It’s hardly a theoretical exercise to wonder if you will lose your job to a robot. Robots, or some form of automation, are already affecting the livelihoods of physicians, airplane pilots, and journalists—plus factory workers, of course. Speech and vision recognition is getting better, aided by improved cameras and algorithms. Self-driving cars and trucks are already legally on the road in parts of the U.S., giving taxi drivers and long-haul truckers alike a literal run for their money.
Which jobs are next? And which will be safe?
Two technologists, Mubashar Iqba and Dimitar Raykov, wanted to find out in a deeply human attempt to predict the future. The pair took research published in 2013 by two Oxford University researchers that estimated that 47% of U.S. Jobs could be taken over by robots by 2033. Then they crunched additional numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to provide a personalized look into career prospects by job category.
How will you fare? Just visit their website willrobotstakemyjob.com and plug in your job description to get an estimated probability that robots will replace you (presumably in the next 20 years, although the time frame is not stated on the site). Jobs are listed using the Standard Occupational Codes set by the U.S. Government to classify job categories.
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If you’re a reporter like me, the news, at least on this front, is good. Your “automation risk level,” according to the site, is a mere 11%. (On the other hand, job growth in the field is pegged at negative 9%, which will probably not surprise any working reporter. Hang in there, guys.)
The results vary considerably. Given the technological strides in speech recognition, for example, it’s hardly a shock that court reporters who transcribe legal procedures in real-time face a fairly high—50%—risk of replacement by technology.
Related: The Bright Side of Job-Killing Automation
And if you’re a cashier? Forget about it. You face an automation risk factor of a whopping 97%. That qualifies as a “you are doomed” classification by the site. (Though if you’ve been following Coins2Day’s coverage of the cashier-less Amazon Go store, you may have had an inkling of what’s to come.)
Speaking of long-haul truck drivers, the job is a closely watched segment because it is so large. There are an estimated 1.8 million of these drivers in the U.S. Today. The impact of self-driving vehicles on those jobs is expected to be considerable.
Indeed, according to the site, “heavy and tractor trailer truck drivers” face a 79% automation risk factor, but the number of jobs is still expected to grow 6% by 2024.
Given that the original Oxford research is four years old—a very long time in the fast-changing field of artificial intelligence— there is room to quibble with some of these findings. But it’s hard to deny that the impact of automation will be felt across every segment of the labor force, prompting humans to gravitate toward what they—not machines—do best.