Automation and the future of work: understanding the numbers
In 2013, we published a paper titled ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?’ which estimated that 47% of jobs in the US are at risk of automation.
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Our estimates – particularly the 47% figure – have often been taken to imply an employment apocalypse. Yet that is not what we were saying. Our study simply looked at the susceptibility of existing jobs – 702 occupations, comprising 97% of the US workforce – to recent developments in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and mobile robotics. It did not predict a timeframe, and it did not explore the new sectors and roles that will undoubtedly arise in the years and decades to come.
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What our results show is that the potential scope of automation is vast, just as it was on the eve of the Second Industrial Revolution, before electricity and the internal combustion engine rendered many of the jobs that existed in 1900 redundant. Had our great-grandparents undertaken a similar assessment at the turn of the 20th century, they would probably have arrived at a similar figure. Back in 1900, over 40% of the workforce was employed in agriculture. Now it is less than 2%.
Seen through the lens of the 20th century, our estimate that 47% of jobs are exposed to future automation does not seem extraordinarily high. Policymakers need to understand the thinking behind the numbers in studies like ours to draw their own conclusions about the scale of the changes facing us. The world of work is, once again, changing at pace, and will continue to change. We need to be able to craft appropriate responses.
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