If there’s anything workforce experts agree on, it’s that the number of jobs that can be done more effectively by robots than humans is growing at an exponential rate.
Exponential. It’s hard to fathom the meaning of that. We’re in new territory – the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And it’s happening right now.
We’ve already seen jobs lost to automation – mostly those that involve repetitive, low-skilled, physical tasks (jobs in the auto industry and the textile industry being prime examples). And we know industrial automation will continue.
What many people might not know is that machines are already capable of doing more than just repetitive work – they can take on cognitive tasks as well. In fact, McKinsey estimates that 60% of all occupations have some portion, 30% or more, that can be automated with existing technology.
These findings echo a 2013 Oxford University study that found 47% of all jobs are vulnerable to automation within the next decade. Machine learning algorithms and vastly expanded sensor capability mean that computers can take in a constant stream of data, analyze that data for patterns and recommend solutions to problems humans can’t even see.
Which means jobs once thought to be exclusively human are now within the computer’s domain. In the medical field, computers can sort through vast data sets to analyze medical input and specify treatment options unique to each patient. Computers can also do legal work, ingesting and analyzing hundreds of thousands of legal documents for pre-trial research. It’s very likely that automation will encroach even into fields where human judgment holds sway, such as finance and software engineering.
