What happens when all jobs are automated?

nearlyrich

My quite mainstream job is not covered by the website so I guess either I will be OK (and to be honest I don't care as I am taking early retirement next year) or they didn't do a great job of researching the article, maybe they should have used a robot...

Polarbeary

Some things do make sense - people focused jobs are harder to automate. I looked around at my office today - all people doing desk jobs in finance. Wonder how many will still be around in 20 years? I will come back then and post.

ScorpiondeRooftrouser

Polarbeary wrote: »

My parents have said at school in the 1960s they were told they would be the leisure generation and the big worry was what would people do with their time when they only work 2 days a week? Yet productivity has fallen and working hours and access to emails outside work etc have increased.

That's a choice our society keeps making. We could be working 2 days a week quite easily and all be perfectly comfortable.

Polarbeary

ScorpiondeRooftrouser wrote: »

That's a choice our society keeps making. We could be working 2 days a week quite easily and all be perfectly comfortable.

That would be nice. The question is....will society change?

hcb42

If your job is nowhere to be found, are you safe?

I only have 18 yrs to retirement. Lots of elements of my role (which didnt actually exist as a career 25 years ago) are already assisted with technology, but it's not there yet..

[Deleted User]

So today, I wrote an algorithm, for the first time in years. It's all part of my drive to automate document creation at work.. it can do a fairly boring job of rearranging data in a spreadsheet so it all matches up. Normally takes a few hours - now it takes a couple of minutes.

Funnily, this is making parts of my own job redundant - BUT; we can charge our customers less than competition because I've shaved time off a load of tasks.

Automation won't make my IT job vanish; it will give me more time to do the 'interesting' thoughtful stuff; not the grunt repetitive boring stuff.

Plus: Writing algorithms is quite fun in a super geeky way

patman99

There are driverless trains on the DLR, so why not on the underground ?.

As for self-checkouts in supermarkets, more people are begining to realise that it is 18% quicker to go through a manned till than an automatted one. This is why Morrisons are switching back.

ScorpiondeRooftrouser

Polarbeary wrote: »

That would be nice. The question is....will society change?

I don't know.

Mistral001

As well as just automation, we have to consider obsolescence as well. Take the example of roll films for cameras. The amount of automation to develop films rolls and print photographs was amazing for its day and in fact I think caused a few strikes if I remember. Along comes the digital camera and almost makes developing rolls of film obsolete - at least for mass production anyway.

getmore4less

ringo_24601 wrote: »

So today, I wrote an algorithm, for the first time in years. It's all part of my drive to automate document creation at work.. it can do a fairly boring job of rearranging data in a spreadsheet so it all matches up. Normally takes a few hours - now it takes a couple of minutes.

Funnily, this is making parts of my own job redundant - BUT; we can charge our customers less than competition because I've shaved time off a load of tasks.

Automation won't make my IT job vanish; it will give me more time to do the 'interesting' thoughtful stuff; not the grunt repetitive boring stuff.

Plus: Writing algorithms is quite fun in a super geeky way

One issue you have to cover with this sort of change is capturing all aspect of the process when it was manual.

Some are non obvious and to still do them can make the tedious job shorter but more prone to error(often different ones).

rearranging data has an automatic built in checking done by the person doing it as they do it.

Picking up a automated corrected version of the sheet to check it is often not so easy to spot errors, and a complacency sets in to the checking process if it gets it right most of the time.

The trick is to have an automated set of tests to run through everytime you need to update the algorythm because you spotted a case that did not work.