We have said it before and we will say it again: the key word is automation. While workers fight for better wages and general conditions, employers of all types and sizes respond by automating more and more processes. The McKinsey Global Institute published an interactive table highlighting the jobs with the greatest potential for automation, and although the study focuses on U.S. territory, it helps us assess what could happen in the rest of the world.
If there is one guarantee I can give while writing these lines, it is that I am a human being with flesh, bones, and blood in my veins. However, my condition does not change the fact that in the future it will probably be bots that generate this type of content. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, and advanced simulations are gaining ground rapidly. Forming text with coherent structure is not easy for an artificial platform, but we already know they can do things as complex as recognizing voices and faces. With that in mind, we discovered an interactive table developed by the McKinsey Global Institute that describes the potential for automation across the entire labor spectrum in the United States.
The Interactive Table
The chart can be divided into several sections, including the theoretical future automation percentage and the average worker salary. The data was compiled in 2014 and belongs to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The so-called production occupations appear at the top of the list. Meat and fish processing, textiles, projectionists, technicians oriented to medical devices, dredging equipment operators, baking, tailoring, CNC system control, dental mechanics, and welders are some of the entries with the highest automation percentage.
At the other end, we find activities related to art, science, sports, health, and social welfare. Home nursing, models, massage therapists, athletes, law and medicine educators, astronomers, animal trainers, and purchasing agents represent those jobs that remain on the margins of any automation attempt in the short and medium term. The World Economic Forum has said that in the next five years 5.1 million jobs will be lost to automated production lines and specialized robots. Anyone who thinks about stopping automation is living a neo-Luddite dream, but perhaps now is a good time to consider other possibilities, including universal basic income.
Access the table: here
