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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 02 2019, @02:28PM
The other one is:
1) Are a lot of the jobs the Chinese and Indians took from the US workers easily automated? If yes, then just think of those bunch as the preview version of what future robots will do.
2) Are those jobs coming back?
From what I see the low end workers in the US aren't getting smarter or better and they sure aren't getting cheaper enough to be competitive. Most of them can't spell, write or think better than potential replacements in Asia at quarter the cost.
And at the higher end see: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/01/16/169528579/outsourced-employee-sends-own-job-to-china-surfs-web [npr.org]
Well I guess that guy would make for a good project manager?