Stop what you’re doing if you want to figure out whether what you’re doing could someday be done by THE ROBOTS.
A new website called Will Robots Take My Job allows users to enter a given profession before offering up the “automation risk level” for that profession. It’s a fun exercise in determining just how much human skill is required to do what you do.
I entered “journalist” into site’s search field, and chose “reporters and correspondents” from the list of corresponding drop-down options. While many would argue that a monkey could do my job, the chance that it will someday be robots is just 11 percent — which is hopeful news when it comes to the prospect of me never being unplugged from the internet or retiring with any money.
Along with the chances of job loss, the site also offers up the field’s projected growth rate by 2024 (-9 percent, yikes!); median annual wage (ugh); and number of people employed as of 2016 (too few).
To measure journalism against a field where automation seems almost a sure bet, I also tried “fast food worker,” which defaulted as “combined food preparation and serving workers.” It seems a given that robots will eventually flip burgers and make milk shakes rather than American teenagers — and the 92 percent probability backs that up. “You are doomed” the site says under automation risk level.
Here’s the site’s official methodology (which was probably typed by a human):
In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne published a report titled “The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?”. The authors examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation, by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier.
According to their estimates, about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk. Although the report is specific to the US job market, it is easy to see how this might apply all over the world.
We extracted the jobs and the probability of automation from the report and have made it easy to search for your job. We’ve added some additional information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to provide some additional information about the jobs.
