Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerization? 385
turkeydance writes: What job is hardest for a robot to do? Mental health and substance abuse social workers (found under community and social services). This job has a 0.3 percent chance of being automated. That's because it's ranked high in cleverness, negotiation, and helping others. The job most likely to be done by a robot? Telemarketers. No surprise; it's already happening. The researchers admit that these estimates are rough and likely to be wrong. But consider this a snapshot of what some smart people think the future might look like. If it says your job will likely be replaced by a machine, you've been warned.
Simplistic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
"Requires the mind?" That's the biggest oversimplification on this thread yet.
50 years ago the hordes of people who worked in analysis departments with massive paper spreadsheets probably thought of themselves as knowledge workers.
Lots of people will be replaced. The ones least likely to be replaced are a) socially prestigious, or b) in jobs that require direct interaction with humans. So lawyers and Doctors are safer then anyone else.
Re:Simplistic (Score:5, Informative)
"So lawyers and Doctors are safer then anyone else."
Tell that to RocketLawyer. Or to the Robot Anesthesiologist, or to the guy who's inventing an easily implantable lens that could completely take out the eyeglass and contact lens industries. Expert radiologists are routinely outperformed by pattern-recognition software, diagnosticians by simple computer questionnaires. In 2012, Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla predicted that algorithms and machines would replace 80% of doctors within a generation.
Re:Simplistic (Score:5, Informative)
Question:
When you talk to actual people, and not your friend wikipedia, and you say "lawyers and doctors;" do they assume you mean the hordes of JDs punching their time-clocks deep in the bowels of a massive firm and a highly paid specialist who they see once a lifetime to get test results; or do they think you mean Trial Lawyers and their General Practitioner?
As I said in another post on this thread, a lot of medical specialists will be replaced by computers. But only in settings where patients can't notice. The GP will send you to a test site where a working class dude with an Associate's will run his diagnostic computer. Then he'll send the result to your GP, who will read it to you. You'll go to surgery where a single surgeon will oversee both the robotic surgeon and the anesthetics machine. If (at any point) you figure out that the whole process would have required an MD at the testing facility, an MD Anesthesiologist, two other surgeons on the team, each costing 500k per year; as well as a half-dozen more nurses at $40k per year, you will freak out and go to some other hospital.
It's the same in law offices. You'll always have a lawyer you talk to when you need a lawyer. You won't know that in the 80s to do what he's doing for you he would have needed a couple paralegals, a newly-minted bunny lawyer to do the boring legal research in paper books, etc.
Re: Simplistic (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
"So lawyers and Doctors are safer then anyone else."
Tell that to RocketLawyer. Or to the Robot Anesthesiologist.... Expert radiologists are routinely outperformed by pattern-recognition software, diagnosticians by simple computer questionnaires. In 2012, Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla predicted that algorithms and machines would replace 80% of doctors within a generation.
Sure, if done right automation may replace a lot of what doctors do today.. But doctors also do research, experimentation... And they'll become skilled in fixing other things... Who knows maybe some day health care costs will begin to decline. But no, doctors are still going to be around, they might not be doing all the same things, but they'll probably still have plenty of work to do.
Re: (Score:3)
Radiologists are already on their way to being obsolete. There's a simple chain of events that leads up to automation:
Wait until all these 12 year olds that started learning Python hit college and industry. There are a lot of stupid for loops that will eventually turn into big code.
I was a lazy 8th grader years ago that learned to program my TI-83. T
Work expands to fit the time permitted (Score:3)
What radiologists do today is not what radiologists will do in 20 years.
That is a VERY different statement than saying radiologists will be going bye-bye.
Yes. My wife is a hospital internist and she says that 80% of her job could be done by someone with less education or automated
You could say that about pretty much everyone's job. That doesn't mean it is economic to do it. I'm an accountant and an engineer myself. Most individual tasks I do could be done adequately by someone else with less education given a modest amount of training. But I don't have endless money to hire other people or purchase automation to do those tasks. Furthermore I actually create some of the automation to make me more e
Automation vs doctors and lawyers (Score:3)
Tell that to RocketLawyer.
Just because someone has digitized some routine legal forms and advice isn't evidence that lawyers will be replaced. I have no reasonable expectation that the vast majority of what most lawyers do is readily amenable to automation. If you think it is then I don't think you really understand what is involved in their job. Rocketlaywer reportedly has about $20 million in revenue. That is NOT a big company and they aren't the first [wikipedia.org] to do this. We're not talking earth shattering stuff here.
Expert radiologists are routinely outperformed by pattern-recognition software
Not really true
Re: (Score:3)
The problem with the website in OP with their 4 keypoints (and the 80% from the optimisic investor in your quote) - is they dont take into account the damage done if a computer gets it wrong.
This is current with UAVs, we have autopilots, but is anyone prepared to board an automated 787 without any pilot onboard?
It will probably eventually be safer and more convenient. Same as automated elevators, traffic lights, etc.
Re: (Score:3)
What will happen is the same thing it happened with trains. Everything will be automated but there will be at least one pilot just for 'emergencies'. Two if its long-haul.
Re: (Score:3)
Everything will be automated but there will be at least one pilot just for 'emergencies'.
That will happen in the beginning. But as people become comfortable with automation, it will be dropped. Would I fly in a pilotless plane today? Nope. But once they have flown 100,000 flights without any incidents, then sure. Most aircraft accidents involve pilot error, so once the bugs are worked out, the pilotless planes should be safer.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
If there was a dirty thankless job that could be done better by a robot, it's the job of a prostitute.
Re:Simplistic (Score:4, Insightful)
The ones least likely to be replaced are a) socially prestigious, or b) in jobs that require direct interaction with humans. So lawyers and Doctors are safer then anyone else.
The lion's share of MDs could be replaced by machines. We tend to worship the ground they walk on in the United States but at the end of the day medicine is just a trade, no different than plumbers or electricians, and nurses do the bulk of the work in your typical medical practice. The percentage of truly innovative Doctors is no different than the percentage of truly innovative coders, for most it's just rote memorization and long established best practices.
There are countries that recognize this fact, where MDs are paid less than teachers and society doesn't treat them as Gods walking amongst men. Of course, in fairness to American MDs, Doctors in those nations don't have to deal with crushing malpractice premiums and student loan debt.......
Re: (Score:2)
Not until get computers that'll write scripts for Oxycontin.
Re: (Score:2)
No doctors will not be replaced by machines (Score:3)
The lion's share of MDs could be replaced by machines.
Not in your lifetime they couldn't. If you think otherwise you don't actually understand what they do. Doctors aren't just differential diagnosis engines. And even if they were a differential diagnosis (which is all a diagnostic computer can give you) will just give you a set of choices and probabilities. It won't give you a definitive answer because frequently there isn't one. The human body is far more complicated than any program we have access to and you need someone who can think through problems
Re: Simplistic (Score:2)
My job title is 'Technical Analyst'. I don't use spreadsheets as data sources so much as I use phone calls, emails, etc. My work is providing second level support for software, web sites, and various automated processes.
The most important skill for my I job is communicating, with troubleshooting and analysis right behind it. If software to replace me becomes useful, I expect the systems I support to become self-healing and self-reporting. I'm not worried right now.
Oddly, with I last talked with a program
Re: Simplistic (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
as most candidates could code or design or work to specifications
I call bs or they have a very low bar to meet "to specifications". Code that works to spec is great when it works and horrible when it doesn't work. Most people design systems that cannot be easily debugged or fail in unexpected ways. But yes, they work great when they work. It's shipped, no longer my problem, right?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Simplistic (Score:5, Informative)
Anything that really requires a mind rather than a simple result of calculation or mechanical action will likely not be replaced without some big advance.
Some things that used to take a human no longer do. For instance, image recognition has improved a lot in recent years. Banks use computers to read and process handwritten checks because they make fewer errors than humans do.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Well, other than the US - China. France. UK. Singapore. Germany. Canada. India.
You know... places with money.
Sorry to hear you live in a third-world shithole where barter in the form of chickens and blowjobs is the accepted currency.
Re:Simplistic (Score:4, Interesting)
Agree somewhat. There are a fair number of human jobs that can probably be automated in the fairly near future as "AI" has been getting better, especially for problems like visual/speech recognition which traditionally was a barrier to automation.
An AI that actually can innovate and is self-aware/etc would be a barrier to eliminating many jobs. At some point I think we'll cross that threshold and we'll see almost every job go away almost overnight (since such an AI could be used to improve itself and rapidly develop specific automation solutions for every job). However, that is of course a major advance and it is really hard to say how soon it will come.
Re: (Score:2)
Not this again. The truth is there has been NO ADVANCES in AI since the 1970's. NONE.
And therefore there never will be one?
That's a bit like saying that aircraft will never be invented because there was no progress on the topic between 350AD and 390AD.
I know people really really want to believe that Siri is AI, or a precursor to AI, but it isn't.
I don't consider either Siri or Google to be examples of AI per se. I think that when AI does come along it might end up incorporating some of the concepts that go into them, but it is hard to say at this point since nobody really knows how to build an AI.
Re: (Score:3)
That's why this analysis will soon be performed by robots.
Re:Simplistic (Score:5, Insightful)
Robots built to replicate human capabilities are, despite continued effort, relatively pitiful. Competent bipedal locomotion, a couple of dexterous hands, fallible but very, very, adaptable image recognition, etc. are a fairly tricky package to put together on a reasonable budget. Outside of tech demos, that's why you don't bother to build the robot to resemble the worker, you restructure the task to play to the strengths of the robot(see basically all contemporary manufacturing processes). This task restructuring can also involve the user: replacing a telephone operator, say, would have been impossible until relatively recently; you need speech recognition software good enough to do the job and computers cheap enough to run it. So we didn't: Pulse code dialing allows line switching to be done with relatively simple electromechanical devices, which is why operators were on their way toward the exit more than a century ago, despite AVR 'agents' still being considered lousy and terrible to work with today.
You will almost always be misled if you try to predict odds of replacement based on 'what the job requires' rather than 'what the job produces'. Beating the people currently doing a job at the skills that the job requires is difficult, frequently impossible or uneconomic. Achieving whatever goal their job exists to fulfill(or achieving something else that eliminates that goal); is almost always how it gets done.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I would trust 2 separate AIs from 2 separate companies tasked with checking and if they don't agree then use a pharmacist.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Simplistic (Score:2)
This has already happened in my field (translation) a good decade ago. The problem with it though is that if a translator is working through and agency and not a direct client, the agency will demand a discount for repeated words, which makes no sense for anything that actually needs to be readable.
If anything, I spend just as much time going over
Re:Simplistic (Score:5, Insightful)
While this is true, when you actually look at people working, the number of jobs that 'truly require' a mind is much smaller.
Even jobs that people think require a great mind like say a doctor. In reality, the way a lot of doctors operate in the real world, it is rather routine.
A lot of diagnosis work can be pretty well automated. Simple stuff. For example, I'm on Thyroid medication. I get a blood test once a year. I've seen this happen first hand now. The blood lab does the work. The doctor gets an automated analysis of the results showing acceptable levels of thyroid... and the corresponding dosage. This entire process could be automated. Even things like radiology, which is very costly, could deal with a lot of automation. I worked briefly in the field about 8 years ago, and back then we were working on automated detection of anomalies in MRI/PET scans.
Two things have to be taken into account here.
One is that so much of a doctors work is routine that a lot of that can be automated. Then if there is an exception, you can have that handled by a human. Or you can do a human review on a positive case. For example, you can have 80% of MRI/PET scans automated for analysis. But before you decide on surgery, have it confirmed by a human radiologist.
The other is to actually look at real work. Theoretically, doctors can spend lots of time with their patients and this extra touch can lead to better analysis and treatment. Look, I'm in Canada, land of universal healthcare. Almost every doctor I've seen (both walkin and family) over the past 10 years has been running a tight ship. 15 minute appointments. Get straight to business.
I don't know if they could theoretically do better if they spent more time, but this is the reality of healthcare. I'd guesstimate you could automate a lot of the diagnosis and treatment. Of course like I said above, serious issues would need to get more serious approvals.
For automation to make sense, it simply has to make sense for a large number of cases. I don't think the automated system needs to beat the very best, because how many of the cases are actually done by the very best?
Again, back to
You also have other jobs that could be automated. Most of the tax system could be automated. I've been seeing it more computerized for years and years, but we're nowhere close. But really, there is no reason my taxes could not be automatically done. They have my income slips. All my investments are with major financial institutions who should be able to calculate my profit/loss...
If they simplified the tax code, it could probably be automated even better.
The more you actually dwell on it, the number of jobs that truly require a mind are simply not that many. Most can be automated. Even judgment style jobs can be automated and probably perform better than the average of human practitioners in the field.
all will be tried to be robotized. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
The telemarketer has already been replaced by robots, but robots are not tolerated so these jobs are still secure. It is the same reason that these jobs are still present in the US instead of completely exported to other count
Re: (Score:2)
Here's a mental health robot (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/407978049/how-a-machine-learned-to-spot-depression
It uses computer vision and voice analysis to diagnose depression and PTSD about as well as human psychologists do. They haven't yet programmed it to provide actual therapy. Maybe it will say things like "tell me more about your family" and "please go on", like ELIZA of yore.
Re: (Score:2)
Somehow, that reminds me on 20Q...
Mental health workers? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a little sad.
You're talking about a profession that in many cases has either no training or dubious training. Anyone here have a family member that has an addiction problem? I have a cousin that is a heroine addict and a brother that is an alchoholic. My brother is also bipolar and god knows what my cousin is at this point... because the drugs do damage the brain.
But the point is that I've some experience with these people and they're often very nice, sometimes they're quite smart... but this is not what I'd call a "science" or even "medicine". A lot of it is witch doctorism. And that can make people feel better. But that is because the believe it works.
Here is a better list:
1. Artists: Computers are terrible at art.
2. Any kind of design or engineering work. Computers will be used as tools but they're not going to do the actual design work. They might automate the implimentation of previously designed concepts. We see that with CPU design where in something designed once is replicated by computer. But the actual design was done by humans.
3. Maintenance and repair work. Repairs are almost never carried out by a machine. You can find a factory that is 100 percent automated and it actually still has human repair techs keeping the robots working.
4. Programmers are not getting automated. The reasons are many but mostly the issue is that we've yet to come up with a machine that can self program or can accept instructions to write a program and then translate that into code with any competence.
5. Construction work on buildings is unlikely to get automated. You're seeing people do prefab and even talking about 3d printed houses etc but even if you include that there is going to be a lot of human labor happening around that.
I could go on... the fears of everyone losing their jobs to robots are ill founded. They're actually going to save us from having to do jobs we hate. Name a job a computer does that you'd actually want to do? There aren't any.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Your list is quite good. I have a few thoughts about it:
- Mental health and substance abuse counsellors should be included though, the reasoning is basically the same as you've given. It's poorly defined, and there's little metric for success or failure within our system. People also prefer to talk to other people about things like that, so it will likely be impossible to automate.
- One of the reasons that programmers and engineers will be the last is that the last and most advanced automation will have
Re:Mental health workers? (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand what you're saying, but I have worked with a lot of people in my career, including in an engineering company that still manufactured products locally (i.e. had factory workers). The reality is that most people are just not that smart, and when you spend all day hanging out with top programmers with degrees you really lose sight of just how big the ability gulf is.
The thing I observe is that the robots are not replacing workers, they are simply driving down the marginal cost of workers because that is the only way most of these people can compete. This is simply what happens in a market economy if the workers cannot own the means of production or up-skill themselves.
I don't know what the solution is but it is a pretty grim existence if you are not in the top 10-20% right now (which lets be honest, most people on slashdot are).
Re: (Score:2)
... hmmm... I think we need to expand on this a bit.
I did not say that people without skills would be doing well. I said that people with certain skills should be able to deal with automation just fine.
As to owning the means of production, automation actually facilitates that.
You do realize that there are a lot of machines already that can make really sophisticated stuff right?
Take a rather cheap CNC machine... I can make all sorts of things with that. Basically anything but steel. And I can make the mold f
no training?? (Score:4, Informative)
This is a field that requires a masters degree and certification.
You're probably thinking of faith-based social organizations that attempt to provide counseling services. Those agencies do not provide effective treatment for the ailments you mentioned. At best they might be able to provide some marriage counseling assistance.
Re: (Score:3)
It's also a field that is remarkably ineffective at delivering results. I think they are not at risk of automation, they are at risk of elimination as a profession.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, many such councilors are secular.
Re:Mental health workers? (Score:5, Informative)
Construction work? Try this...
http://www.wired.com/2012/09/b... [wired.com]
Do enough of it, and the module construction itself can be automated and robotized. Or seen modern shipbuilding these days? Prefab modules assembled and welded by robots.
And so what if there's still "a lot" (weasel words) of labor around that. There's still less of it, and every decrease cascades into additional hits on labor. See the following piece on the potential impact of robot trucks on the long-haul trucking industry.
https://medium.com/basic-incom... [medium.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Your example involved massive human labor in china to build a large building using prehab blocks assembled by PEOPLE in a factory.
So your example is actually an argument in favor of my position.
it is therefore now my example.
*yonk!*
Thank you so very much.
As to the problem of any industry losing a need for labor etc... we used to have 80 percent of labor in agriculture because we needed 80 percent of our population working on farms to feed the rest.
That number in some cases might have been as low as 60 perce
Re:Mental health workers? (Score:5, Insightful)
You could, but it would not enlighten anyone. You are talking in absolutes and margins like they are all that count because you are arguing a straw man.
The "fears" (from people not writing clickbait articles) are not around "everyone" losing their job. They are around too many people losing their job.
Do you know what would happen to ANY of the modern first world economies if 20% of their workforce is no longer needed? Fucking disaster.
And most at much less than that!
So here is a list that has actual meaning in terms of this subject.
- Less people working means less people buying all that rubbish that is the only thing keeping our debt fueled economies from collapsing.
- More automation means (even) more companies outsourcing entire factories overseas: INCLUDING many of those jobs you mention above.
- Since more stuff is made in 3rd world countries which means your trade deficit worsens.
- The above depresses economic growth in said country and thus causes jobs losses in support industries which cause further job losses...etc
- More unemployed means more pressure on government money and less tax to pay for it. It also can mean civil unrest and crime spikes.
- Income inequality skyrockets as the the rich invest worldwide but the rest must earn locally - which further slows the economy.
- All this also depresses wages which also reduces spending which brings us back to DOH!
And this is not theory. This process has already taken place in many areas of manufacturing already. The OECD has just released a report on the impact of income inequality on economic growth.
And this is not an exhaustive list by any means and many of those bullet points are heavily summarized.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You've failed to make any rational point yourself, shy of jumping up and down screaming "He's a witch!"
You've got some serious disconnects between cause and effect going on.
See, with 20% of people out of work, fewer people have money for anything except the most basic subsistence needs. Imagine you're a truck driver, and suddenly most fr
Re: (Score:3)
What happened during the Industrial Revolution is that most of the population moved from agriculture to industry. It was more of a pull than a push: factories could absorb large numbers of people, and paid better than agriculture. Few people wound up structurally unemployed, because it didn't take much to be useful in a factory. This was the age of unions.
The move to service jobs was more of a push: factory jobs went away, and people took what jobs they could, often considerably worse jobs than what
Re: (Score:2)
"As to strawmen, I think you're drawing a distinction without meaning."
Nope, I explained this as thoroughly as needed.
"As to 20 percent of the labor force being out of work... it has happened many times before. We're still here."
Those did not occur "here". With trillions in debt and outsourcing of the manufacturing industry. You have NEVER been there. But again...nice straw man.
"As to less people
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I am addicted to heroines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroine) too! Which one?
Re:Mental health workers? (Score:5, Insightful)
3. Maintenance and repair work. Repairs are almost never carried out by a machine. You can find a factory that is 100 percent automated and it actually still has human repair techs keeping the robots working.
The repair business is way down. Say 25 years ago small electronics repair was a big thing, radios, TVs, computers, stereos and so on. Except for warranty repair - which is suspect is more and more synonymous with warranty replacement or the replacement of complete subsystems - nobody really does that anymore. It went from replacing capacitors to replacing cards to just replacing the whole unit, while the skill level dropped from engineer to glorified delivery boy.
Nobody I know mends their clothes or socks or shoes anymore, they come cheaper off the assembly line. Really all the kinds of small household items I'd be more inclined to replace than start finding duct tape and glue. Maintenance is a little better, I still need people to paint walls but a quick search indicates robots want to take that job too.
More and more has embedded diagnostic sensors and service programs where you're really just following a list of instructions, granted the actual work is still done manually but by much lower skilled staff than before. The less electronics is involved, the more likely your job is safe. Also fixed items that you can't easily replace like electric wiring, water/sewage pipes or air conditioning. Make sure you need actual skills, not just swapping parts as otherwise it won't pay well or be very fun.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Mental health workers? (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Maintenance workers
Yes, they are all humans, but while you don't replace them with robots, you just need less and less of them. In the 1950ies and even in the 1970ies for instance, a computer had to untergo regular maintenance. The tape drives and the programming card feeders had to be cleaned and readjusted, worn out bearings had to be replaced, all the others had to be lubricated, boards with defective elements were pulled, the elements soldered out and new elements built in, the boards were put back etc.pp.
Those maintenance jobs are almost gone. Today, you let your hard drive run until it fails, then you replace it with a new one. The data is on RAID anyway, and the new hard drive will be filled with data automatically. All the compute boards are now a single main board and some bars of memory, and replacing them is easy. And have you ever repaired a network switch? No, you get a new one from the spare parts storage and just replug everything. Thus a single person now can do maintenance for a whole data center during a shift, when in former times, you need dozens - and that was only for that single mainframe running the central database.
And in general, the main time between failures has gone up for almost every computer component. Most of them don't fail anyway until they get replaced because they become obsolete.
2. Design and engineering
Yes, the actual design of a new component is human work, but design as a career has a big disadvantage: design per se is no steady work. Once done, a single design is finished, and now it can be used over and over again. And there is no guarantee, that a new design is necessary after you finalized the last one. Or at least, there is no guarantee that you get paid for a new design because the old one is good enough. And many tasks in a design bureau are now computerized anyway. No technical draftspersons anymore for the finalization, whose task is now done perfectly by AutoCAD and the like. Drawing an RC-circuit is now a single point and click, and not a 10 min task to get everything rectangular and nicely fitted into the page. Need just the electrical installation of a construction plan? I'll send the approbriate layers to the printer instead of calling the assistant draftsperson. And the fan-in and fan-out of a circuit or a sub-component is now calculated on the fly and the right connectors with the right capacity to PWR and GND are automaticly put into my new chip design. My mother worked as a typograph, and I remember, when I was a child, she was sitting at her desk, cutting the galley proofs to length to arrange them on a page and glued them in place, intermixed with the drawings and the marginals and the footnotes and the headlines. Now this whole typesetting process is highly automated, text flows freely around other typographic objects, and we just point and click to change everything from one-column to two-columns.
3. Programming
For programming in general, see 2. Most of the tedious, but steady parts of programming are now done by prefabricated software components, by libraries, by integrated developing environments, by code generators. We have code profilers, we have test case generators, we have automated versioning. A single programmer can maintain larger and larger code bases. We have large databases of code samples, easily browseable. We have online communities for complicated questions.
4. Construction
Actually, construction needs less and less people. Many parts are prefabricated. Others are standardized, and easily mounted on site. You don't see people building window frames on a construction site. Windows are built in highly automated plants and then shipped on site, mounted with construction foam, and then everything is done. We don't mount individual planks, we have large wooden panels. We don't use the hammer to drive in a nail, we have pneumatic nailing machines. We don't do individual cabling anymore, we do structured cabling, where we ju
Re: (Score:3)
There's a bunch of what you say that I agree with*, but then you start going to crazy-town with your talk of "crypto-communists". Especially right after you proclaim "welfare for life" as a solution for the displaced people, which is the very essence of "to each according to their needs".
* In particular, I see "fewer jobs" as an intrinsically good thing. Yes, we all understand that leads to a wealth distribution problem. There are multiple possible outcomes.
Re: (Score:3)
As to fewer people... sure. The point is not to give you a job.
That was the original question: Which jobs will be replaced by robots (e.g. not given to you)? The whole point of the article is what career to chose if you don't want to be replaced by robots. And the grand parent offered some ideas, which I doubted. While those jobs may be not directly replaced by robots, we just need less and less of them. For your career, it is mainly irrelevant if you get replaced by a robot, or if your job just becomes obsolete. You will get fired.
Re: (Score:2)
Maintenance and repair work. Repairs are almost never carried out by a machine. You can find a factory that is 100 percent automated and it actually still has human repair techs keeping the robots working.
Yeah, that's going to go away soon. The robots will become more commoditized and more modular and there will be robots that know how to repair the robots. And there will be robots that know how to repair PCBs. For a while you'll still need humans to identify the fault and decide which components will be replaced, and then eventually the computers will take a circuit diagram and a part and perform circuit analysis to identify bad components.
But seriously soon, you will have robots repairing cars, and robots,
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah but if you had a machine that did the same thing and you could just OWN it... you could get that every day.
There are a few things people do:
1. They sense where there are tight muscles and focus on them.
2. They have a variety of methods for dealing with things and they use their judgement and senses to shift between them.
3. A human will generally push a LOT harder on your body than will some machine. The machines need to be safe. And because they're blind and stupid they can't push as hard on you safely
Only four dimensions? (Score:2)
While I would agree with some of their findings, that is mostly a coincidence. They used only 4 dimension to determine this. And they missed out social skills (beside negotiation), like compassion and moderation, which are required for instance in teachers of all kind, but also in professors and many other areas where people work together. Also robots have big trouble combining gross and fine motor skills, so all areas where both are required might not be automatized that soon.
Mental health and substance abuse social workers (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Mental health and substance abuse social work looks to be doubly golden. Because the takeover by machines will surely increase the number of unemployed people with mental health and substance abuse problems.
Depends on the political climate: if some bleeding heart is calling the shots, sure; but if it's tough-on-crime time, then the rapidly maturing world of combat robotics will be tapped to provide low-cost 'treatment' solutions to these populations.
Truck Drivers, Obviously... (Score:2)
Any other job that's working class and involves making real money will be automated sooner rather then later, as (at least in the States) working class guys have very little ability to stop their employer from replacing them with machines.
Cashier at a store will probably be around for awhile, particularly in bad neighborhoods. They're much better at catching shoplifters then a self-checkout line is. But a lot of the back of the store jobs will either go away or turn into "dude who fixes the robot who puts s
Re: (Score:2)
You mean mind-numbing, back-breaking, dangerous jobs will be replaced with safer, more interesting jobs? Great! The sooner the better.
Re: (Score:2)
You mean mind-numbing, back-breaking, dangerous jobs will be replaced with safer, more interesting jobs? Great! The sooner the better.
Great in economic theory. In practice we've never been good at figuring out WTF to do with a 50-year-old guy whose got no marketable skills because the robots took his job.
Believe me. I'm from Detroit. 50-year-old guys typically aren't terribly mobile because they've got families. They ain't moving to North Dakota to work the oil patch. Even if they had the income to take a few years off and get a degree a) their last experience as a student was 30 years ago, while b) if that experience hadn't sucked they p
Re: (Score:2)
It's just not a terribly nice solution.
Re: (Score:3)
Europe's primary unemployment problem is with young workers, priced out of the market by regulations. Europe's long-term unemployment problem is a separate problem that affects older workers.
So you're saying someone works a union blue collar 40h/week job and never bothe
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect quite a few other jobs behind the scenes will be automated. For example, why have a human X-Ray Tech analyze your pictures when computer image analysis is getting so much better? Heck, why have a team of Medical Specialists who make ($500k a year each) when a computer program can read the data and do the work?
Read the data and interpret it are two very different tasks. Sure, a computer can make an very good guess based on the rules it has to but to infer what something means based on patterns and something unusual will take a while longer for machine to do as well as a human. I'd say a machine is more likely to replace a GP first since they are treating symptoms rater than cases and most symptoms will respond to standard, well defined treatments. the machine can run the tests and check the symptoms and provide
Re: (Score:2)
GPs will be fine. People really like having a human Doctor. Particularly an American-accented human Doctor. Unless the Hospital can bill the insurance company extra for using the human GP they will continue to use the human GP. And the insurers aren't likely to pay extra so the hospital can replace a GP earning low six figures with a computer. Moreover computers would make really shitty GPs, as they are unable to figure out whether you have high blood pressure because you're about to die, or because you're
Still haven't provent their point (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
All telemarketers are robots.
Some are the kind that used to be human.
Design vs. Implementation (Score:4, Insightful)
Head as far towards design and away from implementation as possible. As a designer, automation will make you more and more powerful. Design a house, run automated integrity checks on it, have it printed with the house-sized 3D printer. Even better, design the marketplace for trading house designs. Design the 3D printers that make houses.
On the other hand, applying a skill repeatedly, even if there is some judgement involved, is on a long term trend downward. Lawyers who repeatedly draft the same contract over and over again are already being automated out of existence. Those who can create new contract patterns, however, continue to be in demand.
Another way to think about this is in terms of creating the new vs. applying the old. I once got the chance to visit the Bauhaus archive in Berlin; the design skills and output they produced 100 years ago would still be applicable today despite the radically different consumer landscape.
Shrink job least likely to be??? (Score:2)
Editors .. on websites (Score:2)
Editors on news aggregation websites are very susceptible to being replaced by computerization. In fact I am pretty sure that I have seen examples of (albeit bad) computerization already happening on a website that I regularly read.
Being rich (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Try as you might you'll never see a robot replace the Koch bros, the Hienz family or even a Mitt Romney.
Or George Soros. Of course, he has thousands of mindless activist 'bots doing his bidding, so at least he's contributing to the botpocalypse in his own way.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't a corporation a robot that exists specifically to hold assets?
Nah, a robot has to make its own decisions, but a corporation can't function without humans. A robot actually does stuff, but a corporation is really just a legal fiction and a bunch of pieces of paper in legally-mandated filing cabinets.
Already Automated (Score:2)
Mental health Workers were automated long ago: Eliza.
Basic income / maybe make full time 32-30 hours a (Score:3)
Basic income / maybe make full time 32-30 hours a week.
Need to look at the OT think or we can have some one doing the work of 2-3+ people working 60-80 hours a week covering there old jobs / that are some what automated.
Re: (Score:2)
Pr0n actors, scriptwrites musicians in the 2020s (Score:3)
The porn industry will be the first to replace actors with digital actors that look "even realer than life. Won't even require the digital overlay that was simulated in Running Man. And you can have it any way you want, just like Doug Quade in Total Recall. 37.4%? I doubt it.
Writers are rated at a 3.8% change of being automated. How hard can it be for software to turn out porno plots? Really?
Musicians and singers - 7.4%? Can anyone ever remember the cheesier-than-elevator-muzak from those cheap pornos?
It will create more opportunities for optometrists (13.5%).
Now someone make the inevitable pr0n overlords, please :-)
Humans Need Not Apply (Score:2, Informative)
On the subject of jobs being automated, I recommend this video [youtube.com]. Amazing stuff. Mechanical minds are pretty serious stuff.
Obviously (Score:4, Funny)
"What job is hardest for a robot to do?"
Obviously management.
All that yelling, the ignorance, the incompetence, the rudeness, the anti-social behavior, the complete disregard for the feelings of the employees is hard to duplicate with software.
Nothing. (Score:2)
In the end nothing.
it will take sometime to get there.
The big question is what will people do for leisure?
I suspect that after a while screwing all day becomes boring.
OMG we're all gonna die! (Score:3)
Imagine your garments being woven and sewn entirely by machines! Imagine if all the farmers would be replaced by machines that sow and harvest everything - there would be rampage, murder, rage, and death! Humanity would end! OMG, we're all doomed! ... Errrmh, ...
Ok, scratch that. Never mind.
Machines taking over the dirty work. Awesome.
More time for me to dance tango, do yoga and live to become 120 years old.
Sorry, folks, but I'm welcoming the new robot army with open arms. No excuse me while I continue my job as a webdev, clicking together Wordpress apps and doing the type of work that would've needed a team of seven 10 years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:nope (Score:4, Funny)
And it would be a hell of a psychologist.
The emacs psychotherapist doesn't even like me using the word 'hell'. I'm afraid feeding an AI with even a small subset of YouTube would drive it into a blind rage.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed, all jobs are susceptible to computerization. The question should be: which jobs are most likely to get computerized next? It is more a matter of cost vs return on the investment, public perception and in the end profitability.
Re: (Score:2)
I am a computer myself you insensitive clod.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Too bad it's manufactured, assembled, and shipped by robots... only to sit in automated Amazon warehouses. Why? Because no else has a job and as such no one else has the income to purchase the silly things.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
A database administrator? You ask them to grant you the required permissions to do your work and then you ask them every now and then to restore some data, why the database is performing so terribly and if they have any idea why the database crashed again (if it's an Oracle database anyway).
You don't seem to be talking about a real database administrator. Maybe a MS SQL database installer, I mean administrator. I've known people who put data into a GUI who think they are database administrators. Plenty of people who do the job you described above also fancy themselves database administrators. It goes far beyond that.
The good news about automating Computer Programming jobs is that for every programming job that gets automated it takes 1.01 Programmers to maintain the automation.