Gigaom AI Minute – September 21

Transcript

Often when the topic of jobs lost to automation comes up you will hear the number 47% thrown about. You may see things like, "Study says 47% of jobs will vanish due to automation." The number comes from one of the very finest and certainly most quoted studies on this topic that came out of Oxford in 2013. The reported seventy-two pages long, but most of the time what gets referenced online and in the media is a single ten word phrase, "About 47% of total US employment is at risk." Who needs more than that? But the authors Frey and Osborne had much more to say on the topic, and towards the end of the report they have a 400 word description of some of the limitations of the study's methodology.

They state "We make no attempt to estimate how many jobs will actually be automated. The actual extent and pace of computerization will depend on several additional factors which we left unaccounted for." What Frey and Osborne actually claimed was that 47% of the things that we do in our jobs can be automated.

This is interesting to be sure, but not particularly surprising. That's pretty much the history of technology and employment. Think of any job from 1990 and reflect on how much it is changed in that time. We expect technology to make us more productive and it has always done so against the backdrop of reason we study employment.