I can understand telemarketers/retail workers. However, I was of the understanding that accounting isn’t simply plug and chug, and involves a lot more subjectivity that is beyond the grasp of computers. Is the Economist mistaken?
I’m especially interested in hearing from professionals in the accounting field, both public and private. What are the prospects of the profession disappearing or becoming greatly diminished in terms of need, due to the increasing sophistication and ability of computers?
We’ve seen a big change in the legal profession due to automation. It used to be that there were a lot of lawyers at the entry level whose job was to search through books of prior case law and the like to answer questions about ongoing cases. Once search engines showed up, there was no further need for people to do that sort of job.
I suspect that the accounting world is similar. Not everyone will be automated away, but a lot of the people whose jobs can be automated will have trouble finding employment in the future.
I have a bet going with one of my friends on which fast food restaurant will be the first to have an entirely robotic workforce (at least one shift). My money’s on Taco Bell, he’s betting on one of the donut places. We both think there will be a limited menu available that’s entirely prepped by machines in 6 or 7 years. Maybe something like a large redbox that customers can use a debit card and get an actual cooked/prepped taco or pastry. Not just a pre-made that’s microwaved.
So, my guess is fast food and server jobs will see a steep decline, although not “cease to exist” as in the OPs title. I’ve further speculated that my grandkids will only visit restaurants with human servers for special, hi dollar occasions.
Anecdote: I’ve eaten at two Chili’s restaurants recently that had the menu, ordering, and payment (credit card) via a small wireless screen at the table. The only interaction with a server was when they brought the food. It even printed my receipt after scanning my Ccard. I actually prefer it because I don’t have to wait for the server when I want to order or pay out. I would imagine this greatly reduces the total number of waitstaff required to run the restaurant.
I have my doubts about how fast the robot overlords will take over.
The linked article lists Real Estate Agents as going extinct within the next 20 years.
But what makes the next 20 years different from the previous 20? Real estate agents became unnecessary as soon as the internet became common, almost 20 years ago. But they still exist.
And for more complex physical tasks,like fast food, I think it’s going to take even longer.
(You may replace the cashier with a touch screen, but, but somebody still has to unload the truck on a snowy day, replace the cylinders of coke syrup in the drink machine, etc. The french fries need to be salted, tables cleared, spilled drinks mopped up immediately, etc.)
For retail—the cashiers will disappear, (half of them already have, with self-service checkouts).But you still need a lady in a Walrmart vest to fold the jeans and re-arrange the candy that people took off the shelf and put back in the wrong place.
It’s unlikely we’ll see full automation in the short term, but we probably will see hybridized robotics system like the ones Kiva develops for warehouses. (ICAPS presentation on the subject). The idea for warehouses is that the robots attempt to retain a near-optimal layout of goods, but deliver them to people who actually put them in the boxes. The individual employees are permitted to tell the robots that something they brought was damaged or that there was an inventory error so the robot didn’t bring the right thing.
The system works extremely well, and I don’t see why something similar wouldn’t work on a scale like food. We’re not talking “not a human in sight” automation, but “could be reasonably staffed by a couple of guys pressing some buttons.” I’ll grant that bussing tables is likely going to be the hardest part.
For stores, I think we’ll actually see a “regression” in how large department stores work. In the past, stores weren’t really “browse and bring to the front counter”. You gave a list to (or spoke to) the general store clerk about what you needed, they’d rummage around, and come back with your items. I think we could easily see stores move to a similar model where you press some buttons at a kiosk near the entrance and the robots bring the requested items. This is, as mentioned, basically how Amazon’s warehouses work.
In the short term, we’re not really going to see professions “cease to exist”, IMO, what we’re going to see is professions so streamlined with helper robots and tools that jobs that used to require employing 10 people now only take 1 or 2.
E: There will, of course, always be places that either can’t afford the robotics or else doggedly insist on human workers for aesthetic, philosophical, political, or marketing reasons.
Some translation services. I don’t know how it will play out employment wise but the computing ability for such services is improving all the time. A year or two back it was at a fairly poor level.
Many Physicians. Devices like Watson will be better diagnosticians, they will have a better understanding of what tests to order and eventually they will be able to perform autonomous surgery. I have no idea if it’ll be 30 years, it could be longer. I predict east asian nations would take this tech up first as they seem to enjoy cutting edge technology more than the west does. The west will take it up after we realize the quality is higher and prices are lower than current technologies.
On the subject of automation many people want to believe only low skill, low pay jobs are affected. But higher skilled jobs are at just as much risk if not more. I’ve heard that the safest jobs during the automation revolution will be ones that require a lot of manual dexterity like auto mechanics. Supposedly those require so much varied physical manipulation that a machine probably can’t do it anytime soon.
Yes and no. We no longer have a big physical library, but I rely heavily in the articling students and junior lawyers in our office to do the basic research on the interwebs, for two reasons :
They’re much better at it than i will ever be - as with so many other technical things the young’uns are more attuned to it.
It frees me to do strategic thinking about the file, drafting the brief, and preparing for court b
Dispensing Pharmacist. Not sure why so many still exist…I assume they have a legion of lobbyists. Combination of robotics and Pharmacy Technicians should have been able to replace most of them already. The M.D. sent over the scrip, they just have to fill it. All the known contraindications for it are in the computer, nothing for the dispensing pharmacist to remember.
Automobile mechanics could be greatly reduced in number if all electric automobiles really start selling. Similar to what has already happened to shops specializing in “tune-ups”. Or similar to TV and computer (server and SAN, for example) repair. Pop it open and snap in the failing part replacement.
Automobile body shops / collision repair. If “self-driving” cars also become the norm, there will almost certainly be fewer accidents.
Internet usage was not “common” 20 years ago. 20 years ago most people didn’t use the Internet much, if at all, and such use as there was was much more limited than it is now.
The Internet is already eating into the traditional “REALTOR!!!11” model, and will continue to do so. For most purposes real estate agents are an immense waste of money given the existence of the Internet, and the future will bear that out.
What’s keeping the real estate racket going is their dominance over the listings through the MLS system, but that’ll be solved eventually.
Not the kind you’re thinking of: I’m talking about color separators, the people who would prepare color images for printing by photographing them multiple times through filters. With the advent of digital imaging, you can just skip that whole process.
Some sooner than others and I think the sooner will be many specialists than primary care providers.
Radiology and many aspects of pathology … mind you visual pattern recognition may not be there quite yet … but progress is being made.
The harder thing to automate though is taking a good history … and a list of questions answered yes/no or by numbered scales is not a good history even if it allows the search of a large database and the triggering of various protocols. A good history must allow some open-endedness and requires a bit of theory of the mind to figure out what the actual issue of concern is, and then guided questioning to raise or lower the probability of certain hypotheses, while having some empathy at the same time.
The thing that automatation has going for it is not the difficulty of computerizing those process though, as difficult as that may be, but that so few humans do it well, so the bar to be as good as many physicians is unfortunately quite low.
I’m gonna say – pretty much everything that doesn’t involve aesthetics, art, research and design. And some of the jobs involving those 4 will be gone too. For instance, I expect most graphic designers will be gone.
I wonder: what about programmers? If you set the requirements properly and give them access to a growing library of code, couldn’t machines create new programmes much faster and with fewer bugs than human programmers? Or would that automatically lead to the singularity?
In theory, a sufficiently abstract programming language would do this. I mean, something simple enough for someone to write English-like sentences to describe what they want the program to do (or how they want it changed).
I don’t see it doing away with all the layers- what would likely happen is that the programmers and analysts would sort of merge, with the technical coding becoming less important, and the elicitation of requirements and wants being the in-demand skill, since the actual “coding” is pretty elementary.
I think there’s a lot of areas already that could be automated, but it’s not cost effective. Watch one of those “Food Factory” shows, and you’ll see how they pretty much make most commercial food products like frozen pizzas in an automated way already. No reason in theory that your local joint couldn’t do that, but it’s probably only cost-effective if you’re making tens of thousands of pizzas a day.
I don’t see that changing particularly soon either- the cost is in the actual machinery and its integration, not the control systems.
I mean it’s not hard to imagine some sort of machine that could cook a burger patty exactly and then arrange the parts of a burger on a bun, including condiments. But it’s probably not cost-effective for every location of a burger chain, and that’s because of the machinery and ingredient requirements.
Reducing the number of visits thanks to virtual tours certainly. But people don’t buy houses enough so that time efficiency is a big issue. And no one is going to commit to live somewhere until they visit in person. (Think of the fakery possible with an on-line tour, as if staging wasn’t bad enough.)
There is good reason to keep the home owner far from the potential purchaser.