Personality traits might play role in whether you’ll lose your job to a computer

There is good reason to worry that a robot might take your job, but new research suggests that your personality might help you.

A widely reported 2013 study out of Oxford University estimated 47 percent of total U.S. employment is at risk of being automated over the next decade or two, with the highest-risk occupations including both bygone trades — watch repairers, hand sewers — and jobs that still appear embedded in the modern economy, such as real estate brokers, restaurant hostesses, drivers and tax preparers.

Follow-up work by the University of Redlands School of Business this month found some U.S. metropolitan areas, such as Las Vegas, El Paso, Texas, and San Bernardino, Calif., disproportionately rely on those automatable jobs, but nearly all large metro areas could lose more than 55 percent of their current jobs due to automation. The Pittsburgh area’s share of jobs

facing automation by 2035 is between 58 and 61 percent, according to the analysis.

Now, a study in the European Journal of Personality says that personality traits, such as being mature and outgoing, and an interest in arts and sciences during adolescence are good predictors for how you’ll fare as machines and data disrupt the world of work.

Researchers led by University of Houston assistant psychology professor Rodica Damian examined a dataset of nearly 350,000 people collected through a long-term study called Project Talent that surveyed high school students in 1960 and then followed up with them 11 and 50 years later.

In the new study, researchers looked at the students’ demographics, personality traits, intelligence and vocational interests compared to the kinds of jobs they later held and whether those jobs are now considered at risk of automation.

“Wefound that — regardlessof social background — peoplewith higher levels of intelligence, higher levels of maturityand extraversion, higherinterests in arts and sciences,and lower interestsin things and people tended to select (or be selected) into less computerizablejobs” 11 and 50 years later, the researchers wrote.

The “lower interests in things and people” finding surprised the authors — isn’t being a people person hard for a computer to replicate? — but they explained it through a bit of history: In 1960, interest in people “mapped quite well onto wanting to become an office clerk, someone who interacts with people but mostly performs routine tasks with the help of an office machine.” Most of those jobs are now gone or likely will be soon.

The researchers’ conclusions match what others have found — that creativity, complex thinking, social intelligence and other flexible skills will be more valuable in the future of human work.

Those findings suggest that educators should try to develop ways to teach young people personality characteristics that will help them secure jobs in the future labor market. The findings are less useful, the authors concede, in addressing “how to avoid mass unemployment when it comes to people who are already hired in highly computerizable jobs.”

Meanwhile,the upside to afuture where computers makemany of the jobs we do nowobsolete? “Future jobs will likely be more interesting,” the authors write, “less routine,constantly changingand challenging and will require skills that are uniquelyhuman.”