Jobs that are disappearing thanks to robots

http://www.businessinsider.com/jobs-that-are-quickly-disappearing-thanks-to-robots-2016-2

by Mz • 10 years ago

47 58 10 years ago

1. It's good that such boring, backbreaking labor is being automated away.

2. It's bad that we're still in the middle ages when it comes to this thing where if you don't slave yourself enough to something, you starve because no money.

crapolasplatter2• 10 years ago

Well said. Too bad we didn't have an Oligarch as this could be a great thing for Humanity.

If robots took over all the jobs that nobody wants to do and people only did the things they loved whether its sitting on their arse or becoming doctors we might just evolve as a civilization to the next level. I think this is also key to becoming a monetary-less society.

Obviously the trick and hard part will be to still get people interested and motivated to become doctors and engineers,etc ..

I personally love what I do as an engineer and could see myself doing even more engineering tasks if resources wasn't a constraint.

Personally I love problem solving and could not handle sitting on my arse all day long, and I don't think I'm one bit unique in this mentality.

Will it happen ? I doubt any time within the next century if ever.

However, I think to evolve as humanity we need to change the system we have today. Currently its more beneficial to hide information than to share it because of monetary gains.

quietplatypus5• 10 years ago

Yeah, I'm an engineer now and if we were post-money I honestly would still be an engineer, because I take pleasure from finding out how things work and making new things that work. I think there are a lot of us like this.

No one really wants to sit on their ass all day, that's just something that's made up by rich people to stress us out so we continue working like dogs for them instead of on our real projects.

If you sat me down in front of the TV with no responsibilities forever everything provided I probably wouldn't last three days.

dpeterson2• 10 years ago

Yeah, reality sucks doesn't it? For those infinite things we still need people to do, we can't just have some people do all the work while others get to sit around and enjoy.

crapolasplatter2• 10 years ago

It doesn't suck but it could be better for a lot of people.

Somehow I don't think that m-f 40+ hour work week is the most relevant thing about our live once we die.Yet its the most time consuming part of it.

sbov• 10 years ago

need

You probably have a different definition of need than I do. Want != need.

quietplatypus5• 10 years ago

Nice cult-like thinking there buddy. Hope your startup works out! I too wish I could enslave myself to something harder than most others (and throw a bunch of my employees under the bus in the process, making it a net loss), obviously the only way forward is back. I'm just a little bit more in touch with this annoying 'reality' thing :)

incongruity2• 10 years ago

And here are three white collar jobs that PBS says are going away due to machines:

Pharmacists, lawyers, and journalists.

It isn't just dangerous jobs - it's repetitive or easily automated ones across the board. In very few cases does it completely eliminate a role - more often it is a force multiplier, letting fewer do more.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/3-white-collar-jobs-robo...

onlyrealcuzzo• 10 years ago

I've always wondered why pharmacists still exist, yet TONS of articles say that there's almost no chance of that job being automated in the foreseeable future. I don't get it. It seems like a problem that's virtually impossible for a human to do, and not too tough to solve programmatically. Doesn't make sense to me. Would love to learn exactly why it will or will not be automated.

hk__2• 10 years ago

Pharmacists aren’t just people selling drugs. They know exactly how to combine them and why you should take one or another based on how you are, what disease you have and if you have allergies. They can even sometimes replace physicians.

petra• 10 years ago

Laws say pharmacist must give you the prescription, in a pharmacy. So there's little automation.

But with online ordering(PillPack ,etc) ,the laws are different, so there's more automation.

protomyth4• 10 years ago

Well, IHS locally has a pill dispenser (looks like a pipe organ filled with pills that drop into the container), but they have two pharmacists. I guess there are still errors.

trgn• 10 years ago

Pharmacists in small towns are often first in line for people to seek medical advice from, often for small things: chit chat about their cough, show a nasty bruise or ugly cut, a weird rash, etc... They're like doctors-lite, a listening ear, but with some authority, and some agency to suggest minor treatment. Not unlike nurses. And usually a pharmacist could recognize when something is more serious and refer somebody to a doctor.

I grew up in such a town, and as a kid, I knew the pharmacist a lot better than the family doctor: "my ma told me to ask you about this wart on my hand", that kind of thing. Heck, our pharmacists even did home deliveries to old people (on her bike, no joke). I'm in a my mid-thirties, so this is not entirely ancient history.

So I can see why that social aspect of the work - which is incredible valuable - cannot be automated.

Now, there's WebMD, pharmacists are doing a shift in CVS, "small town life" is pretty much dead, these soft relationships between shopkeepers and customers no longer exist, people no longer defer to authority as easily as they used to, ...

Also, pharmacists have the law on their side. Drugs are a political issue, so they nurture their role as gate-keeper. For that reason alone, the credentialing will persist. The only difference is that perhaps a pharmacist will just be the lady pushing the on/off button on the vending machine, but still, somebody will need to push that button. The jobs that will be automated won't be the pharmacist's job, it will be the assistant's jobs.

venomsnake• 10 years ago

Except the occasional mix in place, they are essential double check against doctors' errors.

wrong_variable• 10 years ago

Journalists are not loosing their jobs due to automation. They are losing their jobs due to the greed of their corporate masters - who value profit over delivering news that can be trusted.

Being a real journalist is a far more creative work then being a programmer. Especially in fields like investigative journalism - you must be a 100,000X programmer if you think you can replace Glenn Greenwald with a bot.

skybrian• 10 years ago

You say it's greed but worrying about profitability isn't optional, particularly when revenues decline as much as they have been in the newspaper industry.

When customers stop paying, fewer journalists have jobs.

jonsen• 10 years ago

Journalists are not loosing their jobs due to automation.

Well, the robots don't buy newspapers.

protomyth4• 10 years ago

Being a real journalist is a far more creative work then being a programmer

At this point, there should be a name for "No True Scotsman" applied to creativity. I have a tough time seeing the comparison between someone reporting what actually went on to someone creating wholly new things. I actually don't want creativity in my journalists or historians. I want ethics and fact checking.

vtlynch• 10 years ago

Agreed. Journalism is one job that robots will never replace. Even if software eventually could, what company would write it.

cwyers• 10 years ago

Sure they are, it's just not their work being replaced - it's the printing press. Journalism used to be a loss leader for the real revenue making activities of the newspaper press, advertising. The most profitable were the classified ads and car ads. Well, Craigslist gutted classifieds, and a combination of services have supplanted car ads in newsprint.

okigan2• 10 years ago

I often question the quality of articles on businessinsider.com, i.e. "this is news" vs "this is what i want you to think is news".

Picking from the top of BI list, do these jobs even exist today?:

3. Switchboard operators, including answering service

1. Telephone operators

0xffff2• 10 years ago

It says right in the article how many of them exist today. ~12k is a vanishingly small number though.

okigan2• 10 years ago

I thought these jobs were gone long time ago. There are 143,288K jobs in USA [1], so 100%*12K/143288K=0.00837%.

The article portraits these jobs are in process of disappearing, looking at the numbers above, looks like BI is rather late with their "news".

[1] http://www.deptofnumbers.com/employment/us/ (assuming data is correct)

jqm• 10 years ago

Yes, this appeared to be a very lazily written article. It basically lists a bunch of variations of materials molders and postal workers.

gedy• 10 years ago

Frankly, while technology has a part in this, I feel this media noise is cover for the much larger impact of globalization, cheap-labor driven free trade, TPP, etc. that the banksters and elites push for.

dba7dba• 10 years ago

Nothing pretty much happens unless those in power want it done. It's not the fault of the geeks but the bankers/board-of-directors/ceos/majority-share-holders.

Pxtl2• 10 years ago

Yep. Half the time, the robots are really Malaysians.

creshal2• 10 years ago

Still, global manufacture is now efficient enough that a tiny part of the world can supply all the rest of it with all goods it needs. Neither China nor Malaysia manage full employment, and the rest of the world is even worse off.

We really have to get past the "people would totally get a job if they weren't so damn lazy" mentality.

CyberDildonics• 10 years ago

The dirty banksters and elites helping to pull people in poor countries out of poverty. Maybe some people in poor countries speak english and are available thanks to the internet.

anovikov• 10 years ago

I was kind of thinking that all potential effect from globalization was in place about 5 years ago, if not more. Since then, wages in outsourcing-related industries in destination countries like China have skyrocketed making outsourcing a lot less profitable and relieving pressure on the American jobs in same areas.

Take software outsourcing: what was the going rate for an Ukrainian developer 10 years ago and what it is now? The is no longer much of an arbitrage, American developer can compete easily just because of better English and working in the same time zone.

And that is NOT because Ukraine became richer. It didn't. Nominal current-dollar GDP growth since 2003 in USA and Ukraine was about the same (about 1.60x). But the developer salaries which were 5% of American in 2003, at best, are now at least 25%. Which leaves very little sense in outsourcing (and yes Ukrainian developers live the same if not better than American ones these days, at least in a purely material sense - of course crime, environment etc. are much worse there)

I think same is the case with most outsourced industries, except for the few where outsourcing has been so complete in past years that the American skills in these areas are no longer available.

protomyth4• 10 years ago

On a side note, does anyone know of anything like a technical certificate for robotics technician or an actual robotics engineering degree?

br2• 10 years ago

A while back I was reading an article about how to get a job at an upcoming Volvo plant in SC and it mentioned a "mechatronics technician" degree program.

http://www.wltx.com/story/money/2015/05/12/technical-college...

gexla• 10 years ago

I have found articles from BusinessInsider to be of such low quality that it became an easy filter to reduce the overwhelming size of my Pocket reading waiting list. If only they could write articles as well as they can write titles.

We change. Jobs change. The planet changes. The only thing which will never change is that we will never be able to see into the future. Low quality articles predicting something which triggers gut reaction doom are auto trash. I don't even need AI for that filter.

maneesh• 10 years ago

and yet, this article was pretty good

JulianMorrison• 10 years ago

These look excessively conservative to me. Projections from present-day plans that don't take upheaval into account. Example: good luck finding a job as a postie if drone delivery takes off. Or a trucker, competing with self driving vehicles.

rv77ax• 10 years ago

Why accountant is not in the list?

AFAIK, there is no changes in accounting process since, I don't know, 50 years ago? Accounting should have been replaced by software and people start teaching/learning how to use the software instead of teaching at university.

cLeEOGPw• 10 years ago

Well there's a reason it hasn't been replaced. Accountant's job is far from easily automated. Companies use different types of documents, make different kind of papers. Accountant not only needs to blindly write and rewrite numbers, but also understand and comprehend the intent and that includes some knowledge of business logic even in some cases. Companies like oracle have tried to make automation tools for accounting for decades, but manual work is still required absolutely everywhere. Unless everyone adopt some kind of universal standard and fill same papers in same way, automation won't happen there, not on large scale at least.

Jobs that are disappearing thanks to robots

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