White-collar jobs, interpersonal jobs, and exposure to A.I. displacement

The Brookings Institute published a new analysis of jobs most likely disrupted by artificial intelligence in November 2019. They used a new method for modeling exposure to displacement through automation developed by Stanford Ph.d. candidate Michael Webb, which ironically used machine learning and natural language processing (an A.I. technique) to identify professional occupations most associated with A.I. development. This novel method analyzed keywords in patent filings like "A.I." and "automation" and modeled them to match with keywords in job descriptions. It gave them a score of most exposure to displacement via automation.

The report shows which occupations are most likely to be displaced and the estimated number of jobs in that field. What's surprising is that this way of looking at it suggests that analytical white-collar jobs have more exposure to displacement. Furthermore, these jobs are currently occupied predominately by white and Asian males living in bigger cities.?

In contrast, roles in education, health care support, and personal care, which show more involvement from women, have less exposure to displacement from automation. It also suggests that rural communities have less exposure, mainly because their current occupations per capita are less weighted by white-collar jobs.?

The critical question is, are jobs most exposed to displacement because they have high proximity to investment in A.I., or are they most likely to be displaced because they are the highest-value occupations worth automating?

My take on this is that the intellectual property being developed right now is weighted more towards disrupting white-collar jobs because the firms driven by those occupations are the ones investing in the development of automation directly, or they are buying it from the originators of the I.P. This might have more to do with the capability to develop such technology and less to do with marginal value created by the automation itself. Another way of looking at it is that white-collar jobs might have more exposure because they have lower marginal value associated with human-driven value.?

In the short term, it seems evident that if higher-paying professions cost businesses more and they consist of repeatable processes, automating them would enable those businesses to offer similar services at a lower cost, thus creating more value for consumers. In the long term, however, society might gain more weight from automating processes like healthcare because it has a higher average impact on the quality of life than, say, automating investment banking processes.

The final question I'm left with is, will A.I. driven-automation encourage white-collar workers in bigger cities to find more interpersonal opportunities in smaller communities, or will they stay in bigger cities and transition to working in fields that build scalable automation that will eventually displace the less exposed occupations? Part of the answer will have to do with the importance of human-to-human connection and the empathy required to understand what problems they're solving.?

What are your takes on this study? What do you see in your community? And how are you thinking about your future with respect to these findings??