
The future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerisation? - anigbrowl
http://www.eldis.org/go/home&id=65902&type=Document#.UqjGjeLIcm0
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anigbrowl
If people want the tl;dr then I suggest loading the pdf at the article and
jumping to page 37, which has a stack graph of automative potential broken out
by employment sector. If you have a little more time, I urge reading the whole
paper, which is quite elegant.

~~~
jliechti1
For convenience, a little more infomation from that page:

 _" According to our estimate, 47 percent of total US employment is in the
high risk category, meaning that associated occupations are potentially
automatable over some unspeciﬁed number of years, perhaps a decade or two."_

Here are the categories they list:

    
    
        Management, Business, and Financial
        Computer, Engineering, and Science
        Education, Legal, Community Service, Arts, and Media
        Healthcare Practitioners and Technical
        Service
        Sales and Related
        Office and Administrative Support
        Farming, Fishing, and Forestry
        Construction and Extraction
        Installation, Maintenance, and Repair
        Production
        Transportation and Material Moving
    

The ones most susceptible to computerisation (probability > 0.7) seem to be

    
    
        Sales and Related 
        Service
        Office and Administration Support
        Production
        Transporation and Material Moving
    

_" Our ﬁndings thus imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers
will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerisation – i.e.,
tasks requiring creative and social intelligence. For workers to win the race,
however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills."_

I'm having a hard time thinking of the millions of job openings of this kind.

~~~
mtdewcmu
>> I'm having a hard time thinking of the millions of job openings of this
kind.

Supposedly after manufacturing, the economy will naturally transition to
services. What I never got about this theory is what would account for the
huge increase in demand for services to support such growth. It seems like the
thinking is that, since there will be nothing else to drive the economy,
services it must be. The people have no bread? Let them eat services!

~~~
dualogy
Once we finally fully lost our ability to form bonds with others naturally and
with ease, "services" might turn into what's going on in Japan already, stuff
like "rent-an-uncle for $10/hr -- he gives life advice and goes to the mall
with you". Not kidding, they have that there, targeted at apparently single
women.

~~~
mtdewcmu
I'm concerned that services tend to be luxuries and unreliable sources of
work. I don't think they'll replace the manufacturing jobs that supported a
stable and growing middle class for decades.

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jl6
I see the collapse in demand for human labor as the key political issue of the
21st century. So many of us are just not required by our economy.

~~~
wavefunction
The economy should serve man, not the other way around.

~~~
mtdewcmu
Communist, eh?

~~~
wavefunction
Funny how you can take an innocuous statement like that and fit it into your
fucked up worldview. Says more about you than me.

~~~
mtdewcmu
I was trying to make a joke. I like the idea that the economy should serve the
worker, but I think that's essentially what Karl Marx was saying. The Cold War
is over, and the future seems to belong to robots.

~~~
arethuza
You could argue

    
    
       Communism + Robots = The Culture
    

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture)

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InclinedPlane
Maybe someday I'll write an extensive rebuttal to the idea that jobs will be
destroyed by automation and a significant fraction of the populace will be
left permanently unemployable or unable to earn a living.

Here are two factors that are important though.

First, money has to be spent somewhere, and robots don't have bank accounts.
Money saved through reduction of costs due to automation will naturally end up
being spent elsewhere. We'll end up with a much different mix of jobs than
previously, but overall employment levels will not diminish. This has already
happened numerous times even in the last century. Far fewer people are
employed in mining and agriculture. Far fewer people are employed in
manufacturing. And so on. Jobs change, the economy changes, people adapt.

Second, wages for "the lower castes" won't fall or be left behind as much as
people imagine. A big reason why being Baumol's cost "disease".

Personally I don't view "labor" as a sad, helpless group of unwashed masses a
la the "proletariat". I don't think they need to be babied or rescued from the
terrifying advance of modernity, I think they need to be empowered to make the
adaptions that they've always been capable of. The "labor" of the future that
I imagine is a labor of skilled and passionate people, many of them self
employed. We're already seeing trends in that direction happening with things
like craigslist, etsy, and kickstarter. A considerable amount of growth in the
21st century economy is coming not from "professionals" like software devs but
from effectively blue collar folks, people who craft or cook or build or
provide services.

~~~
nkoren
The data simply doesn't support your claims.

> First, money has to be spent somewhere

Financial instruments such as derivatives and hedge funds do very little to
put money back into the real economy. If they did, then you would not see
wealth becoming concentrated in a historically unprecedented way among the
upper 0.1%. For your first claim to be true, you'd have to show that this is
_not_ occurring, when of course it is.

> Second, wages for "the lower castes" won't fall or be left behind as much as
> people imagine.

Since the mid 1970s, in inflation-adjusted terms -- and despite enormous
productivity growth -- mean incomes have stagnated and median incomes have
fallen. (And note that inflation-adjustment doesn't compensate for the cost of
housing or education; if those were included in the calculation then "The
lower castes" would already be worse off than at any time since the
Depression.) For your second claim to be true, you'd have to show that this
has _not_ happened, when of course it has.

Note that the decoupling of productivity and wages coincides with the advent
of microcomputers and industrial robotics, and job losses have been greatest
in the industries which those innovations affected. So the story of
technology-driven wage stagnation and unemployment is not some speculative
story about the future: it's the story of the developed world's economic
development over the last 40 years.

~~~
dualogy
> Financial instruments such as derivatives and hedge funds do very little to
> put money back into the real economy. If they did, then you would

.. see run-away inflation on store shelves before year's end ;)

Sounds flip but think about it.. are you really suggesting there's not enough
money circulating in the real economy? Are you sure that's what you want? The
vast expansion of dollars over the last decades was never a real problem
because the new cash largely didn't enter the real economy and ended up abroad
or in ultimately arbitrary asset valuations, from stocks to houses to bitcoins
to xyz.

You want all those dollars to circulate in your local real economy? Think hard
and long on this one ;D

> Note that the decoupling of productivity and wages coincides with the advent
> of microcomputers and industrial robotics, and job losses have been greatest
> in the industries which those innovations affected. So the story of
> technology-driven wage stagnation and unemployment is not some speculative
> story about the future: it's the story of the developed world's economic
> development over the last 40 years.

You're right but that all that automation _could_ instead very well also have
led to real wealth gains for the masses of people, middle class and low income
-- if the wealth tech created hadn't been fully gobbled up by Fed, Wall St.
and US Govt. That's my own crazy theory.. ;)

~~~
nkoren
The issue isn't the total amount of money in the real economy -- it's the
_distribution_ and _accessibility_ of money within the real economy, as
workforce participation falls off due to the lack of jobs. While the financial
economy does hoover up vast amounts of money, the people who own the "wealth"
in the financial economy (and you're right: they're pretty much arbitrary
asset valuations rather than real actual wealth) are also increasingly the
only ones with real access to the real economy.

The gains from automation weren't gobbled up by the Fed, "Wall St."
(generically), and the US Govt. They were gobbled up (specifically) by the IP
holders and financiers who enabled that automation. Those entities not only
lack any incentive for their gains to be redistributed to the poor and middle
classes -- they don't even have the _means_ to perform such redistribution
(shareholders' rights prevent banks and technology firms from acting as
charities).

The only solution I see is for a portion of those gains to be channelled into
a Universal Basic Income, in which case automation _would_ genuinely enable
real wealth gains for everyone. At present, however, it is not.

------
mtdewcmu
>> For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative
and social skills.

What?? I have to acquire social skills or a robot will take my job? I'm pretty
sure I have more social skills than a machine...

~~~
kika
I believe it means that flipping burgers do not require you to have any social
skills (besides flipping a bird to your "manager" when he/she doesn't see it).
And this position is very likely to be automated really soon [0].

[0]: [http://gizmodo.com/5962656/this-robo+griller-can-
flip-360-bu...](http://gizmodo.com/5962656/this-robo+griller-can-
flip-360-burgers-an-hour)

~~~
mapt
"Momentum Machines estimates that every fast food franchise in America spends
an average of $135,000 annually on staffing."

Think about that for a second.

$135,000 is all the _entire staff_ of a McDonalds sees per year, in pay and
benefits.

It's already almost a vending machine, for all it contributes to our
population's welfare.

~~~
kika
I believe it's "staffing" as is, i.e. efforts to fill the open positions. It's
not payroll.

~~~
mtdewcmu
You'd expect hiring to be touchy-feely work that couldn't be done by machines.
But, ironically, that seems not to be the case, as companies outsource to
"recruiters" with computer-driven systems.

