A paper written by Oxford University’s Carl Frey and Michael Osborne sent waves of fear throughout labor forces all over the world in 2013, warning that 47% of jobs were about to be replaced by automation in the coming decades. Their claims have been highly debated ever since, by common citizens and academics alike concerned over the future of first world economies.
According to The Verge, this doomsday outlook may have been premature, with the the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently reporting only 14% of jobs to be “highly automatable,” a significant decrease from Frey and Osborne’s 47%. In order to be considered “highly automatable,” the position must have a 70% or higher probability of being automated.
The most likely explanation for the disparity between the two predictions lies in the nuance of research, as the OECD paid more attention to the “variation between jobs of the same name and to tasks that are difficult for computers to manage even within highly automatable jobs.” Some workers may have a lot of responsibilities that are automatable, but they also probably oversee junior employees and do a variety of other tasks that a computer simply can’t. It’s also important to note that in more technologically developed countries like the US, a lot of automation is already in place, and workers are mostly performing tasks that resist computerization.
Though the circumstances are not as dire as we were told in 2013, we can’t underestimate how a 14% decrease could affect the economies of rapidly-automating countries, with the potential of 66 million job losses across the world and 13 million in the US alone. This drop would be several times more troublesome than the technological revolution that disrupted American auto manufacturing in the 1950s.
But we can’t just ask how many jobs will be eliminated, as we need to pay attention to which employees will suffer the most disruptive consequences. The jobs that are more likely to become computerized are those held by lower-skilled employees, with the OECD reporting, “The risk of automation is not distributed equally among workers […] Occupations with the highest estimated automatability typically only require basic to low level of education.”
Younger citizens that are just starting to enter the workforce will also see major changes in their roles and possibly employability, as those who are 20 or younger are more likely to be in lower-skilled positions like food service, cleaning, and sales, which are highly automatable jobs.
The numbers and percentages may be less severe, but the cost of limiting social mobility could still be a major threat to rapidly automating countries. Lower-skill jobs are often an entry point for the lesser educated to work their way up their career ladder, but this rapid automation will be cutting off the first few rungs and those in lower economic classes will have to leap to catch up with those who are college educated or have connections in high places. “Re-qualification is an important mechanism to aid the transition from more to less automatable jobs,” write the researchers, adding that it is “important not to dismiss the importance of providing retraining and social protection” for young workers and those in low-skilled jobs.
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