Robots could replace nearly a third of the U.S. workforce by 2030
Robots could replace nearly a third of the U.S. workforce
by 2030
By Danielle Paquette November 30 at 12:48 PM
Over the next 13 years, the rising tide of automation
will force as many as 70 million workers in the United States to find another
way to make money, a new study from the global consultancy McKinsey predicts.
That means nearly a third of the American workforce could
face the need to pick up new skills or enter different fields in the near
future, said the report's co-author, Michael Chui, a partner at the McKinsey
Global Institute who studies business and economics.
“We believe that everyone will need to do retraining over
time,” he said.
The shift could displace people at every stage of their
career, Chui said.
By 2030, the researchers estimated, the demand for office
support workers in the U.S. will drop by 20 percent. That includes secretaries,
paralegals and anyone in charge of administrative tasks.
During the same period, the need for people doing
“predictable physical work” — construction equipment installation and repair,
card dealing, security guarding, dishwashing and food preparation, for example
— will fall by 30 percent.
Other advanced economies, such as Germany and Japan, will
see at least a third of their workforce similarly disrupted, the report
concludes.
China's share will be smaller (12 percent), since more
employers there will still find it cheaper to employ humans.
Machines can increasingly perform tasks that people have
long handled. They scan Tylenol and lip balm at the drugstore. They build
pickup trucks. They take your grilled cheese order at Panera.
Technology could replace up to 375 million employees
worldwide by 2030, the McKinsey authors estimate.
The jobs most at risk involve repetitive tasks. About
half the duties workers handle globally could be automated, according to the
report, though less than 5 percent of occupations could be entirely taken over
by computers.
Caretakers, psychologists, artists, writers — anyone who
relies on empathy or creativity at work — can expect to have the most job
security as automation continues to spread, said Jason Hong, a computer science
professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
“Artificial intelligence is now taking over even white
collar jobs,” he said, “but those that require lots of human touch and
communication won’t be easily automated.”
Still, the McKinsey researchers foresee “substantial
workplace transformations” across the globe, which they think calls for more
public investment in job training centers and education.
“The shift could be on a scale not seen since the
transition of the labor force out of agriculture in the early 1900s in the
United States and Europe, and more recently in China,” the authors wrote.
A May survey from the Pew Research Center revealed
anxiety among bosses. About a third of business leaders and technology watchers
in a group of roughly 1,400 expressed “no confidence” that the country’s
education system and job training programs will evolve quickly enough to meet
the next decade’s labor demands.
But the McKinsey study, an eight-month endeavor, offers
hope.
Susan Lund, a labor economist at the firm, said
automation will open more jobs — workers who create robots, workers that run
computers, occupations we can’t yet imagine — and ultimately boost U.S.
productivity and general well-being, as long as the workforce can adequately
adjust to a new climate.
Earlier this month, she pointed out, Stanford University
researchers found that a machine could better diagnose pneumonia than
radiologists.
“This is how our children could end up with a better
standard of living than we have,” Lund said. “We want to be able to transition
our workforce so that the people displaced can get new jobs and we can capture
the benefits without the downside.”
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