Question

What is the range of recent estimates about how many jobs could be displaced by anticipated automation developments? What are the most significant technologies that analysts believe will cause this dislocation?

Answer 1

Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing industries and through improvements to productivity will lead to economic development. They will also help tackle societal "moonshot" issues in fields ranging from health to climate change. Such innovations can at the same time change the essence of work and the workplace itself. Machines should be able to do more of the human tasks, supplement the work that humans do, and even do other tasks that go beyond what humans can do. This will result in some jobs decreasing, others rising, and many more changing.

Beyond conventional industrial automation and advanced robots, in environments ranging from autonomous vehicles on the highways to automated check-outs in grocery stores, new generations of more efficient autonomous systems emerge. Improvements in systems and materials, including mechanics, sensors and software, have driven much of the development. In recent years, AI has made especially great strides as machine-learning algorithms have become more advanced and have taken advantage of massive increases in computing power and the rapid growth of data available for training.

Almost all occupations would be impacted by automation, but only about 5 percent of the occupations will be fully automated by the technologies currently being demonstrated. Even more occupations have parts of their constituent tasks that are automated: we find that about 30 percent of the tasks could be automated in 60 percent of all occupations; This ensures that most staff must operate alongside constantly changing devices – from welders to mortgage brokers to CEOs. As a consequence, the essence of those jobs will undoubtedly change.

The broad range underlines the various factors that will affect the speed and scale of adoption of AI and automation. The only determining factor is the technological viability of automation. Other considerations include implementation costs; labor market conditions, including the quantity of labor supply, price, and related wages; advantages beyond labor substitution that lead to business cases for adoption; and, finally, social expectations and acceptance.

When robots supplement human labour, partial automation may become more prevalent. AI algorithms that can read diagnostic scans with a high degree of precision, for example, can help doctors diagnose patient cases and determine suitable treatment. In other fields, jobs with repetitive tasks may move toward a model of automated systems management and troubleshooting. At retailer Amazon, workers who have previously lifted and stacked objects are now robot operators, tracking the automatic weapons and solving problems such as an object flow interruption.