Should we believe headlines claiming nearly half of all jobs will be lost to robots and artificial intelligence? We think not, and in a newly released study we explain why.
Headlines trumpeting massive job losses have been in abundance for five or so years. Even The Conversation has had its had its share.
Most come from a common source. It is a single study, conducted in 2013 by Oxford University's Carl Benedict Frey and Michael Osborne. This study lies behind the claim that 47% of jobs in the United States were at "high risk" of automation over the next ten or so years. Google Scholar says it has been cited more than 4,300 times, a figure that doesn't count newspaper headlines.
The major predictions of job losses due to automation in Australia are based directly on its findings. Commentaries about the future of work in Australia have also drawn extensively on the study.
In Australia and elsewhere the study's predictions have led to calls for a Universal Basic Income and for a "work guarantee" that would allocate the smaller number of jobs fairly.
Our new research paper concludes the former study's predictions are not well-founded.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday November 02 2019, @05:02AM
Agreeing with you here, but it's not that much of a problem. There are already automated forklifts, and they are improving all the time. It's a lower difficulty problem than public road driving.
And even if there were not, in a well set up palletised warehouse it doesn't take a human on a forklift very long to load a semi. That task is independent of the driving, which still has a high incentive to automate.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.