Visualizing the Jobs Lost to Automation

O(1) said:
http://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-jobs-lost-automation/

Visualizing the Jobs Lost to Automation
Jeff Desjardins
on May 30, 2017 at 12:42 pm
automation-and-unemployment.jpg


Visualizing the Jobs Lost to Automation
The employment landscape of the future will look very different than it does today.

While we’ve charted the automation potential of U.S. jobs before, today’s graphic from Henrik Lindberg perhaps tells the story more succinctly.

In plain black and white, it shows the jobs that exist today in contrast to the jobs that are expected to disappear as a result of automation in the workplace. Though, technically speaking, it is applying the probabilities of the widely-cited Frey & Osborne (2013) study to U.S. jobs as of 2016 to give an expected value to each job title.

A Different Landscape
In the near-future, many of today’s most common jobs may be changed profoundly. People working as retail salespersons, cashiers, fast food counter workers, and truck drivers will likely see opportunities in those fields dry up as automation takes place.

At the same time, jobs such as those in teaching and nursing are expected to stand the test of time, as they require empathy, creativity, and a human touch not yet available through machines. In the coming decades, it’s possible that these could even be professions that employ the most people overall.

Casualties of the Fall?
In the vastly different employment landscape of the future, the worry is that low income workers will have fewer opportunities available to them as technology comes into play.

The good news? Historically this has not been true. As an example, nearly 500 years ago, Queen Elizabeth I had a similar fear when she denied a patent for an automated knitting machine. The thought was that the machine would kill jobs, though eventually factories and companies adopted similar technologies anyways. With the lower prices, higher demand for knitted goods, and more capital for investment, jobs for factory weavers actually quadrupled in the coming years.

As we’ve seen over time, while machines destroy jobs, they also often create new ones.

Composition of U.S. Job Market over the Last 150+ Years

us-jobs-as-percent-1.jpg


The bad news? It is now clear that agricultural jobs of the early 20th century were replaced with the white collar jobs of today. However, it is much more difficult to forecast out how some of the jobs of the future will be created, especially for low income workers.

The knitting example above certainly applies in some situations – but in others, it’s hard to say what will happen. For example, with millions of unemployed long-haul truck drivers, what roles will these people be taking in the future job market?

Even with costs of transportation and logistics going down, increased demand, and more capital to invest, it seems that there’s going to be a lengthy period of time where many of these people will have trouble finding work.

Do they join the company to help manage the many more trucks that are self-driving? It’s unlikely, and that is the part of the optimism about automation and future jobs that is the hardest to reconcile.
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The article states the expected time frame for the bulk of these changes will occur within 10 - 20 years and mostly affect lower level/lower wage jobs. I think they are missing the boat and severely underestimating the rapid changes taking place in the fields of automation and AI.

I think the time frame will be accelerated to be half their estimate at 5 - 10 years to see a significant turnover. As for job skill levels affected, it will cut across all levels. There are robots today performing complex surgeries that doctors thought could only be done by a human. Hedge fund and portfolio managers are losing clients left and right to robo-index trackers. The cushy top HF jobs that paid 2% and 20% are shrinking fast as money flows out.

Automation is also now being incorporated into engineering, law, journalism, etc... I think it's only a matter of time before AI rises to automating software development and there go most of the jobs at the majority of tech hubs.

Governments likely have no clue as to how they will handle such widespread jobs displacement.
 
Which occurs because robots, even though ares millions of times more contextually inept than humans, are now more efficient than most workers. And that's the cost of perfection, if you're not on the inventor/explorer side you become the caretaker of stupidity.
 
However, the national policies in an automation/knowledge economy would be still decided/designed by the politicians whose majority would be decisively determined/elected by the same majority states engaged in farming industry that employ only relatively small and shrinking number of farmers, representing nearly 1% of job market nowadays, comparing to nearly 50% +150 years ago.

Is that true? And reasonable/rational? !

Composition of U.S. Job Market over the Last 150+ Years
us-jobs-as-percent-1.jpg
 
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O(1) said:
IMF Blames Fall of Middle Class on Globalization and Technology
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017...le-class-on-globalization-and-technology.html
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Now in fairness, some of the problems with a report like this are the difficulty of unpacking critical issues. For instance, as we’ve discussed regularly, the amount of offshoring of jobs that took place was considerably more than was justified by profit concerns. Direct factory labor is a small percentage of wholesale product cost; savings there are offset by greater managerial, finance, and transport costs, plus higher risks. In others words, offshoring and outsourcing are often, if not mainly, a transfer from low level workers to management rather than a bona-fide plus to the business. So while it is narrowly correct to say that globalization has been a big driver of middle class losses, analyses like that are misleading because they focus on proximate causes, not ultimate causes.

This report also misses another increasingly recognized driver of inequality, which is the lack of anti-trust enforcement which in turns leads to monopoly and oligopoly rent extraction. And it ignores a huge transfer from ordinary citizens to the capital-owning classes via subsidies. The banking industry is a huge example, where as we’ve written repeatedly, its operations are purely extractive (the cost of periodic crises greatly exceeds the value of the enterprises) and it enjoys such large subsidies that it should not be regarded as private enterprise. Banks should be regulated as utilities.
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I don't dispute the facts stated in the article (there aren't really all that many) but its conclusions surprise me.

It seems to me that actually the long history of automation in various industries has generally tended not to decrease the number of jobs at all, as it creates as many as it makes redundant. They're just different jobs.
 
OddTrader said:
However, the national policies in an automation/knowledge economy would be still decided/designed by the politicians whose majority would be decisively determined/elected by the same majority states engaged in farming industry that employ only relatively small and shrinking number of farmers, representing nearly 1% of job market nowadays, comparing to nearly 50% +150 years ago.

Is that true? And reasonable/rational? !

Composition of U.S. Job Market over the Last 150+ Years
us-jobs-as-percent-1.jpg
More...
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I think i will respectfully dispute that.You seemed to note, that for example IOWA has nowhere near the farm workers[true]. So far, so good; but ALL of the 50 states still have 2 US Senators, reguardless of population .Then the Aussie article writer seems so upset they ignored the stock market/capital opportunities+played the blame game on wages/wrong.
 
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