Report: Automation could kill 73M jobs by 2030

But growth, other forces could offset losses

Automation could destroy as many as 73 million U.S. jobs by 2030, but economic growth, rising productivity and other forces could more than offset the losses, according to a new report by McKinsey Global Institute.

“The dire predictions that robots are going to take our jobs are overstated,” says Susan Lund, the group’s director of research and co-author of the study. “There will be enough jobs for everyone in most sectors.”

Yet maintaining full employment will require a huge overhaul of the economy and labor market that rivals or exceeds the nation’s massive shifts from agricultureand manufacturing-dominated societies over the past 165 years, the report says.

“I think it’s going to be a difficult transition,” Lund says.

Machines and artificial intelligence are already spreading rapidly with the advent of self-driving cars, software that can respond to customer service inquiries and robots that can work assembly lines, flip hamburgers and check store inventory.

In a study early this year, McKinsey found that about half of all work activities globally have the technological potential to be automated, but the new report provides a more realistic assessment based on economic, social and technical factors. It concludes that from zero to a third of work activities could be displaced by 2030.

In the U.S., 39 million to 73 million jobs could be destroyed, but about 20 million of those displaced workers can be shifted fairly easily into similar occupations, the report says.

That means 16 million to 54 million workers — or as much as a third of the U.S. workforce — will need to be retrained for entirely new occupations.

Jobs most susceptible to automation are physical ones in predictable environments.

Those include workers who operate machinery, prepare fast food, collect and process data, originate mortgages and do paralegal and accounting work.

Jobs safest from the effects of automation involve managing people, highlevel expertise and unpredictable environments.

They include engineers, scientists, health care providers, educators and IT professionals, as well as gardeners, plumbers and elder care providers.