The computer is going to eat your job!
Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization
Rapid advances in technology have long represented a serious potential threat to many jobs ordinarily performed by people.
A recent report (which is not online, but summarized here) from the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology attempts to quantify the extent of that threat. It concludes that 45 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers within the next two decades.
The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support. Jobs in services, sales, and construction may also be lost in this first stage. Then, the rate of replacement will slow down due to bottlenecks in harder-to-automate fields such engineering. This “technological plateau” will be followed by a second wave of computerization, dependent upon the development of good artificial intelligence. This could next put jobs in management, science and engineering, and the arts at risk.
The authors note that the rate of computerization depends on several other factors, including regulation of new technology and access to cheap labor.
This is a trend that has been going on for a long time. There is a long list of what used to be considered decent white collar jobs that have fallen victim to automation. Blue collar manufacturing jobs were decimated by off shoring production to low wage countries. Now automation in the form of computerized robots is replacing the need for human workers in routine industrial production. As the power of technology moves ahead by leaps and bounds, the cost of the technology declines while its capacity to perform more and more functions steadily increases.
It is of course a global phenomenon. In countries such as China were wages are on the rise, the idea of automation becomes more attractive to industry. Human labor being replaced by machines is something that has been going on since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In the 19th and early 20th Cs that usually meant that the humans could let machines do things requiring physical effort while they moved onto more complex task. However, digital technology has raised the possibility that all but tasks requiring a high degree of intelligence, imagination and creativity may not need human labor.
You could look at all of this from a utopian perspective and imagine a world of human society that focuses its energy on communally sportive and creative interaction and works to maintain an environmentally sustainable balance. However, given the capitalist law of the jungle that dominates most of the world's political and economic systems, such a picture is really not on the horizon.
There is more and more pressure on young people to go into debt to get an education that might lead to one of the very limited supply of knowledge base jobs that will take longer to automate. We are seeing a growing number of people who have the debt without the job. It is not a picture that fills one with much optimism.