The Next 9 Jobs That Will Be Replaced by Robots

The Next 9 Jobs That Will Be Replaced By Robots http://tinyurl.com/4c66w5b

I thought this article was interesting because I’m always looking at the cutting edge of what can be automated. For me the interest is in thinking about how the cutting edge of technology will move into even more “creative” roles.

The jobs supposedly “on the line” (and they don’t mean tomorrow, but rather a little ‘down the line’):

• Pharmacists – robots in two hospitals have filled 350,000 prescriptions without mistake. (Could human pharmacists boast that level of accuracy?)
• Legal Discovery (Lawyers) because computer can analyze documents faster and for less than humans, and find information and connections that humans miss.
• Drivers – as Google’s self driving car experiments (and those DARPA have sponsored) then commercial drivers may not be needed any more.
• Astronauts (where I’m in favor of replacing human risk as much as possible)
• Retail clerks – self checkout is growing.
• Soldiers because in a smart war, it’s the machines that count and frankly if machines are killing machines, that’s a war I can almost salute!
• Nannies and baby sitters.
• Online sports stories from the basic scores.  This can probably applied to most other types of factual-based writing.

The ones that stand out as interesting are the Legal Discovery, sports writing, and baby sitting. These are not work that I would have associated with some sort of computer/robot capability.

The algorithms behind legal discovery could likely be applied to looking at vast amounts of transcripts for a documentary, and discovering the concepts, thoughts and stories within the material, much faster than with weeks of editor review. (Remember, this software is used not only because it’s cheaper but because it’s faster, and at least as accurate as human paralegals.)

Sports writing to me is more indicative of how so-called “creative” work can sometimes be really formulaic, and when you have formulaic, you have the potential for automation.

Baby sitting is a very complex set of tasks and not a job I would want to deal with myself. Have you tried to keep a young child entertained for an hour or two? Complex monitoring and image recognition would be essential starting points and these are technologies that could be applied to recognizing content in moving images.