soylent Corporation is always "hiring".
This is a job that is 99% matching symptoms to diseases and then looking up the cure. And the good thing about AI would be that they would actually learn from their mistakes instead of burying them. (I'm only half joking, the feed back mechanism for many doctors is limited or too slow to result in significant learning)
The thing to consider about displacing swaths of the workforce is that they'll shift to other occupations. These will often be the jobs that are too complicated to automate relative to the payoff opportunity. Sex worker is something of a safety-net occupation and when people can't find other employment after they have been displaced by automation, many will turn to this type of gig economy work. The customers (employers) will benefit from an abundance of willing workers, which will push prices down. Overall, this dimension of capitalism (i.e. automation) will result in an increase in worker exploitation to the benefit of the wealthy.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The unemployment rate is at a historic low comrade. Unless you were talking about Mother Russia.
Only 25%?? That is huge. And what nobody seems to understand is that AI and machines start at the low end of jobs held by the lower end of the IQ curve and move up the IQ curve. Those jobs to be automated will displace people who are not going to be able to "educate up" to higher level jobs because they have not the capacity. Those lower level jobs have always provided income and daily work for those who are not capable of doing higher work. Thus, automation is a disaster for society as it will create an underclass of floating workers who will become resentful outsiders prone to violence.
E Proelio Veritas.
Cooking is not an exact science and never will be. Even the lowliest fast food worker is still visually inspecting everything he/she so autonomously cooks to make sure the meat is cooked all the way through, that the lettuce hasn't turned, etc. Those food service workers with a bit more freedom are playing with recipes and checking for variance in the cooking process. We'll still have servers delivering food to tables, visually inspecting the food one last time, then checking back regularly that the dining experience. We already pay those in the food service very low rates, and if a food service worker gets sick then they are easily replaced on the line by a cross-trained co-worker. If a robot breaks in an assembly-line fashion kitchen, it's like to bring the whole system down until a very costly technician comes out and repairs the system. Is that going to cost hours, days, or weeks worth of sales? Until robots can experiment with food recipes, tell the difference between good and bad lettuce at a glance, smell expired ingredients, self-repair, and provide friendly interactive experience with humans, don't experience food service jobs to take a major hit from robots any time soon.
And that's a best-case scenario based on pure speculation of what automation can actually accomplish. I'll bet it's even less than 25%. Silicon Valley really needs to stop relying on conjecture, big data, and statistics. None of those things represent reality.
We're going to have a real problem on our hands soon. We don't have a need for uneducated or rote work. And, here's the kicker some people (5% of the population) cannot be trained for higher skilled jobs. As automation continues it will not simply be warehouse jobs, truck driving jobs, taxi drivers, lawn care, street repair, farming positions but also a lot of low level office jobs. Notice how few professional typers there are anymore? That trend will continue.
Unlike 100 years ago we do not simply need a hard workers with a strong back.
This affects everything - from immigration policy, to social security (as we live longer and no longer have back breaking jobs) to everything. And "living wage" arguments don't cut it anymore. Take a look at the food service industry in NYC and other places that increased minimum wage. And UBI (Univeral Basic Income) is not a panacea either. People want to feel needed, useful and most are not self-driven to find satisfaction in the arts.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
How do you go through life with all that dead rich man cum all over your face??
You know the difference between the AI revolution and the industrial revolution? The AI revolution isn't replacing jobs, its replacing workers. Essentially, you are manufacturing an artificial person who can be instantly taught to replace a worker in any job. We could do the same thing without automation by allowing immigrants to come into the country and immediately firing all currently employed people and replacing them with the hypothetical army of immigrants. Let me repeat. We aren't creating new jobs, we are creating new workers.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
"The survivors will thank us".
If I can't imagine the job then it's not going to exist on a time frame that matters to me or even my kids. The resulting technology unemployment, OTOH, will exist.
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Come on you guys, how can you present a static number (25%) for a dynamic process? Perhaps a better representation: 25% within 5 years, 50% within 10 years, 75% within 15 years, and everybody within 20 years... Stupid college profs think they are indispensable. Teaching is a boring repetitive job and AI will quickly come to the conclusion that human teachers are inferior and EXPENSIVE. Just sayin'
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the fact that Luddites were violent has nothing to do with their job losses.
Luddite resistance only existed for a few years because they were brutally oppressed.
The discharged soldiers just show that their economy couldn't absorb an uptick in workers. What do you think will happen when we put 10-25% of a population of 350 million+ out of work.
And employers are _always_ complaining about a shortage of employees. Nothing new there.
I'm not saying we should resist these patterns (you're putting words in my mouth). If you want to know what I'm driving at I'm saying we need a society where you can eat even if there's no useful work for you to do. i.e. socialism, UBI or whatever you want to call it.
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Aaaahhhh motherlaaaaaand
In soviet russia you are not fired,
fired upon are you
Now the professionals are starting to say what I've been saying all along:
It's not jobs that get replaced, it's TASKS. The jobs remain.
Unemployment during the Great Depression was 25%-32%. And, of course, all those folks put out of work won't be buying much, so everyone *depending* on them is going under.
Y'know, sort of like what we're seeing right now, with the government shutdown.
One aspect that I see continually see overlooked is that the forces threatening threatening jobs are ultimately choices. Businesses can choose to automate as much as possible and cut production costs without regard for social costs, or they can value people and respect the dignity of work and benefits to society of having strong employment. Similarly sending jobs oversees to the lowest bidder that will work for exploitative wages is a choice. Legislators also have a choice, in fact policy can be crafted that provides incentives for employing human labor, or performing work in the domestic market, or paying ethical wages to foreign labor to support the global economy. I know it's not likely that the largest companies are going to develop an actual sense of ethics or loyalty to the people or to their own nations, but it doesn't mean that destroying the value of labor is an eventuality, it is in fact a choice. The people also if they so choose can influence this outcome, by choosing which business we buy from and what priorities we communicate to our lawmakers.