Computers put half of U. S. jobs at risk: study
Advances in artificial intelligence could eliminate need for loan officers, cab drivers and real- estate agents
SAN FRANCISCO — Who needs an army of lawyers when you have a computer?
When Minneapolis lawyer William Greene faced the task of combing through 1.3 million electronic documents in a recent case, he turned to a so- called smart computer program. Three associates selected relevant documents from a smaller sample, “teaching” their reasoning to the computer. The software’s algorithms then sorted the remaining material by importance.
“We were able to get the information we needed after reviewing only 2.3 per cent of the documents,” said Greene, a Minneapolis- based partner at law firm Stinson Leonard Street.
Artificial intelligence has arrived in the American workplace, spawning tools that replicate human judgments that were too complicated and subtle to distil into instructions for a computer. Algorithms that “learn” from past examples relieve engineers of the need to write out every command.
The advances, coupled with mobile robots wired with this intelligence, make it likely that occupations employing almost half of today’s U. S. workers — from loan officers to cab drivers and real estate agents — become possible to automate in the next decade or two, says a study done at the University of Oxford in the U. K.
“These transitions have happened before,” said Carl Benedikt Frey, coauthor of the study and a research fellow at the Oxford Martin Program on the Impacts of Future Technology. “What’s different this time is that technological change is happening even faster, and it may affect a greater variety of jobs.”
It’s a transition on the heels of an information- technology revolution that’s already left a profound imprint on employment across the globe. For both physical and mental labour, computers and robots replaced tasks that could be specified in step- bystep instructions — jobs that involved routine responsibilities that were fully understood. That eliminated work for typists, travel agents and a whole array of middle- class earners over a single generation.
Yet even increasingly powerful computers faced a mammoth obstacle: They could execute only what they’re explicitly told. It was a nightmare for engineers trying to anticipate every command necessary to get software to operate vehicles or accurately recognize speech. That kept many jobs in the exclusive province of human labour — until recently.
Oxford’s Frey is convinced of the broader reach of technology now because of advances in machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence that has software “learn” how to make decisions by detecting patterns in those humans have made.
The approach has powered leapfrog improvements in making self- driving cars and voice search a reality in the past few years. To estimate the impact that will have on 702 U. S. occupations, Frey and colleague Michael Osborne applied some of their own machine learning.
They first looked at detailed descriptions for 70 of those jobs and classified them as either possible or impossible to computerize. Frey and Osborne then fed that data to an algorithm that analyzed what kind of jobs lend themselves to automation and predicted probabilities for the remaining 632 professions. The higher that percentage, the sooner computers and robots will be capable of stepping in for human workers. Occupations that employed about 47 per cent of Americans in 2010 scored high enough to rank in the risky category, meaning they could be possible to automate, “perhaps over the next decade or two,” their analysis, released in September, showed.