The big reduction will be, and has been, in areas where the users have a very limited set of commands, so that stuff that used to be custom code can now be packages. Like spreadsheets or canned databases.
Your standard non-programmer is really bad about thinking in terms of precise requirements. In some cases you can afford to work out every possibility up front, but often you won’t run into weird cases until the coding has begun. However better languages reduce the nitty gritty detail work a lot.
50 years ago my mother had a job as a bookkeeper, entering and balancing ledger information. She had an adding machine and that was about it. I think that job category is gone.
Some of the headline writing for the local paper got moved to India. Small problems like them thinking that Ohio was in the Northwest.
Accounting is never going away. NEVER. When the world has been nuked and cockroaches are eating the fruitcake, there will be an accountant there, keeping track of the fruitcake inventory.
However, accounting is changing. There is ever-decreasing need for people to manually enter data, or to manually move data from one place to another. Those people lower on the totem pole may find themselves needing to update their skills. There will always be a demand for the people who interpret the laws, policies, procedures, etc. and make sure that computers and other automated systems are working right. Because accounting standards and laws are both continually changing, there’s simply no eliminating accountants at that level.
A lot of the accounting work that exists today is for people to resolve or reconcile what the computer does. For example, I talked to someone who spends all her time at Amazon reconciling returns. She only handles the 0.01% of transactions that somehow trip up the computer, and require a person to figure out what happened wrong and make the appropriate corrections manually. Since no computer is ever perfect, you can only eliminate so many people like her.
In a way, it’s just like the old assembly line problem. You used to have 1000 guys manually welding car parts together. Now you have 100 guys tending to the robots that do the welding. When you invent robots to fix robots, you’ll still need 10 guys to make sure they don’t turn into SkyNet.
Parts of entire professions are gone already or closely following all those type-setters out there; but I would say Marketing is taking a huge hit due in no small part to marketing automation and being able to be everywhere at once.
As a home seller, there is no way I would want people touring my house without someone, ie a realtor, accompanying them, and no way I’m dumb enough to be the one there when the tour happens.
With telemarketers, retail salespersons and real estate agents near the top of the list it seems like there is the view that sales people are not effective in closing sales. Hmm.
It’s strange, but I’ve heard programmers mentioned a number of times in this context recently, but I’d be quite willing to bet money that it will be one of the last things to be fully automated out.
For example, consider bugs. I read an article in New Scientist where they still described bugs as being essentially typos. But these kinds of bugs are increasingly rare using high-level languages and modern development environments. Most bugs I encounter now, certainly the ones that can “slip through the net” are just unforeseen consequences of the requirements.
It takes true understanding, of meaning, of whatever the software is actually trying to accomplish, to see such problems in advance.
When computers can do that there’s not much left humans could do that computers could not.
OTOH programming tools are advancing such that there may be a time where someone with no comp sci training could create simple programs as easily as, say, creating a blog.
And automated testing is already widespread.
Actually this is another good example of how such changes often play out: The number of jobs in testing has actually increased at the same time as productivity has shot up due to the use of automated systems.
Aren’t strippers already automated? I was a stripper for a few years in the late '60s, and it’s not that complicated that a machine can’t do it.
And typesetting: Sure, anyone can sit there, wiggling their fingers over a keyboard, and what comes out is “good enough” today. What’s lost is the art of typography, and nobody cares.
If the autonomous auto comes along, the wiring and sensors will be, essentially, black boxes - too complex to try to repair.
Tires, oil, batteries/fuel will be readily accessible, and dimensions will be standardized (as are bumper heights now) - those are "drive into the bay, press buttons for desired operation, sit tight while your car’s history (and required activities) are downloaded and your account debited.
If it can’t be easily accessed from the exterior, it will probably be too expensive to fix.
We used to repair TV’s and radios. Now they are throw-aways. Cars are looking like the same.
Of course, when people realize that there are 100 cars in that driverless lane going from the same area to the same area, we will re-invent the inter-urban trolley.
Programming - yes the “4GL” (for those who remember the debate) are here - your secretary CAN now write programs after a week’s training.
If the machines get fast enough and cheap enough, you CAN make a Rube Goldberg-like process work. A clever design will outrun it by a factor of 100 - is that worth paying far? I’m guessing it will be for at least another generation.
There will still be functions where we, as humans, will want the “human touch” - marriage really does not need someone saying certain things - just keying in your ssn and birth-issued PIN says “I will/I do/ Why the Hell Not” without further ado. Mortuary - same thing. the morticians got laws passed requiring embalming. They also got the parlor (where the dead were laid out) renamed “living room”. They really have no use except as facilitators of grief. Real Estate folks serve (beyond their own “required by the laws we had passed” functions) serve to reassure us that we are doing the proper thing - in choice, price, etc.
Is anything actually fully automated even now? It’s rare to find something that’s actually fully automated. Getting your money out of a machine rather than the bank is one; are there any others? Not including ordering online.
I think the number of waitstaff will decrease, but they’ll still be there for reasons other than just making the food.
Spain, for example, has automated vending machines that sell burgers. Cooked burgers, not cold sandwiches somehow or other. I do actually trust the machine to make the food as well as a human could, but stepping over and holding out my money or my debit card without a human around felt like a huge risk WRT opportunist thieves. Yeah, we do that with ATMs all the time, but they tend to be out in the open, on the street, so at least there are bystanders and a way for you to run away. Food service is (and has to be for hygiene reasons) going to have to be enclosed in some way.
Yeah, not sure about that either. I get a lot of telemarketer calls for some reason (I am on various DNC lists) and if it’s a robot I just hang up.
I am an accountant and have been for over 20 years. What the field has seen is much less accounting clerk work. I don’t think the Economist is saying that there will be no more CPAs or CMAs, rather that there will be no more AP Clerks or AR Clerks. When I started in the field in the mid 1990s I processed thousands of invoices a mouth. Three years later that job had been automated. When I left that company after four years the accounting department was 30% smaller but the volume of work going through the department had increased by at least 25%.
Accounting used to involve a lot of data entry using technology that lacked the ability to cut and paste. It is a much more efficient field now. The current efficiencies come from taking work like expense reporting out of the accounting department and putting it back to the sales department (or whomever generates a company’s income), or taking coding out of accounting and pushing it back to vendors. Most of this is common sense and soul crushingly boring.
The new economy is for me a very exciting time. I have left corporate accounting and now do freelance work for small businesses and non-profits. My standard line is telling people not to waste their creative energies on bookkeeping and tax filing, let me be your staff accountant so that you can do whatever it is that you started your business to do.
This is something I have been meaning to ask the Dope in ‘automated car’ threads for some time… Is truck driving going to succumb to the robots? I’m tempted to believe it, but can’t decide. I can see the actual driving-down-the-road part becoming almost fully automated, but there is more to it than that. There is a certain amount of service and supervision required. Even if the truck becomes completely self-driving and self-parking, are we going to allow trucks moving freight around with no human supervision/backup? Is the software going to secure loads onto flatbeds? Handle the customer interaction and transfer of products? Maybe all that is possible one day, but how long will it be before humans can be removed from this industry? I have considered driving a truck as a backup career, and hope it sticks around at least 20 years more, in whatever form…
I can see all of the driving professions becoming much more automated/assisted by bots, but not taking place without a human around at all. What sez the Dope?
All driving professions, except possibly those that convey status to the employer, are done soon; watch the video I linked in post#34. Once the infrastructure is in place, human pilots are done too. Look at what we can already teach quadcopters to do. Combine that with the ability to learn like Baxter has, and employed human pilots and drivers will be as numerous as working horses, IMO.
ETA: BTW, Baxter costs just $25,000 for the basic model. I suspect his software is being licensed by many companies as well, and soon will permeate our culture.
That’s fine. I’ll be happy to pay you a fee per house to show it. But, I’m not going to let you negotiate for me, or charge me 3% of the closing price. And you don’t need to be licensed if all you’re going to do is walk me through a house.
Junior associate here, and researching case law is like half of my job. The real redundancies in the legal field are in the areas where there’s no particular need for a lawyer to do the work: reviewing and summarizing medical and employment records, calculating wage loss, and so on. We’ve also had an increasing trend towards electronic dockets, which means much less copying, printing and mailing.
I don’t need anyone to “close” a sale for me when I go to the grocery store, I don’t see why they’re needed in other areas. The whole profession is a waste.