The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?

TL;DR: In this paper, a Gaussian process classifier was used to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, and the expected impacts of future computerisation on US labour market outcomes, with the primary objective of analyzing the number of jobs at risk and the relationship between an occupations probability of computing, wages and educational attainment.

About: This article is published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change.The article was published on 2017-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 4853 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Educational attainment.

Summary

Introduction

• This study aims to characterize the phenological behaviour, thermal requirements and the physical and physicochemical features at harvest of seedless grapes varieties ‘BRS Morena’, ‘BRS Clara’ and ‘BRS Linda’ under the conditions of the Submiddle São Francisco Valley.
• For this purpose, phenological periods were characterized, since pruning until early stage of budding, flowering, fruiting, ripening and harvesting, in addition to thermal requirements for each phase, expressed in degree-days (DG).
• At the harvest point, the bunch weight, the diameter of the berries, the pulp firmness, the soluble solids (SS), titratable acidity (TA) and the pH were determined.

DG for ‘BRS Linda ‘. In general, the cultivars ‘BRS Morena’ and ‘BRS Clara’ had the physical and physicochemical potential for domestic and international markets, provided that management practices are used to improve some physical characteristics of these cultivars.

• Phenology, degrees-day, seedless grapes, Vitis A. E. O. Santos et al. Rev. Bras, also known as Key words.
• A viticultura consiste numa atividade promissora, devido principalmente ao crescente aumento no consumo de sucos de uva e vinhos, além do consumo “in natura” (Sato et al., 2009).
• Com produção anual estimada em 1.300.000 toneladas em uma área cultivada de aproximadamente 81 mil hectares, o Brasil ocupa, em 2010, a décima quinta posição na produção mundial de uva de mesa, sendo a Itália e a China os dois maiores produtores (FAO, 2011).
• Como resultado dessas pesquisas, a Embrapa Uva e Vinho lançou, em 2003, as primeiras uvas apirenas brasileiras, registradas como 'BRS Morena', 'BRS Clara' e 'BRS Linda'.
• A necessidade térmica de uma cultura é determinada, comumente, por meio da adoção de índices biometeorológicos.

Material e Métodos

• Os experimentos foram conduzidos em área de produção comercial, no município de Petrolina, PE (latitude: 9º15’ Sul; longitude: 40º25’ Oeste), com altitude média de 366 metros.
• O clima da microrregião é classificado como semiárido quente, BSh’W (classificação de Köppen), com temperatura média anual do ar de 26ºC.
• Médias mensais de temperatura, precipitação pluviométrica e umidade relativa, do ano de 2010, Petrolina-PE Foram utilizados os cultivares de videira 'BRS Morena', 'BRS Clara' e 'BRS Linda', da espécie Vitis vinifera L., que consistem em uvas finas de mesa, apirenas, lançadas pela Embrapa Uva e Vinho em 2003.
• O delineamento experimental para as avaliações das fases fenológicos foi o inteiramente casualizado (DIC), com 20 repetições, sendo a unidade experimental constituída por uma planta, com dois ramos de produção.
• Os valores, obtidos em quilograma-força (kgf), foram convertidos em Newton (N).

Figures

Table 2. Performance of various classifiers; best performances in bold

Figure 2. The distribution of occupational variables as a function of probability of computerisation; each occupation is a unique point

Table 1. o∗net variables that serve as indicators of bottlenecks to computerisation

Figure 4. Wage and education level as a function of the probability of computerisation; note that both plots share a legend.

Table 3. Distribution (mean and standard deviation) of values for each variable

Figure 3. The distribution of bls 2010 occupational employment over the probability of computerisation, along with the share in low, medium and high probability categories. Note that the total area under all curves is equal to total us employment.

Figure 1. A sketch of how the probability of computerisation might vary as a function of bottleneck variables

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in "The future of employment" ?

The authors examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation. Based on these estimates, the authors examine expected impacts of future computerisation on us labour market outcomes, with the primary objective of analysing the number of jobs at risk and the relationship between an occupation ’ s probability of computerisation, wages and educational attainment. The authors further provide evidence that wages and educational attainment exhibit a strong negative relationship with an occupation ’ s probability of computerisation. The authors are indebted to Stuart Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, Eris Chinellato, Mark Cummins, Daniel Dewey, David Dorn, Alex Flint, Claudia Goldin, John Muellbauer, Vincent Mueller, Paul Newman, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Anders Sandberg, Murray Shanahan, and Keith Woolcock for their excellent suggestions. 

Q2. What is the common way of removing the requirement for adaptability?

in which the construction object is partially assembled in a factory before being transported to the construction site, provides a way of largely removing the requirement for adaptability. 

Q3. What is the way to reduce the complexity of perception tasks?

While basic geometric identification is reasonably mature, enabled by the rapid development of sophisticated sensors and lasers, significant challenges remain for more complex perception tasks, such as identifying objects and their properties in a cluttered field of view. 

Q4. What was the effect of electrification on the demand for skilled workers?

In short, while factory assembly lines, with their extreme division of labour, had required vast quantities of human operatives, electrification allowed many stages of the production process to be automated, which in turn increased the demand for relatively skilled blue-collar production workers to operate the machinery. 

Q5. What are the non-routine tasks that are evident in the present study?

While the computer substitution for both cognitive and manual routine tasks is evident, non-routine tasks involve everything from legal writing, truck driving and medical diagnoses, to persuading and selling. 

Q6. How many years of computerisation are associated with high risk occupations?

According to their estimate, 47 percent of total us employment is in the high risk category, meaning that associated occupations are potentially automatable over some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two. 

Q7. What is the role of the task model in predicting the impact of computerisation on the task?

Computer capital can now equally substitute for a wide range of tasks commonly defined as nonroutine (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2011), meaning that the task model will not hold in predicting the impact of computerisation on the task content of employment in the twenty-first century. 

Q8. What are the states currently making legislative changes to allow for driverless cars?

The states of California and Nevada are, for example, currently in the process of making legislatory changes to allow for driverless cars. 

Q9. Why did the guilds have a political power to repress them?

Because the diffusion of various manufacturing technologies did not impose a risk to the value of their assets, and some property owners stood to benefit from the export of manufactured goods, the artisans simply did not have the political power to repress them. 

Q10. What was the first law to make the destruction of machinery punishable by death?

With Parliamentary supremacy established over the Crown, legislation was passed in 1769 making the destruction of machinery punishable by death (Mokyr, 1990, p. 257). 

Q11. Why is the Hindenburg disaster widely recognised as a consequence of the public acceptance of technological?

By contrast, airship technology is widely recognised as having been popularly abandoned as a consequence of the reporting of the Hindenburg disaster. 

Q12. What is the impact of the technological development of robotic hardware on the employment of operatives?

The continued technological development of robotic hardware is having notable impact upon employment: over the past decades, industrial robots have taken on the routine tasks of most operatives in manufacturing. 

Q13. How did the share of us labour hours in service occupations change?

More specifically, between 1980 and 2005, the share of us labour hours in service occupations grew by 30 percent after having been flat or declining in the three prior decades. 

Q14. What is the challenge of identifying and correcting mistakes of robots when they drop an object?

A related challenge is failure recovery – i.e. identifying and rectifying the mistakes of the robot when it has, for example, dropped an object. 

Q15. What are the common occupations that require knowledge of human heuristics?

in short, generalist occupations requiring knowledge of human heuristics, and specialist occupations involving the development of novel ideas and artifacts, are the least susceptible to computerisation.