[quote=no_such_reality][quote=carlsbadworker]I think some of the comments are short-sighted. Yes, automation and robots are going to kill manufacturing jobs and retail jobs, but so what? That doesn’t mean overall jobs are going to decline.[/quote]
Retail and Manufacturing? Try white collar. Bye-bye 80-90% of those office white collar jobs.
Accounting, bye-bye.
Human Resources, bye-bye.
Tech Support, bye- bye.
Customer Service Positions, bye-bye.
Legal support positions, bye-bye.
R&D, yep, lots of mid and low level stuff going bye-bye. Automation is seriously letting Pharma consolidate R&D staff.
Tax departments, bye-bye.
Medical support, bye-bye (robots already reading x-rays and results).
True creating positions and sales positions will remain, but a lot of the positions doing the grunt work under the creative designers is going out.
Those people may still be employed, they may even still do something similar to related to it, but they’ll be in a very different organizational structure likely will be either gigging it or trying a startup.[/quote]
What time scale are we talking? 20 years? 30?
In the 3-5 year time frame we’re still a long ways off from a lot of your examples. Think of the last time you tried to use a phone menu or website to get something done. Routine transaction? You probably were successful. Anything beyond the 5-10 most typical activities? You probably needed human intervention.
In my company it could be hugely time saving to be able to streamline the purchasing process, but the existing inventory management software is terrible and cost prohibitive if you have tons of different items that are re-ordered infrequently.
As for R&D in pharma, there have been some significant advances in automation for some tasks, but a lot of the data processing software out there frankly is still awful, and right now companies need to invest a lot in their AI to try to make it remotely better. There also are regulations in place for Development that ultimately require a human to take responsibility for data. There’s also a fun trend that as it becomes easier to generate more and more data, the FDA starts demanding more and more data in submission packets. Funny how that works, but it keeps me in a job.
I do know that there already is a trend towards eliminating accountants for personal taxes, as for a lot of us TurboTax is more accurate and better. The accountant often just serves as a handholder and in some cases a person to point the finger at if something goes wrong down the line.
