But that's all over now and it's back to banging the what-do-we-do-when-the-jobs-are-all-automated drum. The jumping off point is a website I discovered through Reddit, called:
WILL ROBOTS TAKE MY JOB
Of course, the first thing I did was punch in 'blogger' which was understood as either 'Reporter/Correspondent' or 'Logger'. Great! I'm a reporter!
Eleven percent likely to be replaced by a robot. Not too bad, but not great. Let's try 'Writer' which is both broader and closer to what this I do with this blog.
3.8 Percent? Fabulous! Except that I appear to be aggressively underpaid (I don't get enough hits for Google Ad-sense to recommend my site to any advertisers... even the sketchy 'sexy singles' ones).
Putting the pay issue aside, why are these jobs have such low risk to automation? Both of these are termed highly creative; ones that require higher level thought and analysis (and a good understanding of both semi-colons and parentheses). Therefore, other such occupations should also be safe, right?
Apparently, yes! This was my job prior to [a bunch of personal stuff happening]. Also highly safe. But then, well, I decided to go back a bit further and look at the job before Training and Development:
DOOMED! Obviously. Self-Check Out and Amazon are chewing on the guts of retail employment. And, if the numbers are to be trusted, that's 4.5 million jobs lost to automation.
But The Numbers Lie
The trouble with these numbers rests in a few areas. First, let's take a closer look at that Training and Development job: my particular field that I trained and developed was Retail Salespeople. Welp, there goes that. I've got no one to train.
In fact, I would hazard to guess that most of the Training and Development jobs, retail or otherwise, will be automated out in the near future for similar reasons. No employees means no on-boarding process or 30-60-90 day evaluations. (Though tracking and processing those reports are things that I do not miss.)
Secondly, what does this website use to make its decision? A quick look at the 'About' page takes us to a study called "The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?” by Frey and Osborne. This is from 2013 and a cursory inspection shows that it is based on job classification data from The Department of Labor, circa 2010 (see page 31 of the report). That's a problem. The data is old: both the data from the paper and the data that the paper is based upon.
Thirdly, in skimming through the paper, the data does not appear to be time bound. In other words, it does not say how quickly robots will take your job, just how 'at risk' the occupation is to automation. The paper's authors base this on how likely it is that certain engineering bottle necks will be solved in 'the next decade or two' (page 30). A couple of decades is a long time, but not long enough to plan a career. It does not help a college freshman determine their major (if any college freshmen are that heads-up about their lives... I sure as hell was not). For that time frame, you need to be looking at half centuries. My feeling (no hard data) is that most jobs of any kind will be automated in the next fifty years.
But... Creative!
Yes, creative jobs like writing and painting and making music are safe, right? Not entirely. Aside from Google's DeepDream is already taking some of that away, though the output is still a bit startling to call true art. Google Magenta is taking this farther with music. Right now, the Big G is saying that these are tools for artists instead of being artists in and of themselves, but to me that's more than a bit disingenuous.
And for writers and reporters? We are on the chopping block as well. Not only is there software that will match keywords to data and spit out an article, but the entire current business model for ad and subscription based news will have to change if no one has a job to make money and buy anything.
Final Thoughts... This Week
This all comes across as doom and gloom for the job market. That is not my intent. Instead, I see it as a speed bump in the path to something freer. Something that will allow us to explore where we each want to go with our lives instead of where we have to go because otherwise how do we eat? Employment as an economic driver will go away. Money will go with it. What will be left is billions of humans with time to do the things that they want to do.
Is that overly optimistic? Perhaps. With nothing else to do, there may be more fighting, more competition for the resources that are not automated. But there will also be time to do things we want, even if the computers can do them better.
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