How Automation is transforming the global economy.

In a headline-grabbing study published in 2013, the Oxford University economist Carl Benedikt Frey and machine-learning researcher Michael A. Osborne made a very sobering prediction: by 2033, up to 47 percent of current jobs could be eliminated from the US economy. The reason? In a word, automation – the process by which jobs are performed, well, automatically, without the need for human labor, thanks to robots, software or other forms of technology.

According to the study, jobs as wide-ranging as sports refereeing, telemarketing, bank loan supervising, insurance underwriting, retail sales, and even catering have a 95 percent or greater chance of obsolescence. The list goes on and on, touching nearly every industry.

Meanwhile, just about every remaining job will be significantly affected by automation, and a whole range of new jobs will be created. Some major economic and societal transformations lie ahead. To give you a better idea of what they might look like, in this series of articles we will take a good look at developing trends in nine major industries that run the gamut of the modern global economy: manufacturing, transportation, the service sector, law, banking, healthcare, journalism, education, and entertainment.

1) Manufacturing:

After decades of hype, industrial robots are poised to replace human factory workers.

In the 1960s, we saw the rise of industrial robots – automated factory machines that manufacture products without human assistance. But six decades later, the robots haven’t taken over yet. There are still millions of people working in factories.

Sure, many of those factories are now in Eastern countries like China, rather than Western countries like the United States. But they’re still around, chugging away – and still powered by human sweat. So it would be reasonable to think that maybe the fears about robots taking over were overblown.

Well, think again. Even in the East, industrial robots are on the rise, and factory jobs are starting to disappear. In China alone, there were 189,000 industrial robots in 2014. That number is projected to reach 726,000 in 2019. Indeed, far from being the last bastion of manual factory work, China is now pioneering fully automated factories. In 2017, a cellphone factory in the industrial city of Dongguan replaced 590 of its 650 workers with robots. It then announced its ambition to further reduce its staff to 20 and eventually to zero.

The Chinese media hailed the factory as a success story, illustrating the progress of the country’s Made in China 2025 economic plan. One of the aims of that plan is to achieve a “robotic revolution,” in the words of President Xi Jinping.

Four factors are helping to fuel that revolution. First, industrial robots are becoming cheaper. Second, Chinese labor is getting more expensive. Third, modern industrial robots’ productivity leaves humans in the dust: the robots can work at higher speeds and with greater precision, 365 days per year, 24 hours per day.

The fourth and final factor combines the previous ones with the fact that Chinese factories often make products for Western corporations. Given the lower cost of industrial robots, the higher cost of Chinese labor and the tremendous productivity benefits of automation, those same corporations are now tempted to build their own factories at home in the West. That way, they can eliminate their international shipping costs.

Put those four factors together, and Chinese factories have a strong economic motivation to automate their operations. That way, they can lower their prices and keep their corporate clients happy.

But numerous factory jobs will probably be lost as a result. Indeed, the World Bank estimates that 77 percent of jobs in China are threatened by automation, many of them in manufacturing.

And that’s just the tip of the automatic iceberg

2) Transportation

Advancements in self-driving technology will soon render truck, taxi and delivery drivers obsolete.

Imagine it’s the near future. You’re a corporation with an army of industrial robots cranking out your products around the clock, eliminating most of your manufacturing labor costs in the process. But you still have one pesky little problem: getting those products into the hands of your customers.

Well, that’s where the robots come in again. The transportation industry is about to be revolutionized by autonomous vehicles. You’ve probably heard about the self-driving cars being test-driven on the highways of California – but autonomous trucks are also in the works, with lots of money being poured into their development. Otto is one of the companies leading the way, and it was recently bought by Uber for $700 million.

By 2025, one-third of all American trucks could be automated. At first, they’ll only be allowed to pilot themselves on highways, but eventually, drivers won’t be needed to navigate trickier local roads either. There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the United States, so that’s going to put a whole lot of people out of work.

Around the same time, Uber, Lyft and traditional taxi drivers will start joining the ranks of the unemployed. Here, too, Uber has been leading the charge. In 2014, the company hired almost the entire robotics department from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, where it’s been testing a fleet of self-driving taxis since 2016. Around the same time, Lyft got in on the action, too, with a $500 million investment in autonomous vehicle technology.

Delivery drivers are also under threat. Domino’s Pizza is already trialing self-driving food delivery cars, and package delivery drones are being developed by Amazon, FedEx, UPS, and DHL. Oh, and speaking of drones, there are automated flying taxis already being built by the Chinese company Ehang, and several of them are already in limited operation in Dubai.

The future of automated transportation is coming fast, and it’s being driven by rapidly advancing technology. For example, the sensors in self-driving cars are getting increasingly sophisticated, enabling them to be responsive to unexpected events, like a dog running across a foggy road at night. As a result, from 2015 to 2016, the rate at which human engineers needed to override autonomous vehicles on test drives fell from 0.5 percent to 0.2 percent.

Soon, that rate will probably reach zero, at which point, the technology will have fully arrived – probably by the mid-2020s.

3) The service sector

The need for retail and restaurant workers is already being eliminated by automated technologies.

Unless you’ve been living off-grid for the past decade, you’ve probably made a number of purchases from online retailers, such as Amazon. Of course, millions of other people have been doing the same thing.

As a result, brick-and-mortar stores have been dropping like flies. In the United States, just in the first few months of 2017, Radio Shack closed 552 stores; JCPenney, 138; Macy’s, 68 – and the list goes on and on.

With each closure, many people also lose their retail jobs. For example, when Macy’s shut down those 68 stores, it also fired 10,100 workers. All in all, about 12 million retail jobs in the United States are currently threatened by the rise of Amazon.

And those retail jobs aren’t going to be replaced with Amazon jobs. That’s because the company needs far fewer low-level employees than its brick-and-mortar competitors. Whereas the latter need salespeople, cashiers, security guards, and various other employees, Amazon mostly just needs workers to pick up its products from its warehouse shelves and put them onto trucks. And it’s already working on replacing those workers with robots.

Now add automated Amazon delivery drones into the mix, quickly bringing the company’s cheap products right to your front door. That’s going to make it even tougher for retail stores to compete with the online giant.

As for the stores that survive the e-commerce onslaught, they will be transformed by automation as well. Already, many grocery stores have replaced cashiers with self-checkout systems, and companies are now eyeing other jobs as well. For example, the home improvement company Lowe’s has developed LoweBots: five-foot-tall robots that are equipped with touch screens, speech-recognition technology and wheels that allow it to roll around autonomously. They’re already in operation at some of the company’s stores, where they track inventory and help customers find items.

Meanwhile, automation is rapidly taking hold of the other main branch of the service sector: the restaurant industry. Touch-screen ordering tablets are already replacing counter staff and waiters at restaurants like McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, food preparation robots have already debuted at the Zume Pizza chain, which has cut its labor costs in half.

Of course, cutting labor costs is a euphemism for getting rid of workers. In the US fast-food industry alone, 3.6 million jobs could be eliminated in the coming years.

Automation will soon take over many of the more mundane tasks of the legal profession.

Factory, retail, restaurant, and transportation workers – these are all low jobs on the socio-economic ladder. High-end jobs will be safe from the threat of automation, right? Well, some might be safer, but many of them will also be in peril. Others will be significantly transformed.

As a general rule of thumb, the more routinized a job is, the more likely it is to be automated. In other words, the more your job involves doing repetitive actions, the more likely a robot or a computer is to start doing it for you in the coming years. That’s why many lower-end jobs are going to be eliminated; a machine can flip burgers just as well as a human. But the same holds true for many higher-end jobs.

The law, banking, healthcare, journalism, education, and entertainment discussed in separate articles -link to them.

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