Informed observers have noticed that many manufacturing jobs have disappeared because of robots and automation, particularly among industries returning to the US from abroad where the updated plant needs far fewer workers. (See Manufacturing Is Returning to US, but Automation Means Fewer Hires.)
Oxford University forecast last year that 45 percent of US jobs were vulnerable to robots or computerization in the next two decades.
And the robot revolution is not confined to industrial production; it will become “omnipresent” according to the CEO of Google.
Professional occupations like doctor, lawyer and architect are no longer safe from smart machines, as noted in the article following.
The higher-end job threat from automation is another reminder that America does not need to double legal immigration, as legislated in the Senate amnesty bill S.744. The automated future is taking shape before our eyes, from robot hamburger flippers to Sergey Brin’s self-driving cars but the amnesty-addled politicians in Washington don’t see the approaching cliff.
Robot doctors, online lawyers and automated architects: the future of the professions?, The Guardian (UK), June 15, 2014
Advances in technology have long been recognised as a threat to manual labour. Now highly skilled, knowledge-based jobs that were once regarded as safe could be at risk. How will they adapt to the digital age?
Last year, reporters for the Associated Press attempted to figure out which jobs were being lost to new technology. They analysed employment data from 20 countries and interviewed experts, software developers and CEOs. They found that almost all the jobs that had disappeared in the past four years were not low-skilled, low-paid roles, but fairly well-paid positions in traditionally middle-class careers. Software was replacing administrators and travel agents, bookkeepers and secretaries, and at alarming rates.
Economists and futurists know it’s not all doom and gloom, but it is all change. Oxford academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A Osborne have predicted computerisation could make nearly half of jobs redundant within 10 to 20 years. Office work and service roles, they wrote, were particularly at risk. But almost nothing is impervious to automation. It has swept through shop floors and factories, transformed businesses big and small, and is beginning to revolutionise the professions.
Knowledge-based jobs were supposed to be safe career choices, the years of study it takes to become a lawyer, say, or an architect or accountant, in theory guaranteeing a lifetime of lucrative employment. That is no longer the case. Now even doctors face the looming threat of possible obsolescence. 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.
In their much-debated book The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argued that we now face an intense period of creative destruction. “Technological progress,” they warned, “is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot of people, as it races ahead … there’s never been a worse time to be a worker with only ‘ordinary’ skills and abilities to offer, because computers, robots and other digital technologies are acquiring these skills and abilities at an extraordinary rate.”
So where does that leave the professions, whose hard-won expertise is beginning to fall within the power of computers and artificial intelligence to emulate? The efficiency of computerisation seems likely to spell the end of the job security past generations sought in such careers. For many, what were once extraordinary skillsets will soon be rendered ordinary by the advance of the machines. What will it mean to be a professional then? Continue reading this article
