Before you invest $100,000 or more on a college diploma that will
prepare you for a particular job, you should consider what the
chances are that automation advances in the future will reduce your
chances of getting or keeping the job. Let us look at which jobs will
be most vulnerable to advances in automation and robotics in the next
few decades.
Driver Jobs
Google is currently working on driver-less cars, and their
self-driven cars have already logged thousands of miles on the road.
Nevada has become the third US state to authorize the use of
driver-less cars on a test basis. We can anticipate that in the
future there will be far fewer driver jobs because of this advance.
Do not be surprised if you find yourself in a self-driven taxi within
another decade or two.
Waitress and
Cook Jobs
It is easy to imagine an automation advance that will sharply reduce
the number of waitresses and waiters. When you arrive at your table
in the restaurant, you could see a little sign with a web address and
a table number. You would then access the web site using your smart
phone (which almost everyone seems to have these days), and navigate
through an interface allowing you to choose your food. You would
then type in your table number and pay by credit card. There would
be several advantages: no chance of the waiter writing down your
order wrong, no chance of customers skipping out without paying, and
no need for tipping. The technology for such a system is basically
already available.
Cooking is a fairly hard thing for a robot to do, so it may still be
safe to be pursuing a degree in the culinary arts. But we can
certainly imagine robots cooking in another decade or two in some
restaurants with a limited menu.
Teachers
In the next ten years, there is probably little risk of job
reductions caused by teaching robots in the classroom. But as we go
to out to a twenty or thirty year time frame, the risk grows much
higher for elementary school teachers. Some type of elementary school
instruction such as reading instruction involves a great deal of
rote, repetitive work that is quite suitable for being handed over to
a robot. We can imagine a slight modification in classroom
procedures that might make teaching robots work quite well, such as a
situation in which one half of the class works with a robot, and the
other half with a human teacher.
As for college teachers, the threats to their jobs will not likely be
from android robots, but from internet advances such as instructional
videos on www.youtube.com and
free online college courses, which have recently become very popular.
Pharmacists
Any student borrowing lots of money to pursue a pharmacy career might
cringe upon looking at the wikipedia.org article on pharmacy
automation. There are already medicine-dispensing machines available,
and in California an entire hospital pharmacy has been completely
automated. It is easy to imagine a system in which a large fraction
of drugs could be dispensed without requiring a pharmacist. Your
doctor could give you a prescription with a barcode, and you could
take that to a drugstore machine (similar to a vending machine) which
would read the barcode and dispense the medication. Or your doctor
could send an electronic message to some large drugstore machine,
which could dispense the medicine, and put it into a little envelope
with your name on it, ready for you to pickup.
Doctors and
Nurses
Nursing jobs and physician jobs are probably fairly immune to
automation advances in the next two decades. However, it is possible
to imagine two ways in which automation will reduce employment in
these medical fields. The first possibility is robot surgery, which
is becoming more popular, and may reduce demand for surgeons. The
second possibility is that they may soon develop some type of android
doctor or “doctor in a computer” that would be used purely for
boring, common cases. A doctor finds that 90% of his cases are the
same old thing, and 10% are interesting, uncommon cases. We can
easily imagine a typical doctor visit twenty years from now going
like this: if you have a very common case or some boring request for
a prescription renewal, you would see a “doctor in a computer” or
an android doctor, but if you mention anything unusual, you then see
the regular “in the flesh” doctor. If that type of thing catches
on, it might reduce employment prospects for doctors and nurses.
Factory Workers
and Warehouse Workers
If you are planning out your life as a young person, you had better
not count on 40 years of employment in a factory or warehouse, as
your father may have enjoyed. Already millions of factory jobs have
been replaced by automation, and the number will probably grow much
greater, particularly given advances in 3D printing which may make
obsolete many manufacturing techniques relying on human labor. They
currently have in place astonishing robotized warehouse workers,
based on a system in which everything is put on small shelves, and
robots slide under the shelves, moving them around automatically to
assemble an order consisting of multiple items collected from
different places in the warehouse. As such systems get better and
better, more and more warehouse workers may lose their jobs.
Home Health Care
Aides
As the tasks of a home health aide are usually fairly simple, rarely
involving actual medical treatment, this is an area that is ripe for
automation advances. It is not hard to imagine in about ten or
fifteen years a type of robot that could replace many of the existing
home health care aides.
Management Jobs
I am tempted to call management employment “the beast that will not
die.” Given the fact that being a manager involves huge amounts of
subtle interaction with humans, it seems unlikely that anything like
a robot manager could be developed in the next few decades. Creating
a robot manager would require creating artificial intelligence almost
equal to that of a human being, with political skills comparable to
that of a human being. So there seems to be relatively little danger
of a management major losing his job to a robot in the next few
decades.
Accounting,
Sales and Marketing Jobs
Even though computers are very good at math, accounting activities in
large corporations typically involve a huge number of subtle matters
of interpretation and law that robots and computers are not good at.
Sales and marketing jobs also involve a great deal of subtle
psychology that no machine is likely to be good at any time soon. So
jobs in accounting, sales and marketing are probably relatively safe
from advances in automation.
Computer
Programming and Information Technology Jobs
It is remarkable how little progress has been made in automating the
writing of computer code. There are systems out there that can write
thousands of lines of code. The problem is that almost always what is
needed is something different in a hundred ways from what a
code-writing system will produce. I think there is actually little
danger that automation will decrease by very much your chance of
getting or keeping a computer science or software developer job. The
amount of code written by computers may double, but the total amount
of code that needs to be written will probably quadruple, resulting
in a net gain for human programming employment.
Cashier Jobs
Thinking of a long happy career as a Walmart cashier? Think again.
When I'm done with this blog post I'm going to a discount chain where
I'll use the “scan it yourself” automatic checkout line. The
store currently has half of its checkout lines as automatic checkout
lines, but how long will it be before there are no cashiers at any of the big stores?
Construction
Jobs
The rise of 3D printing threatens jobs in the construction industry.
It may be that the skyscrapers and houses of the future are built
through a “layer by layer” process of 3D printing that requires
little human labor, or built by a process in which humans just link
together modules that were built by robots in a factory. But there
will probably still be lots of construction work for renovations and
cases when things break down. A 3D printer doesn't do you any good
when a pipe springs a leak.
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