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Machines Are Going To Perform More Tasks Than Humans By 2025 (cnbc.com) 145

In less than a decade, most workplace tasks will be done by machines rather than humans, according to the World Economic Forum's latest AI job forecast. From a report: Machines will overtake humans in terms of performing more tasks at the workplace by 2025 -- but there could still be 58 million net new jobs created in the next five years, the World Economic Forum (WEF) said in a report on Monday. Developments in automation technologies and artificial intelligence could see 75 million jobs displaced, according to the WEF report "The Future of Jobs 2018." However, another 133 million new roles may emerge as companies shake up their division of labor between humans and machines, translating to 58 million net new jobs being created by 2022, it said. At the same time, there would be "significant shifts" in the quality, location and format of new roles, according to the WEF report, which suggested that full-time, permanent employment may potentially fall. Some companies could choose to use temporary workers, freelancers and specialist contractors, while others may automate many of the tasks. New skill sets for employees will be needed as labor between machines and humans continue to evolve, the report pointed out.
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Machines Are Going To Perform More Tasks Than Humans By 2025

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  • by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Monday September 17, 2018 @09:51AM (#57327842)

    Name one job that doesn't use a machine? Sure, most require a human to operate machines. A computer is a machine, a can opener is a machine, a typewriter is a machine... almost every job already requires a machine.

    Now, automated machines is a different thing- they might not have replaced humans yet but even coopers and blacksmiths in ye olde medieval Europe used machines, Machines have been around since man put a stone in a sling.

    • by Zorro ( 15797 )

      A Knife is a wedge combined with a class 2 lever.

      Your point is....

      • by Anonymous Coward

        His point is clear, appearing directly in the title of his post: "Machines overtook humans years ago." He is contradicting the OP that states "Machines Are Going To Perform More Tasks Than Humans By 2025".

        Captcha: candle

      • A Knife is a wedge combined with a class 2 lever.

        A club is a class 3 lever.

    • Name one job that doesn't use a machine?

      Signboard person at street corner? Except the Subway store in my neighbor has an automated dummy who looks like a Subway employee with a wig moving the signboard back and forth.

    • The key word (the dog whistle term) is "overtake". Machines aren't "overtaking" anything. They're helping to automate processes, just as they did in the automotive industry and other manufacturing markets. Some jobs go away, others will be created -- perhaps even more interesting careers will come out of the more mundane processes going away

      It's not a zero sum game.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        It's not a zero sum game.

        Indeed. For many jobs, Jevon's Paradox [wikipedia.org] leads to demand going up as productivity improves.

        If you ran a factory, and a machine became available that could make each worker twice as productive, and twice as profitable to employ, would you fire half of them, or hire more?

        If automation really displaced workers, then Europe, America, and Japan would be impoverished, while Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Niger would be prosperous.

        • by thecatt ( 1677280 ) on Monday September 17, 2018 @11:46AM (#57328534)
          You're missing the difference between automation and tools. What you describe is a tool that make a worker more productive. Automation is more like a machine becomes available that will be twice as productive as a worker and cost half as much, with no worker needed to operate it. How many workers would you hire to work in your factory when you no longer need any? We're not there yet, but it's coming fast.
        • Indeed. For many jobs, Jevon's Paradox [wikipedia.org] leads to demand going up as productivity improves.

          It is notable that the actual evidence available for supporting Jevon's Paradox (a theoretical claim, not one based on data) in the real world is slim and debatable. The problem is although "rebound effects" do definitely occur, the proposition that they actually increase net utilization instead, of modestly offsetting savings, is very difficult to demonstrate since over time many other factors influence utilization. It should definitely not be treated as any sort of law, that efficiency improvements always

      • Imagine an almost horizontal line, being the average perceptual and intellectual capacity of a person, or if you like, the average intelligence-guided physical action capacity of a person. A complex mishmash of capability that is a little hard to quantify, admittedly, but that's why I said "imagine". It's a thought experiment, with some simplifications.
        The line is almost horizontal because human innate capability improves noticeably on evolutionary timescales (100,000s to millions of years).
        Now this human c
    • by MouseR ( 3264 )

      Jerking off.

    • Consider agriculture.

      Back in the 1700s most people's job was farmer. In Europe, villages would be 500-700 acres, and would require dozens of families to farm properly. By the mid-19th century a Homestead (with one family) was 160 acres. These days the cast majority of those have been consolidated. technology has reduced the need for farm work by literal orders of magnitude. We have probably lost more jobs to tractors then any other single technology.

      It's possible most office jobs have not been automated, bu

  • I'm surprised they predict it will take that long.

    The question, of course, is what the humans will do when there half as many jobs. Our economic system is based on the concept that a human who wants to work can find a job.

    The obvious solution would be for jobs to work fewer hours. But the economic system seems to have no way to implement that-- what actually happens is that the few who have jobs are overworked and working late every day, while the rest who don't have jobs just stop looking (and hence are

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 )

      whatever will we do when the internal combustion eliminates the plowman and the horseshoe. Our agrarian based society will collapse. waaaah!

      get real, you have no idea what jobs will exist in 10 years.

      automation and IT creates jobs

      • The internal combustion engine created domestic jobs. Ones that aren't here any more.
        • the marketing and selling and maintenance of autos with foreign components in them has created jobs HERE, to say nothing of the use of them to create wealth HERE

          • No need for marketing when all the cars are in self driving fleets owned by some large conglomerate. Will maintenance still be a thing, or will the trend that puts parts into large foreign made modules continue?
            • large conglomerates have massive marketing and sales departments..and IT too among many other departments.

      • whatever will we do when the internal combustion eliminates the plowman and the horseshoe. Our agrarian based society will collapse. waaaah!

        Those people got service jobs. But now computers are starting to eliminate the service jobs, and there's nothing for those people to do once they get laid off.

        • You know there weren't service jobs at one point because that was rich-people thing? Tipping is a sort of European custom that came to America because European barons and lords were used to tossing some spare change to well-behaved servants. It was, at the time, novel for the less-wealthy to have access to maids and cooks.

        • But now computers are starting to eliminate the service jobs

          Computers have been automating service jobs for decades. When was the last time you asked a teller to withdraw $100 from your account? Or a telephone operator to place a call to your mom? Do you pay a laundress to scrub your shirts on a washboard?

          ... and there's nothing for those people to do once they get laid off.

          That's what they said about the tellers, switchboard operators, farmers, hunter-gatherers, etc.

          • Computers have been automating service jobs for decades. When was the last time you asked a teller to withdraw $100 from your account? Or a telephone operator to place a call to your mom? Do you pay a laundress to scrub your shirts on a washboard?

            Yes, that is my point [shadowstats.com]. Unemployment is actually at a high right now, already, not the government-reported low.

      • by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Monday September 17, 2018 @10:18AM (#57328010) Journal

        And to some extent the agrarian system did collapse, and beginning with the Industrial Revolution in Britain, you started to see many agrarian workers heading to the cities to work in the factories and related forms of employment. But we're rapidly running out of places where displaced workers can go to find new work. When even service industry jobs like cashiers at department and grocery stores are becoming extraneous, where is it you imagine those people are going to go? For the skilled workers in many fields employment is guaranteed, at least for now, but as we've seen with low-skilled blue collar workers in industrial settings, automation means they end up going from relatively high-paying jobs to more service-oriented jobs, and now that even McDonalds is becoming increasingly automated, even that far less than ideal replacement work is fading away.

        At some point, as automation begins to out perform even the cheap labor of developing countries, it isn't just Western low-skilled and service industry workers who are going to find themselves unemployed and unemployable by robots and AI.

        The farm hands of the 18th and 19th centuries had options, even if those options were far from ideal. Where precisely do you suggest a single mom with two kids or some 55 year old divorcee getting back on their feet go when all the tills at Walmart are replaced by scanners and two or three floor managers to keep things rolling along smoothly?

        This isn't the Industrial Revolution. We've been watching the process of increasing automation for nearly fifty years, and from where I sit, I can see major industrial centers like Detroit basically depopulating. For the moment the system is buoyed by a need for service industry workers, but in part that low unemployment will simply drive automation even faster as businesses give up on finding employees and invest in automation. And then, at some point when unemployment starts to rise those traditional back stops will no longer be there.

        • you're inventing sob stories and then extrapolating that to the future. nonsense.

          we're not "running out of places", instead that move fuels construction industry, we make more spaces.

          entire huge junks of the worlds population are being lifted out of poverty by tech. cities and industries are being built, new markets created, tech being put into the hands of people that had no tech.

          this is a technological revolution, and it's ongoing and lifting the human race out of poverty.

          and bringing up Detroit without

        • This isn't the Industrial Revolution. We've been watching the process of increasing automation for nearly fifty years, and from where I sit, I can see major industrial centers like Detroit basically depopulating.

          Well, yes. We don't always create jobs in place; productivity gains come from structural change. That means your farm job goes away and the 300-population small town out west becomes a booming tech megatropolis with 10 million people crammed together in huge apartment complexes.

          Detroit didn't depopulate because of lost factory jobs, by the way; it depopulated because the factory jobs moved away. While we have Mexico doing some final assembly, we still employ as many Americans... in the cities surround

      • Ask the horses how many jobs internal combustion created for them. So far humans have stayed ahead of automation because there has always been some other job we could shift to we were better at than the machines. That will not always be true. Soon your choices may be show pony or the glue factory.
        • Ask the horses how many jobs internal combustion created for them. So far humans have stayed ahead of automation because there has always been some other job we could shift to we were better at than the machines. That will not always be true. Soon your choices may be show pony or the glue factory.

          There are plenty of service jobs inside the home that are nowhere close to being automated. Cooking, cleaning, even folding clothes is something that AI and robotics still severely lags even people with very low IQs. Worst case scenerio is not massive unemployment but rather going back to a caste system where you have the middle/upper class with dozens of low class servants. This was the norm for the founding fathers of the USA and having household servants is still common in many countries like India.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Just a gentle reminder that industrial revolution was followed by 40 years of misery and hunger to many people. So if you are saying that history will repeat itself, you are saying that after 40 bad years, we will all be better than before.

        And while it is relatively easy (just kidding, it is extremely hard) to invent new jobs, it is a bit harder to invent a new job that humans can do better than robots.

        Most of the new jobs are just fancy names for engineer/programmer, aka a person who makes technical stuff

    • by Zorro ( 15797 )

      History says get in to trouble.

    • by ThosLives ( 686517 ) on Monday September 17, 2018 @10:16AM (#57328002) Journal

      Our economic system is based on the concept that a human who wants to work can find a job.

      Which economic system is that? I can't think of any economic system based on that premise in all of history. People who want jobs but don't have them have been around for as long as there has been a concept of a "job."

      The situation full automation brings into light is that the concept of ownership and the rights to profits of use of capital is breaking down. If human labor is not required to make productive use of capital, then labor cannot be the source of wage. The social upheaval will be because currently only money can be used to gain ownership of capital, and if you have no capital and nobody will give you money for labor, there is no longer a mechanism to gain capital.

      This means either forcing a (larger) portion of the productive use of capital distributed to more non-owners (let alone employees!), or reducing the concept of private ownership of capital. Either of those would be a tenuous transition, if for no other reason that people are not used to anything else.

      • or reducing the concept of private ownership of capital. Either of those would be a tenuous transition, if for no other reason that people are not used to anything else.

        That and because this is a fundamental violation of human rights. The core natural rights are the rights to life, liberty, and property; we cut into property all the time (taxes) because governments take away some natural rights under a social contract to protect other natural rights.

        I have proposed the theory that governments must actively seek efficiency: if a government taxes 10% and delivers 5% worth of service, the government is unjustly depriving the governed of 5% of their property. This is a hu

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      The question, of course, is what the humans will do when there half as many jobs.

      The opposite question is more likely: what will people do when jobs outnumber available workers? Retirees will outnumber workers in the U.S. in 2030. Healthcare and related industries will attract young talent. Good luck in trying to find someone to remodel your kitchen or mow your lawn.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Blah, blah, blah, Retirees will outnumber workers in the U.S. in 2030. Blah, blah, blah...

        You posted this at least one thousand times already creimer. STFU!

        Oh, right, I forgot about your posting strategy and how you chose what you post.

        Here is how creimer decides what to post:
        https://slashdot.org/comments [slashdot.org].... [slashdot.org]
        creimer wrote:

        All you need to do is find a website with a permissive TOS, say, Slashdot, create a Python script to scrape your own comments, sprinkle Amazon affiliate links in various posts, and then re-post past links whenever possible. Won't be long before you start making "coffee money" each month.

    • The question, of course, is what the humans will do when there half as many jobs.

      Traditionally, they become homeless, then they starve in an alleyway. Hopefully there will be a machine to dispose of the body.

    • How fast can you breed humans?

      Ever wonder why the labor force doesn't exceed job availability? Unemployment keeps going down to about 5% in the US, 2% in Japan. We keep importing labor--300,000 foreign worker per year. Why aren't we just importing millions and millions of workers, having loads of Irish twins, and otherwise building our population?

      For that matter, why does population explode suddenly around the Green Revolutions (when food costs dropped by half), computer revolutions, and other technol

    • Since McDonald's, alone, already serves about 9 million pounds of fries per day, I am surprised that it has taken this long for machines to overtake humans in number of tasks performed.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Ok, 58M new jobs, for how many people becoming adults worldwide in the same timeframe?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#growthrate
      83 Million new people born per year
      https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sl.tlf.cact.zs
      62% labor participation rate
      51.46 M, call it 45 to account for less births in the past, deaths before age 15.
      45 million per year over 5 years is 225 million. Seems we're 167 million short.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday September 17, 2018 @10:09AM (#57327970)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • DevOps creates such laughable complexity there will be room for all.
      • is that it's an excuse to make the developers pull double duty as sys admins. It also lets companies take jobs that used to require little more than a high school diploma, declare them as "Developer" jobs in need of an advanced degree and bring in H1-Bs to take them. Basically, it's longer hours and lower pay for everyone.
    • We've circled back a generation to where to be a SA who gets paid well and has job security you'll need to be able to script that system like a boss

      There's no such thing as job security in tech (or anywhere, tbh). "Job security" means "I am good at finding jobs." That's the only way.

  • Here is a $100 bet I'll happily make with any "Robots/AI/Illegal Aliens/Whatever are going to take our jobs" people:

    Pick any industry sector you like. Any industry at all. I'll bet a $100 to anyone that there will be more people working in that industry in 10 years than are working in that industry today.

    Note: This is not about specific jobs. For example, "Travel Agent" is a job. If you wanted to choose "Travel Industry", I'll happily accept the bet.

    • by ledow ( 319597 ) on Monday September 17, 2018 @10:43AM (#57328168) Homepage

      Though that might hold for most things based on the fact that there'll simply be more people as time goes by for quite a while yet, it won't hold generally.

      For a start, depending on how broadly you define your industries, you can always cheat.

      The people who made cars are... well... gone.
      The people who ran music shops... gone.
      The people who took orders at McDonald's... gone.
      The people behind my bank counter... gone.

      Now that doesn't mean that they can't have hired more bank tellers internally to the bank in other roles, it means that there aren't many bank tellers left. All those people who sat behind a bank branch handling cheques? Gone.

      Replaced by a handful of computer technicians and people making machines to accept cheques, and people servicing that infrastructure, sure. But the role has gone. And I very, very much doubt that banks are hiring more people to fulfill that role even if they are hiring more people overall.

      If you account for "natural inflation", in that there are just that many more customers, branches and people around, then some industries are indeed dying off. Say, staff-per-customer. That's plummeting in some industries. And there's a reason for that.

      Whether the *number* of jobs grows isn't the bet here. It's the proportion (i.e. less humans, more machines, proportionally).

      Even IT... I can manage a thousand machines from one desktop. I couldn't do that 20 years before. It simply wasn't possible. But I might have the same team-size as I did back then. The problem is, the other guy is nothing but a keyboard jockey, and proportionally I'm servicing twice as many users as I was back then too.

      Thus, though the number may not have changed, the proportion and skills has drastically shifted to the machines instead of the people.

      Travel agencies died with the advent of online travel price comparison sites (flights, hotels, etc.). Their replacements may have generated more IT jobs, maybe even more sales jobs, but it didn't make more jobs in the actual travel industry, just the opposite.

      Whatever way you look at it, that's a hit. And it's predicated on one problem... that as things get more automated, more of those industry jobs go to IT (whether coding, server support, datacentre rookie, or just plain tech support). And more and more of IT is getting automated. You don't even speak to advisers on websites any more, little AI chatbots cut the simple questions out.

      Before long there will be a significant hit to other areas. Big supermarkets and shops probably spend more on their online services now than they do on ground staff... it's ground rent that's killing them and pushing them out of the high-street. Do you know how many big-name high-street retailers have gone out of business in the UK in the last 10 years alone? To be replaced with websites.

      And last time I changed car insurer, it was all done online (there's an industry that's almost dead offline), and LITERALLY the backend/company/underwriters that actually insured me for my old and new policies from two different brand names were the same place. Same web interface. Same underwriting clauses. Same technical data access. But two different "brands" offering the same insurance policy at completely different prices.

      If anything, that's a perfect example that shows you what will happen - an enormous shift to IT-running of these places, everything operated on the basis of algorithms, no human-face at all (even the customer support lines are way understaffed and refer you to the website more than anything) and then an enormous consolidation of those services from all kinds of places into one place that they all outsource to.

      It's slow. There are ALWAYS jobs if you want to go looking for them. But it's inevitable, measurable and inexorable.

      I'd go for Insurance as the industry. And I'd say that once things like PPI claims etc. are past their expiry dates, those numbers will plummet. Because, as an industry, they just don't nee

      • utter rubbish, the continued trend on planet earth is for tech to create jobs, create cities, create industries and lift people out of poverty.

        your whining and wailing are based on an unreality between your ears. reality is job and wealth creation. the jobs *change*, that is the only truth. jobs become obsolete but even more are create.

        For 300 year tech has created jobs, at the present is creating jobs, and will continue to create jobs.

    • Pick any industry sector you like. Any industry at all. I'll bet a $100 to anyone that there will be more people working in that industry in 10 years than are working in that industry today.

      You'd win that bet in a lot of industries but not all of them because it depends heavily on what definition of the word "industry" you use to define a particular industry. Industry can be a rather vague and subjective term so you have to be clear about what your definition is. It's part of what makes anti-trust regulation difficult because to determine if a company is a monopoly you first have to define what industry you think they monopolize. Sometimes this is easy but sometimes it's incredibly hard to

      • I agree, definitions are tricky.

        But my point was attacking the "Robots are coming" people. AI and robots will take a lot of jobs. But there will be more jobs created as a result.

        Consider farming. Today, very few people are actual farmers. You probably don't actually know a person who has ever plowed or harvested a field. But you probably know lots of people that work in in the agricultural industry. There are people that make and service the machines, sell insurance, find temp employment. There are LOTS of

        • AI and robots will take a lot of jobs. But there will be more jobs created as a result.

          Agreed. The whole fear of AI and robots seems to have little basis in evidence and seems more like linear extrapolation run amok.

          Consider farming. Today, very few people are actual farmers.

          Quite a lot of people are actual farmers. About 31% globally [ilo.org] or around a billion people globally. Where your statement is correct is in rich industrialized countries which are comparatively automated but even then it is only a relative statement. In the US there are currently several million farm workers which isn't a trivial number even today. The most labor intensive farmi

    • Bad bet. Structure can change--look at farming, which went from 26 million to as low as 2 million over the span of a century. You want to look at the unemployment rate across all industries.

      We may invent new industries. We might conceivably alter the manner in which we set wages to slow labor force growth, drive wage compression, and produce a nation of relatively-wealthy workers (the poor are not that poor, even if they're not exactly middle-class).

      • It's a fine bet. People's problems is that they tend think that the world as it is right now is in some sort of economic stability. It's not. It's constantly changing and always has been. Look at how much the world has changed today vs 10 years ago. Today there is hardly an industry that isn't heavily affected by mobile internet communications, for example. That whole industry basically didn't exist 10 years ago. And yet, I challenge you to find an industry that is employing fewer people today than 10 years

        • Oh I know; part of that change is industry dominance as a fraction of total economy, however.

          1.2 million agricultural workers, 2008. 856,300 agricultural workers, 2016. Outlook: 0% employment change, 2016-2026, projected to have 400 fewer employed in the industry in 2026 than in 2016.

          Total number of employed workers in the United States in 2006 was 145 million, and over 150 million in 2016. Even at a rate of zero additional jobs, farm industry employment is shrinking relative to the economy's total

          • I'm not talking about jobs. There may be more or fewer people actually picking berries in the US in 2028. The number of farm hands is dependent on a LOT of factors, and predicting numbers down to "400" in 8 years is absurdly fake precision. (The number of farm hands in America changes more than than every day.)

            "There are more jobs in the United States; there are fewer jobs in the agricultural worker industry. More engineers, chemists, and doctors; fewer people riding tractors."

            That's exactly my point. There

            • I'm not talking about jobs.

              This is an English forum, and employment means jobs.

              There are more people that work in the agricultural industry doing chemistry, engineering, soil science, marketing, import shipping, just-in-time distribution, etc.

              Not really. The engineering, chemistry, marketing, import shipping, and logistics industries are highly-efficient: they devote a fraction of their resources to agriculture, and each person working in those industries is producing outputs for a large span of industries. Only part of a given worker's output is an input to agriculture; and when you combine those fractions, you get strikingly-few workers.

              Your strongest connection is the manufacturing be

              • Consider computer automation, which over the last 50 years has been just as widespread as agricultural automation.

                In the 1950s, when Parkinson wrote his great paper, bureaucracies like banks and tax offices were almost completely unautomated (yes, there were punch cards). Rows of clerks with mechanical adding machines reconciling banks statements and tax returns.

                Yet bureaucracies have grown, not shrunk, as a result of all this automation. The reason is that while the human gut can only consume a certain a

                • Of course some industries grow, others shrink, and others appear out of nowhere. They don't always all grow; it depends on if technical progress exceeds consumption.

  • by JoeDuncan ( 874519 ) on Monday September 17, 2018 @10:15AM (#57327994)

    ...this has already happened.

    I mean are they counting robotic car assembly as "workplace tasks"? What about assembly line QA by image recognition? Is that a "workplace task"?

    To vaguely defined to be much more than bullshit click bait.

  • Please robots, come and take my job! Heaven knows I don't want it.

    I'll sit back and get fat (well maybe fatter) and happy!

  • All so-called 'news' like this does is spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt), and as such is just clickbait. While there's this so-called 'news story', there's also this [slashdot.org] so-called 'news story' that is diametrically opposed to it.

    Just IGNORE all of it, none of it means ANYTHING.
    Business will continue as per usual. Billions of people will not suddenly be replaced by robots, AI isn't going to cause The Apocalypse, and so on, and so on.
    All of this shit is just distractions from the things that will
  • In less than a decade, most workplace tasks will be done by machines rather than humans

    That was true a long time ago depending on how you parse the word "tasks". If a calculation is a task then computers do untold trillions of tasks every second - far more than what people do. We're a species of tool makers. It's hardly a surprise that our tools make us more productive.

  • I'd anticipate a growing shift to automation and intelligent business systems over the next 10 years, but I don't think the pace is going to be as fast as predicted. Technology always moves faster than society, and businesses usually adopt new tech when it is convenient for them. In the late 90s, the pundits claimed any business not on the internet was doomed, and then the dot-com bubble burst and people realized only some businesses benefit from e-commerce. Shipping 50lb. bags of dog food over the internet
  • Define task. Define machine.

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