Stefan Mileschin

To really stuff something up will still require a human

Boffins at the Brookings Institute have been adding up some numbers and think that only a quarter of US occupations are at "high risk" for losing jobs from the advance of automation.

Brookings Institute's policy director Mark Muro who penned the report said most occupations will see specific tasks assumed by machines, but much of their labor will likely be enhanced, rather than fully replaced, through automation.

He said that automation rarely replaces entire jobs, but instead handles specific tasks in occupations that often require hundreds of them.

To forecast the effects, Brookings researchers looked at thousands of specific tasks within each occupation, and the degree to which automation could handle them, coming up with a risk rating for each occupation.

Workers most vulnerable are in transportation, production, food preparation, and office administration, which, combined, make up about 36 million jobs, or a quarter of the total jobs in the US today. In these occupations, roughly 70 per cent of tasks were considered routine and predictable, prime targets to be managed by machines. The most vulnerable were "packaging and filling machine operators" (100 per cent exposure to automation), food preparation workers (91 per cent), payroll and timekeeping clerks (87 per cent), and light-truck and delivery drivers (78 per cent).

https://fudzilla.com/news/48010-only...ed-to-machines