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“Change is coming,” author Joe Toscano writes in his book, Automating Humanity, which discusses how technology and automation will change the workplace, and everywhere else.
The speed at which jobs will be automated in the future will have a lot to do with how easy — or how hard — it is to teach a machine the occupation’s job skills, writes Joe Toscano, the author of Automating Humanity. As others have noted, “many of the ‘soft’ human skills which cannot be standardized will become exceedingly valuable in the new economy,” Toscano said. Hard skills also will be needed, he added. “None will be more important than technology and data literacy in the future we’re headed toward.”
In his book, Toscano reprinted a list that calculated the likelihood that a job would be automated by 2032, a forecast that was created by a pair of researchers at Oxford University who analyzed job data from the U.S. and the U.K.
“The exact number of jobs that will be lost to automation is something we won’t know until it happens, but one thing we can be certain of is that change is coming,” Toscano wrote. “The antidote, according to many experts around the world, is education.”
The following is a selected list from the forecast, ranging from most likely to least likely to be automated. A full list is available at bbc.com.
| JOB | % AUTOMATED |
|---|---|
| Ophthalmic lab technicians | 97.0 |
| Hotel, motel and resort desk clerks | 94.0 |
| Insurance sales agents | 92.0 |
| Taxi drivers and chauffeurs | 89.0 |
| Construction laborers | 88.0 |
| Food-preparation workers | 87.0 |
| Heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers | 79.0 |
| Museum technicians and conservators | 59.0 |
| Librarians | 65.0 |
| Computer programmers | 48.0 |
| Historians | 44.0 |
| Airline pilots, co-pilots, and flight engineers | 18.0 |
| Chefs and head cooks | 10.0 |
| Construction managers | 7.1 |
| Sociologists | 5.9 |
| Editors | 5.5 |
| Healthcare practitioners | 5.0 |
| Meeting, convention, and event planners | 3.7 |
| Health-care practitioners (diagnosing/treating) | 2.0 |
| Teachers and Instructors | 1.0 |
| Curators | <1 |
| Training and development managers | <1 |
| Dentists | <1 |
| Audiologists | <1 |
CMP Series Required Reading
Once you’ve finished reading the articles linked below, go to Human Intelligence At Work for instructions on how you can earn one hour of CE credit toward the CMP certification from the Events Industry Council.