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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

If people want the tl;dr then I suggest loading the pdf at the article and jumping to page 37, which has a stack graph of automative potential broken out by employment sector. If you have a little more time, I urge reading the whole paper, which is quite elegant.

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For convenience, a little more infomation from that page:

"According to our estimate, 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category, meaning that associated occupations are potentially automatable over some unspeciﬁed number of years, perhaps a decade or two."

Here are the categories they list:

    Management, Business, and Financial
    Computer, Engineering, and Science
    Education, Legal, Community Service, Arts, and Media
    Healthcare Practitioners and Technical
    Service
    Sales and Related
    Office and Administrative Support
    Farming, Fishing, and Forestry
    Construction and Extraction
    Installation, Maintenance, and Repair
    Production
    Transportation and Material Moving

The ones most susceptible to computerisation (probability > 0.7) seem to be

    Sales and Related 
    Service
    Office and Administration Support
    Production
    Transporation and Material Moving

"Our ﬁndings thus imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerisation – i.e., tasks requiring creative and social intelligence. For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills."

I'm having a hard time thinking of the millions of job openings of this kind.

Hospitality sector is one off the top of my head.

So is that sector then facing an acute shortage of millions of workers?

Nope. Just missing quality workers.

How are robots and automation going to replace sales? I find that hard to believe with all the networking and human interaction required.

Are they including retail sales associates? When I was a kid you couldn't go shopping anywhere without being molested by a handful of sales people. Now I can walk freely around any department store or costco or best buy or whatever for hours without have to resort to human interaction until checkout (and even then, some stores are self-serve checkout now with 1 person per 4-6 lanes of checkout).

If you continue on that trend you're fitting the prediction pretty well.

Also one has to question how many of those low-skill workers are capable of "reallocating" to more creative jobs, particularly the older ones.

>> I'm having a hard time thinking of the millions of job openings of this kind.

Supposedly after manufacturing, the economy will naturally transition to services. What I never got about this theory is what would account for the huge increase in demand for services to support such growth. It seems like the thinking is that, since there will be nothing else to drive the economy, services it must be. The people have no bread? Let them eat services!

Once we finally fully lost our ability to form bonds with others naturally and with ease, "services" might turn into what's going on in Japan already, stuff like "rent-an-uncle for $10/hr -- he gives life advice and goes to the mall with you". Not kidding, they have that there, targeted at apparently single women.

I'm concerned that services tend to be luxuries and unreliable sources of work. I don't think they'll replace the manufacturing jobs that supported a stable and growing middle class for decades.

The tl;dr in one sentence: 47% of US jobs have a >75% chance of being replaced by software and/or robots within a decade or two.

[edit to clarify timeframe as the authors state it.]

In what time frame though, that's important as well.

And how do we get out ahead of the curve? How can we help prepare our societies for this change?

IMO:

1) Basic income

2) Tariffs linked to basic income provisions and OHS standards.

The point of 2) is to stop a race from the bottom occurring. You remove the ability to profit by under-mining working and social conditions, because everyone agrees to put a tariff on your goods if you break ranks on 1).

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