How to Compete with Robots

"The result is a ranking of the 1,000 jobs, with “Physicists” being the ones who have the lowest risk of being replaced by a machine, and “Slaughterers and Meat Packers”, who face the highest risk. In general, jobs in food processing, building and maintenance, construction and extraction appear to have the highest risk."

The researchers need to ask themselves why the "high risk" jobs have not already been at least partly automated, if they are so susceptible to robots. Perhaps get out of the lab/office, and go and look. Closely, and at length.

Brian Potter's "Construction Physics" blog[1] does a good job of explaining the situation in construction. Every site is different, with a different grouping of specialist subcontractors doing a wildly different array of tasks. Thousands of tasks. Automating one suite of tasks, such as drywall fixing, gets you maybe 0.3% of the way. And that alone is not trivial to do, because it's made up of many tasks, starting with truing up the framing (itself a whole suite of tasks) and finishing with the final skim and sand.

Building maintenance is even more varied and awkward to do.

In meat processing, robots would be a good way to increase costs, either through customer claims for faulty or contaminated product, or through increased manual re-work of things the robots do mostly correctly. Again, there are a great number of tasks each requiring R&D effort, and a great deal of variability in both the inputs and the required outputs. It'd be much easier to replace the whole system with plant-based meat substitutes.

These industries tend to be money contrained also, because they have limited growth potential and are competitive.

1. https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/construction-phys...