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Robots May Disrupt Half of All U.S. Jobs
Scientists torn whether robots will create more jobs than they disrupt by 2025.
Get ready for robots to make your existence obsolete.
The boom in digital technology, such as mobile
phones and the Internet, has changed life dramatically in the past
decade, but scientists are torn whether computerization will create more
jobs than it replaces during the next 10 years.
The Pew Research Center recently surveyed a group of scientists and other analysts. Of these experts, 48 percent said robotic advances will have displaced a significant number of blue and white collar jobs by 2025, while the other 52 percent predicted innovation will create new industries. A big fear expressed in Pew’s survey was that schools are not preparing students with the technological skills needed for new types of jobs that may emerge in a rapidly innovating economy.
U.S. News also tried to predict how robots and computerswould affect the future of jobs at the start of the personal computer era in January 1984 with its cover story “High-tech: Blessing or Curse?” Decades later companies like Apple and Google have been investing in robotics research for both factory production lines and newer technology like self-driving cars, which could eventually disrupt both manufacturing and transportation jobs.
[READ: Cybersecurity Remains a Gray Area for NATO]
Disrupting entrenched ways of doing business with new technology, however, is a way that startups like Facebook and Netflix in recent years began new companies to create jobs and improve existing ones.
The growth of automated and computerized services puts 47 percent of all U.S. jobs at risk during the next 20 years, according to a 2013 report by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of the University of Oxford.
Factory worker jobs will likely continue to be replaced by robots and
computers as they have been during recent decades, according to the
Oxford report, but anybody who has seen the automated checkout scanners
at grocery store aisles recently can see that other service industry
jobs are at risk. Jobs likely to be disrupted by robots and artificial
intelligence include telemarketing, construction, and transportation.
The growth of computing power and search engines are also likely to disrupt jobs that require more education like paralegals and office administrators as the Internet makes research easier. Computers with more processing power will also likely affect more than 230 million knowledge workers – approximately 9 percent of the global workforce, according to a 2013 report from the McKinsey Global Institute market research firm.
New technologies like robotics and 3-D printers will affect 640 million manufacturing jobs – approximately 24 percent of the global workforce, McKinsey reports. The efficiency from new technologies will be a mixed blessing, saving $1.2 trillion in the manufacturing sector and $3 trillion in the medical, retail, logistics and personal service sectors by 2025, McKinsey reports.
[ALSO: NSA's 'MonsterMind' Could Automate Cyberwar]
Voices of optimism in the Pew survey included Vint Cerf, credited as one of the creators of the Internet for his computer science work with the Defense Department in the 1970s.
“Historically, technology has created more jobs than it destroys and there is no reason to think otherwise in this case,” said Cerf, now Google’s Internet evangelist.
During the last decade Internet and mobile technology have already led people to question how to live their lives, however, so other respondents to the Pew survey like Stowe Boyd, lead researcher at Gigaom Research, feared how humans will find their way in a robot-based economy of 2025.
“The central question of 2025 will be: What are people for in a world that does not need their labor, and where only a minority are needed to guide the ‘bot-based economy,'” Boyd said.
The Pew Research Center recently surveyed a group of scientists and other analysts. Of these experts, 48 percent said robotic advances will have displaced a significant number of blue and white collar jobs by 2025, while the other 52 percent predicted innovation will create new industries. A big fear expressed in Pew’s survey was that schools are not preparing students with the technological skills needed for new types of jobs that may emerge in a rapidly innovating economy.
U.S. News also tried to predict how robots and computerswould affect the future of jobs at the start of the personal computer era in January 1984 with its cover story “High-tech: Blessing or Curse?” Decades later companies like Apple and Google have been investing in robotics research for both factory production lines and newer technology like self-driving cars, which could eventually disrupt both manufacturing and transportation jobs.
[READ: Cybersecurity Remains a Gray Area for NATO]
Disrupting entrenched ways of doing business with new technology, however, is a way that startups like Facebook and Netflix in recent years began new companies to create jobs and improve existing ones.
The growth of automated and computerized services puts 47 percent of all U.S. jobs at risk during the next 20 years, according to a 2013 report by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of the University of Oxford.
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The growth of computing power and search engines are also likely to disrupt jobs that require more education like paralegals and office administrators as the Internet makes research easier. Computers with more processing power will also likely affect more than 230 million knowledge workers – approximately 9 percent of the global workforce, according to a 2013 report from the McKinsey Global Institute market research firm.
New technologies like robotics and 3-D printers will affect 640 million manufacturing jobs – approximately 24 percent of the global workforce, McKinsey reports. The efficiency from new technologies will be a mixed blessing, saving $1.2 trillion in the manufacturing sector and $3 trillion in the medical, retail, logistics and personal service sectors by 2025, McKinsey reports.
[ALSO: NSA's 'MonsterMind' Could Automate Cyberwar]
Voices of optimism in the Pew survey included Vint Cerf, credited as one of the creators of the Internet for his computer science work with the Defense Department in the 1970s.
“Historically, technology has created more jobs than it destroys and there is no reason to think otherwise in this case,” said Cerf, now Google’s Internet evangelist.
During the last decade Internet and mobile technology have already led people to question how to live their lives, however, so other respondents to the Pew survey like Stowe Boyd, lead researcher at Gigaom Research, feared how humans will find their way in a robot-based economy of 2025.
“The central question of 2025 will be: What are people for in a world that does not need their labor, and where only a minority are needed to guide the ‘bot-based economy,'” Boyd said.
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