Yeah. I personally fill the role it took 4 bookkeepers to do 5 years ago, and I've got another... 40 years of professional life left. If my job isn't entirely automated away, I'm confident that...
Yeah. I personally fill the role it took 4 bookkeepers to do 5 years ago, and I've got another... 40 years of professional life left. If my job isn't entirely automated away, I'm confident that 95% of my professional compatriots will be winnowed by increasing task automation. Data entry from banks and credit cards? Automated. Payroll? Automated. A/P & A/R? Very close to automated, and there's already companies trying to be the middleman to make it happen, like bill.com. It makes me worry for the next generations, because basic bookkeeping was one of the paths out of menial labor and into the lower tiers of white collar jobs. The basic stuff is gone, and so is that step that could help people climb the economic ladder.
Note that when I talk about automation we're currently between stage 2 and 3. Some cases you tell it what to do and it does it for you with minimal future input needed, and in some cases it's already making accurate suggestions you just need to approve. It's not yet free of the need for human supervision, which is most of what I do at this point.
Might large numbers of human workers go the way of the horse? In 2003, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane published a study of the economics of technological change that made two influential observations.
First, they pointed out (correctly) that it is misleading to talk of robots — or any other technology — taking jobs. Instead, machines perform tasks, a narrower unit of work. Since most jobs involve many different tasks, robots do not take jobs, but they may radically reshape them. A robot accountant is not C-3PO; it’s Excel or QuickBooks. As with the horse, there is no wage at which human calculators can compete with a computer at the task of adding up a spreadsheet. Still, human accountants exist in large numbers. Their jobs simply look very different today.
Second, argued Profs Autor, Levy and Murnane, the tasks that machines took on were best described not as “skilled” or “unskilled” but as “routine” or “non-routine”. Recalculating a spreadsheet is a skilled but routine task, easily automated. Cleaning a toilet requires little skill — even I can do it — but is non-routine and therefore hard to automate.
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In task after task, the computers are overtaking us. In the Visual Question Answering challenge that CloudCV attempts, humans score 81 per cent. The machines were at 55 per cent as recently as 2016; by the summer of 2019 they were at 75 per cent. It’s only a matter of time before they do a better job than us — just as AlphaZero does.
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So — will the machines take all the jobs in the coming decade? No, and that remains an unhelpful way to phrase the question. Machines encroach on tasks, and we reorganise our jobs in response, becoming more productive as a result. But there is good reason to believe that such reorganisations will be wrenching in the decade to come, and also that some people will be permanently unable to contribute economically in the way they would have hoped and expected. Above all, it is likely that our political institutions will be unable to adapt to the challenge.
Yeah. I personally fill the role it took 4 bookkeepers to do 5 years ago, and I've got another... 40 years of professional life left. If my job isn't entirely automated away, I'm confident that 95% of my professional compatriots will be winnowed by increasing task automation. Data entry from banks and credit cards? Automated. Payroll? Automated. A/P & A/R? Very close to automated, and there's already companies trying to be the middleman to make it happen, like bill.com. It makes me worry for the next generations, because basic bookkeeping was one of the paths out of menial labor and into the lower tiers of white collar jobs. The basic stuff is gone, and so is that step that could help people climb the economic ladder.
Note that when I talk about automation we're currently between stage 2 and 3. Some cases you tell it what to do and it does it for you with minimal future input needed, and in some cases it's already making accurate suggestions you just need to approve. It's not yet free of the need for human supervision, which is most of what I do at this point.
From the article:
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