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from the ya-tvoy-sluga-ya-tvoy-rabotnik dept.
regift_of_the_gods writes:
"A study that was published last year by two Oxford researchers predicted that 47 percent of US jobs could be computerized within the next 20 years, including both manual labor and high cognition office work. The Oxford report presented three axes to show what types of jobs were relatively safe from being routed by robots and software; those requiring high levels of social intelligence (public relations), creativity (scientist, fashion designer), or perception and manipulation (surgeon) were less likely to be displaced.
This further obsolescence of jobs due to automation may have already begun. The Financial Times describes an emerging wave of products and services from algorithmic-intensive, data-rich tech startups that will threaten increasing numbers of jobs including both knowledge and blue collar workers. The lead example is Kensho, a startup founded by ex-Google and Apple engineers that is building an engine to estimate the impact of real or hypothetical news items on security prices, with questions posed in a natural language. Specialist knowledge workers in many other fields, including law and medicine, could also be at risk. At lower income levels, the dangerous are posed by increasingly agile and autonomous robots, such as those Amazon uses to staff some of its fulfillment warehouses.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04 2014, @01:17PM
Sorry to be AC
At least in the U.S., the work we "found" for displaced workers is often lower paying and less stable (service industry and retail vs. manufacturing). We've also seen people give up more in order to keep a job (such as working longer and longer hours, to the point that they have no time for family, or to participate in non-job communities like churches and municipal government).
Our unemployment statistics also exclude those who are no longer looking for work, and pull a few other tricks to obfuscate how many people do not have stable employment.
I think the fault in a lot of these futurist predictions is that they posit a fast, disruptive change, rather than a trend that takes many years to complete (which also makes the issue much more difficult to identify and cope with).
Saying that "new jobs will come along to replace the old" is a statement of faith. Innovation will continue, but in a lot of industries, that innovation will be along the lines of making better machines that require less oversight and cut more expensive labor out of the equation.