Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization

Rapid advances in technology have long represented a serious potential threat to many jobs ordinarily performed by people.

A recent report (which is not online, but summarized here) from the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology attempts to quantify the extent of that threat. It concludes that 45 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers within the next two decades.

The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support. Jobs in services, sales, and construction may also be lost in this first stage. Then, the rate of replacement will slow down due to bottlenecks in harder-to-automate fields such engineering. This “technological plateau” will be followed by a second wave of computerization, dependent upon the development of good artificial intelligence. This could next put jobs in management, science and engineering, and the arts at risk.

The authors note that the rate of computerization depends on several other factors, including regulation of new technology and access to cheap labor.

These results were calculated with a common statistical modeling method. More than 700 jobs on O*Net, an online career network, were considered, as well as the skills and education required for each. These features were weighted according to how automatable they were, and according to the engineering obstacles currently preventing computerization.

“Our findings thus imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization—i.e., tasks that required creative and social intelligence,” the authors write. “For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills.”

The contexts dealt with are few and constrained. As soon as we try to make a robot of the kind Isaac Asimov wrote fiction about, one that gets out into the world and deals with people everywhere... boom. Combinatorial explosion. These were robots who could evaluate MORAL principles... can you imagine the complexity of good and evil? This was the fallacy of the Garden, that sans a direct connection with God one could sort out good and evil at all (even if one had the power to resist the evil).

Being dead in the spirit doesn’t mean that they have no active spirit. Only that it’s a spirit doomed to death (hell, final damnation) if it remains sans salvational intervention. (I am not trying to solve the Calvinist/Arminian debate here about HOW a dead soul comes into new life.) We are supposed to test the spirits. Some will be “dead” in the sense you quote, and they will deem the Lord accursed. Some are alive in the Lord, and they will deem the Lord blessed.

I’m retiring from a 30+ career this Spring. My field is technical. When I went to work in the early 80s, there were 10 administrative people for every 20 or 30 technical people. They did time-keepeing, wordprocessing, financial stuff, travel, building management, etc.

Today we have 1 person for 50 people.

Not everyone is cut out for technical work (or whatever). What to do with all those people who are better suited to routine work?

I don’t know but I do know that not everybody can be a top dog.

Well maybe I might haggle... but I only want to haggle in love, to show how God loves and gives grace and gives the second chance. Not to put anyone down, leastwise God himself. If I fail to conform to the scripture then the scripture is right.

However I have firm reason to believe modern evangelical Christianity, for its success in pulling free of the shackles of human-dominated religion where it was in the Roman Catholic church, sometimes picks up new harmful shackles when it insists that hey it is Arminian or hey it is Calvinist. If I have to think about such things at all I might laughingly call myself a Calminian, with God busting through man’s philosophical categories and teaching me the maximum love and power in both the pre-salvation and the post-salvation stages of a saved life. Maximal freedom to take the step INTO salvation, and maximal security once there. People who never take it, even if they are numerically in the majority, only have themselves, never God, to point to for that failure. With that understanding goes a pre-salvation spirit that is “dead” in the sense of being doomed to separation, which functions in an evil-ridden, degraded mode, which has no salvation but only a sure decline to eternal doom within itself. And a special salvational light shed by God toward all souls, which is not like any other light shed by God, which by any soul not yet saved may be accepted — or eternally rejected — as an atomic action. Indeed God’s word very boldly says that He commands all men everywhere to repent. I take that at face value. I don’t play philosophical games like Calvinists do in talking about this phase. Although I still robustly affirm the permanence of accepted salvation not due to where we are led by a philosophical system but because of God’s promise! “No one shall snatch them out of My hand.” (Which in turn gets Arminians to gnash their teeth.) But what do you expect of a genuine manifestation of God but to completely bust man’s narrow categories? I expect no less of Him and I see Him do it to my narrow categories daily, yet without ever becoming nonsense or ever putting the lie to the words of scripture.

God bless you and bless everyone. If they refuse blessing it is their fault. Not God’s.

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