Will Automation Take Your Job In The Next 10 Years?
I don’t want to be an alarmist, but big changes are coming. That’s the one thing you can always count on, change will happen whether you like it or not. What makes the difference is how you react to it. Automation is increasing exponentially and it will be replacing jobs faster than you can imagine once it really starts rolling out.
Let’s take for example automated cars, it will seem nice at first. Fewer accidents will happen because our cars will sense the issue before it occurs, of course, that also means you won’t have to fix your car as often or replace your car, so you don’t need as many mechanics or auto body repairmen. You also won’t need as many insurance adjusters or customer service representatives to take your calls. In addition, fewer traffic cops, no accident injury lawyers or staff, no court staff to handle the cases and while that all sounds like a good thing, it does represent real decent paying jobs. Of course, this only touches on the personal auto impact, commercial jobs will be even more widespread.
At first, the semi trucks will require a driver but do most of the driving, but eventually the goal is to replace the driver altogether. Some automated trucks are already on the road today, and this will have a far reaching effect on the economy since so much is built up around getting products from point A to point B. The truck stops, motels, and restaurants are all dependent upon the truckers spending their paychecks, and those communities are counting on their employees to have paychecks to spend, and so on.
So will your job be impacted in the next 10 years? Carl Frey and Michael Osborne published a study called The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation in September 2013 and they determined that 47 percent of total US employment is at risk. Now, this kind of thing is hard to predict and get 100 percent accurate, but in our examples above you can see how just automating cars and trucks would have a major upheaval on the economy and that’s just around the corner. We didn’t even get into what Amazon and other companies are trying to do with drones and delivering packages which eliminates even more labor.
So what do we do, move to jobs that will not be replaced by robots? The study is interesting and indicates areas that may not be computerized, but I’ll warn you now, it can be a bit dry. Futurism.com dug through the data and pulled out some jobs and their likelihood of staying around or being replaced and put it in this handy infographic. Now, keep in mind this is in the short term because eventually, AI will get better and better and it may be that no job is safe. For that little problem, we will need to rethink how we do things, and we are clearly not ready for that conversation yet.
