What is our job industry going to look like? Are there going to be machines that are going to take jobs from others and might not have a back up plan?

Hi Anthony!

Great question! Here at PwC, we are constantly thinking about the future and how industry and technology advances. So your question is how will automation impact jobs, right? PwC has actually done a recent analysis over this and has found that automation will/has replaced 5% of jobs within the 2020s. In addition, by the mid-2030s 25% - 35% of existing jobs have the potential risk to be replicated by automated functionality.

These percentages vary depending on industry, but as you can see automation is growing and will continue to grow in the future. At the same time, jobs are constantly advancing and changing so even as some jobs may be replaced by automation, other jobs will become available. In my opinion, I think this is going to drive a larger push for higher education as we'll need individuals to not only perform the jobs that automation does not have the current capability to perform, but also to understand the machines that are taking over automation.

Within my industry, I constantly look at automated functionally and perform testing to verify it is operating properly. My job is actually an example of a job that didn't exist in the past, but does now because technology continues to advance and develop. In the end, I know this is a worry, but companies across the world, including PwC, are already thinking about this and developing ways to add additional jobs for the future.

P.S. There's always going to be a person to fix the machine that's performing the automation function.

Hope this helps!

IMHO a machine will never be able to offer what a human can. While machines do not suffer from fatigue, emotion, etc that humans do, they still lack discernment, compassion and intuition. A machine can be put in place to support a person but not replace. I think about how easily I have accepted using a calculator, a computer and a smart phone. All of three are "machines" and all of three have made my desired tasks easier, more sophisticated and enabled me do things I could not do on my own. But I have never feared they would replace me.

The job market will always evolve based on technology advancement and changes in human needs for products and services. Yes, machines will take away jobs that can be automated.

Therefore, focus your job search, education, and training on what jobs and industries are going to have a high demand in the next 5-10 years. For example, environmental sustainability and renewable energy sources are a hot topic. Therefore, companies are funding more research and dollars on sustainability and alternate energy.

Also, you should never consider yourself too old or stubborn to learn new skills. If your current skill set isn't attractive in the job market, then learn new skills that make you more employable. The internet is a great source of information.

Using machines in most industries will open the door for us to do something in addition to our basic job responsibilities. In our department / team / group we do a lot of manual work on the computer that could be replaced by robots (programmable algorithm to process steps and return a result) to generate typical documents and format them the way we typically like them. In this very example this "machine" is not producing any tangible product like a machine in a car manufacturing facility. However still takes up a lot of work off of our shoulders.

If we save just 1 hour a day with partially replacing our work with this advanced technology, we can focus our efforts more on human interactions and present solutions instead of generating them. If there are more people freeing up from heads down work, we can focus on listening to each other again and addressing the needs via more efficient technology.

From my perspective, I'm happy that automation will give me more opportunity in other aspects of my job so there's no need for backup plan but to adapt to new needs and learn more and more.

In other industries, technology might take away jobs, but there will be always a need for human resources to monitor quality and improve processes done by robots.

Artificial intelligence and Machine learning are the way of the future. We are continuously looking at ways to be more efficient and reduce costs and time spent on repetitive tasks. This is all to make our lives easier.

As such, we will need skills to develop these programs and tools.

In my opinion, if you are new in career looking for a job in IT, getting some programming or coding skills is going to be beneficial to you.

Anthony,

At Verizon our technologies are creating jobs that hadn't existed in the past. These innovations in the workforce have made things simpler, more reliable, and more customizable.

While some industrial job roles may become impacted, as you suggested, there are going to be new opportunities in manufacturing because of these same technologies.

Chart a "Tech Adoption" plan early and you will be a competitive candidate in a hiring pool of your peers. Games like CodeMonkey and Lightbot will give you an introduction to programming and coding that is a future-proof action plan.

Hi Anthony! This is a great question - it's always important to think about how the job market is evolving. Companies can use automation in many ways - one way is through RPA (Robotic Process Automation). This type of automation takes tedious, manual tasks that were performed by people and automates them. While this automation does eliminate some of the tasks performed by our team members, rather than taking jobs away, it enables our team member's to have more time to focus on "bigger picture" projects that add value to the business vs manual tasks.

Hi Anthony,

If you want to know there the industry is going in Technology, I would say that things are becoming more and more automated. Also teams that work on technology are becoming more global--- meaning that you have people all over the world working on projects together. Yes there will be more things done with machines but that doesn't mean that we still don't need people. We need people to handle the things and make decisions that the machines can't.

Machines will replace most of the mundane work. What students study today are courses for which there will not be any jobs in the next 15 years. However, STEM jobs where humans are required to be a carpenter, plumber, electrician and health workers to name a few will not be replaced by human. Their work can be enhance by machine but not replaced fully.

Humans have always worked hard to optimize, automate, and make things more efficient but that opens up new opportunities and things to do that were non-existent before those automations were done. So it's almost like one door closes but another one opens up.

Hi Anthony,

This is a great question! Good job think critically about future trajectories of technology and automation. I've had the opportunity to work at one of the top artificial intelligence research labs and currently do machine learning research for startup whose goal is to develop digital workers.

The short answer is that it is that the job market is always evolving. Many jobs exist today that weren't possible 30 years ago due to the advent of the internet and new technologies. Any many jobs have disappeared due to globalization and those new technologies.

You are asking the right questions. I highly recommend reading more about the debate over the future of work due to AI and articles about how to understand the growth rate of AI. Some very smart people believe that AI is growing very fast (exponential scale) and it could be that in next 10-30 years we will have automated most if not all work. From my experience, those claims are way too aggressive, as general AI is much harder problem than the general policy experts realize. To put things into perspective, at my last job we working on developing a general AI that could take standardized tests. Our best effort was the equivalent of a C+ 4th grader and a D- eighth grader.

Finally, my advice would be to not think about the job you want when you graduate (it may not exist when you get there), but rather the types of challenges and problems you want to solve. If you decide to go to college (which I highly recommend), try to take a balanced set of classes that will give you strong technical (computer science, stats & probability, and other hard sciences) and critical thinking skills (eg. philosophy or political science). The philosophy, political science, and sociology classes will teach you how about the different problems in the world and the technical classes will give a skill set on how to solve them.

I've also recommended some articles below that you might find interesting. Good luck and keep asking forward thinking and critical questions like this one!

IMHO, I think it will depend on the industry. For instance, I see machines replacing simple accounting functions (Think about "payroll" services where a person is processing payments to employees. This is a simple continuous process already been replaced by RPA's - Robotic Process Automation). Other industry I see machines taking over would be transport automation, manufacturing industries as well as shipping/logistics.