More on this - a few excerpts from the article

47% of Jobs Will Disappear in the next 25 Years, According to Oxford University

The Trump campaign ran on bringing jobs back to American shores, although mechanization has been the biggest reason for manufacturing jobs’ disappearance. Similar losses have led to populist movements in several other countries. But instead of a pro-job growth future, economists across the board predict further losses as AI, robotics, and other technologies continue to be ushered in. What is up for debate is how quickly this is likely to occur.

Now, an expert at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania is ringing the alarm bells. According to Art Bilger, venture capitalist and board member at the business school, all the developed nations on earth will see job loss rates of up to 47% within the next 25 years, according to a recent Oxford study. “No government is prepared,” The Economist reports. These include blue and white collar jobs. So far, the loss has been restricted to the blue collar variety, particularly in manufacturing.

snip ...

By 2034, just a few decades, mid-level jobs will be by and large obsolete. So far the benefits have only gone to the ultra-wealthy, the top 1%. This coming technological revolution is set to wipe out what looks to be the entire middle class. Not only will computers be able to perform tasks more cheaply than people, they’ll be more efficient too.

Accountants, doctors, lawyers, teachers, bureaucrats, and financial analysts beware: your jobs are not safe. According to The Economist, computers will be able to analyze and compare reams of data to make financial decisions or medical ones. There will be less of a chance of fraud or misdiagnosis, and the process will be more efficient. Not only are these folks in trouble, such a trend is likely to freeze salaries for those who remain employed, while income gaps only increase in size. You can imagine what this will do to politics and social stability.

Mechanization and computerization cannot cease. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

etc ...

http://bigthink.com/philip-perry/47-of- ... 1488558349

This is frightening, shift. Although I probably won't be around, and if I am, will not be employed. I worry about my grandchildren's future. I desperately hope that TPTB recognize this and plan accordingly. Education is still the most valuable "insurance" against the onslaught. I will be sending this to my daughters so at least they can prepare their children as much as possible.

Edited to add: I think this article is a tad apocalyptic and that things will not be that straightforward regarding jobs in healthcare or other sectors. There a just some things that must be done by humans.

The robots would be encased in hardened steel with the nuts hidden in such a way that anybody working on them would be sure to skin their knuckles and/or require specialized tools to turn. They would survive just fine. The human passengers in the cars and the ones hit might be mush, though.

When Amazon challenges Victoria's Secret you know it's serious


Amazon is going to kill more American jobs than China did
Millions of retail jobs are threatened as Amazon’s share of online purchases keeps climbing



Amazon's revenue has been growing at more than 20% a year.

Amazon.com has been crowing about its plans to create 100,000 American jobs in the next year, but as with other recent job-creation announcements, that figure is meaningless without context.

What Amazon AMZN, +0.05% won’t tell us is that every job created at Amazon destroys one or two or three others. What Jeff Bezos doesn’t want you to know is that Amazon is going to destroy more American jobs than China ever did.

Amazon has revolutionized the way Americans consume. Those who want to shop for everything from books to diapers increasingly go online instead of to the malls. And for about half of those online purchases, the transaction goes through Amazon.

For the consumer, Amazon has brought lower prices and unimaginable convenience. I can buy almost any consumer product I want just by clicking on my phone or computer — or even easier, by just saying: “Alexa: buy me one” — and it will be shipped to my door within days or even hours for free. I can buy books for my Kindle, or music for my phone instantly. I can watch movies or TV shows on demand.

But for retail workers, Amazon is a grave threat. Just ask the 10,100 workers who are losing their jobs at Macy’s. M, -2.04% Or the 4,000 at The Limited. Or the thousands of workers at Sears SHLD, -0.45% and Kmart, which just announced 150 stores will be closing. Or the 125,000 retail workers who’ve been laid off over the past two years.



Online sales are growing much faster than sales at stores found in malls and shopping centers.

Amazon and other online sellers have decimated some sectors of the retail industry in the past few years. For instance, employment at department stores has plunged by 250,000 (or 14%) since 2012. Employment at clothing and electronics stores is down sharply from the earlier peaks as more sales move online.

“Consumers’ affinity for digital shopping felt like it hit a tipping point in Holiday 2014 and has rapidly accelerated this year,” Ken Perkins, the president of Retail Metrics, wrote in a research note in December. And when he says “digital shopping,” he really means Amazon, which has increased its share of online purchases from about 10% five years ago to nearly 40% in the 2016 holiday season.

It’s only going to go higher, as Amazon aggressively targets other sectors such as groceries and even restaurants with delivery services for restaurant-prepared meals.

(For more background, read “Amazon’s Stranglehold: How the Company’s Tightening Grip Is Stifling Competition, Eroding Jobs, and Threatening Communities”)

At the end of 2016, the retail sector employed 16.5 million workers, and the restaurant industry employed another 11.4 million. Together, that’s nearly one out of every five workers in America, the same share of employment accounted for by the manufacturing sector in 1982.

Many of those jobs are threatened by Amazon’s incredible growth. But some are relatively safe: Most of the 11.4 million restaurant jobs are safe from online competition, for instance, because people still love going out to eat, and someone has to cook and wash the dishes. The 1.3 million working at car dealerships probably won’t be affected anytime soon, and neither will the 925,000 at gas stations, or the 1.1 million working at building materials stores. You won’t buy a new car, or a gallon of gas, or 50 sheets of drywall online.

However, about 12 million jobs in retail are facing increasing competition from Amazon, particularly the 6.2 million people who work in the kind of stores that are typically found at malls or shopping centers — furniture, appliance and electronics, clothing, sporting goods, bookstores, and general merchandise stores — what the statisticians call GAFO (General Merchandise, Apparel and Accessories, Furniture and Other Sales).

GAFO is the heart of what we think of as retail, and that’s where Amazon has revolutionized the market. After years of barely holding their own, sales at GAFO stores have stalled, falling $1.8 billion (or 0.6%) in the past year while the rest of retail was growing 4%.

Meanwhile, online sales jumped by $13.7 billion through the third quarter of 2016, with Amazon accounting for most of that. It is expected to overtake Macy’s as the country’s top retailer of apparel this year.

At current growth rates, Amazon would have annual revenue of $500 billion in five years. As traditional retailers close stores and dismiss workers, shopping at the mall will make less and less sense.

There’s not much retailers like Macy’s, The Gap GPS, +0.72% , Best Buy BBY, +0.09% and Barnes & Noble BKS, -0.58% can do about it. Their business will be much, much smaller. And now that Amazon is getting serious about groceries, even Wal-Mart WMT, -0.20% is threatened.

Although retailers have been laying off workers, they probably aren’t laying off enough, considering how quickly their sales are eroding. While sales fell 0.6% in 2016, employment at the GAFO stores increased by 1.6%, or about 95,000. You don’t make money by hiring more people to sell less.

So what’s the big deal? Won’t the people who once worked at Macy’s just work at Amazon instead? Well, no. Amazon needs about half as many workers to sell $100 worth of merchandise as Macy’s does. Macy’s has floor walkers, and saleswomen at the makeup counter to give personal attention, and cashiers, if you can find one.

By contrast, Amazon has “pickers” in warehouses who grab hundreds of items off the shelves every hour. Amazon just announced it would hire a lot more pickers this year as it opens more distribution centers. But even those jobs are threatened by Amazon.

That’s because Amazon is at the forefront of automating retail. More and more of the work in the warehouses will be done by robots, and Amazon contemplates deploying flying drones (robots) to deliver the packages to your door. Amazon’s concept for selling groceries includes almost no workers, because customers will check themselves out and robots will restock the shelves.

What’s most troubling to brick-and-mortar retailers and their workers is that Amazon’s sales growth is accelerating (19% in 2014, 20% in 2015 and 28% in 2016), and shows no sign of plateauing. Amazon isn’t just taking sales from brick-and-mortar stores; it’s also taking market share from traditional retailers’ online stores.

Amazon is also moving aggressively into warehousing and package delivery services, which combined employ 2 million workers, including 600,000 at the post office. How many of those jobs will Amazon’s drones take?

Could Amazon actually kill more American jobs than China did? It’s quite likely. Economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson have estimated China’s manufacturing exports to the U.S. may have cost as many as 2 million jobs.

If Amazon can capture 40% of the GAFO market within five years (as seems likely), about 1.5 million jobs at brick-and-mortar stores could be lost. Add in the jobs Amazon will kill at grocery stores, drugstores, warehouses and delivery services, and the total would be well over 2 million.

And unlike the manufacturing jobs lost to China, which were clustered in a comparatively few counties, those retail jobs are located in every city, town and hamlet in America.

Don’t worry, though. Economic theory says the displaced workers will find other jobs as the economy grows more productive. And Amazon will pay you a couple of bucks if you’ll use your own car to deliver packages to your neighbors.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon ... 2017-01-19

Two videos at link

Are we ready for what's next- the loss of millions of federal jobs and private sector jobs that are grant funded if Trump's budget survives anywhere near its original form. The number of federal jobs and federally funded or federally reliant jobs lost in this budget monumentally surpass the number of jobs he has "saved" or "brought back". Job killing, economy killing budget proposal.

Grabem's supporters don't think that far. Let's hope that there are actually some of them working in these government jobs he's anxious to eliminate. That will teach 'em.

VOTE GRABEM - Make America Unemployed Again

Torches and pitchforks are going to be growing cottage industries.

Betsy Devos?Tom Price? No rank and file federal employees that I know are very fond of him.

Definitely worth reading

The coming automation disruption
Two new studies point to industries and jobs that could change dramatically with the rise of the machines

A wrecking ball is coming for the labour market, analysts warn. One such example: an Oxford study that concludes 47 per cent of jobs risk being automated.

As computer-processing power doubles each year and machines learn from their mistakes, the upcoming federal budget will examine the potential of artificial intelligence to disrupt — industries, politics, and entire societies.

It’s been mostly blue-collar workers hit so far, but Oxford researchers concluded white-collar jobs are next. They found the most at-risk jobs involve repetitive tasks, like telemarketing, tax-preparing, and insurance underwriting. The safest jobs involved unpredictability and interpersonal skills — sparing psychologists, surgeons and social workers from labour’s endangered-species list.

Another study offers a more nuanced view.

McKinsey researchers argue it’s not careers being wiped out — just individual tasks. They concluded nearly half of human tasks will be supplanted by machines within a 20-to-50-year range.

The report concludes 60 million U.S. jobs face some automation and predicts a change as drastic as the shift from an agriculture-based economy into the 20th century.

In the last shift, jobs moved to manufacturing. It’s not clear yet what employment might pick up the slack next time.

Here are examples from different fields:

http://www.macleans.ca/economy/the-comi ... isruption/

Better keep maintain a bit of agriculture, guys... unless Soilent Green is waiting in the wings.

Interesting thoughts about the consequences of all those jobs disappearing

In a world without work, being busy will be the new status symbol: Don Pittis
New research also suggests despair of unemployment could be deadly

The conventional view of economists has been that work is what poor people do. The richer we got, individually and as a society, the more we would revel in taking time off.

Two new studies on work and leisure have turned that conventional economic wisdom on its head.

Most devastating was research released on Friday by Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton and Princeton economist Anne Case that shows "deaths of despair" are soaring amongst unemployed white men in the United States.

Mortality and male despair

Titled Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century, the research shows that while most middle-aged people around the world are living longer, the death rate for white men without a high school education is sky-rocketing.

"The number of "deaths of despair"— death by drugs, alcohol and suicide" and a "slowdown in progress against mortality from heart disease and cancer, the two largest killers in middle age" are to blame, says a Brookings Institution précis of the new research.

snip ...

That's exactly the point of the second piece of research released last week by social scientists at Harvard and Columbia universities. Unlike the era described by Veblen, the authors show that in the modern world the highest status is attached to those who are the most frantically busy.

"We uncovered an alternative type of conspicuous consumption that operated by shifting the focus from the preciousness and scarcity of goods to the preciousness and scarcity of individuals," Science Daily quoted the authors as saying.

MORE>

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is not worried about artificial intelligence displacing U.S. jobs for at least 50 to 100 years, he said Friday.

"I think that is so far in the future — in terms of artificial intelligence taking over American jobs — I think we're, like, so far away from that that," said Sec. Mnuchin at an event held by Axios. "Not even on my radar screen," he added.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/mnuchin-treasury-secretary-ai-automation-comments.html

Mnuchin probably can't see past his nose.

Mnuching in a former investment banker (whose bank was investigated over its lending practices). That means he comes from an environment where people don't worry about anything beyond the next quarter's earning statements (and of course his own year end bonus). There's definitely no consideration of the long term impacts of anything.

John59 wrote:

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is not worried about artificial intelligence displacing U.S. jobs for at least 50 to 100 years, he said Friday.

"I think that is so far in the future — in terms of artificial intelligence taking over American jobs — I think we're, like, so far away from that that," said Sec. Mnuchin at an event held by Axios. "Not even on my radar screen," he added.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/mnuchin-treasury-secretary-ai-automation-comments.html

Where the heck has he been living for the past 50 years? How could he possibly have escaped what technology has wrought. It's not necessarily bad but it has certainly had an impact on American jobs especially those that used to provide a living for the undereducated.

fascinating.

Canada: Here’s How We’re Preparing for the Automation of Human Jobs


https://futurism.com/canada-heres-how-w ... uman-jobs/

I'm sure everyone has seen articles about driverless cars and trucks with claims that they're a lot farther in the future than people think. Based on this, that's not clear ...

Rio Tinto paves road to its future with rise of the robots

THE performance gap between man and machine is growing at Rio Tinto with its fleet of driverless trucks now 15 per cent cheaper to run than the manned variety.

Rio chief Jean-Sebastien Jacques has pointed to the miners investment in cutting-edge technology as a key part of a cost-saving drive.

By the end of the year, that drive will have stripped a total of $US9 billion ($12 billion) from the groups costs since 2012.

Mr Jacques made the comments at the miners annual meeting in London last night his first since taking over Rio in July last year.

Our strong balance sheet, world-class assets and talented employees will help us be more resilient during volatility, he told shareholders.

We have the right strategy to make the most of all of the opportunities that come our way. Mr Jacques (right) said Rio would continue to pull hard on the cost and productivity levers through the use of technology and improving the utilisation of equipment.

He called out the miners investment in autonomous technology with each of its 76 driverless haul trucks in its key iron ore business operating at a 15 per cent lower cost than a traditional manned truck.

The autonomous trucks can run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year without a driver who needs bathroom or lunch breaks.

Rio has led the global mining industry in the use of autonomous vehicles, rolling out a test program in 2008.

By 2013, the miner was reporting its driverless fleet had delivered a 10 per cent improvement in utilised time and had not recorded a single safety incident.

In late 2015, the miner revealed the fleet was 13 per cent cheaper to run, as three of its Pilbara mines became the first in the world where all their ore was moved using autonomous technology.

Mr Jacques has also been managing a bribery scandal over an abandoned iron ore project in Africa that has resulted in the sacking of two senior executives.

The Rio chief did not directly reference the matter in his opening address last night but noted the companys commitment to its global code of conduct was non-negotiable.

How we do things is as important as what we do, he said.

The sacked Rio executives have denied any wrongdoing.

76 The number of driverless trucks in the Rio Tinto fleet 15% The cost saving for each truck, compared with manned trucks $12bnTotal savings since 2012 from Rios cost-cutting drive.

http://www.advisen.com/tools/fpnproc/ne ... dhrj9gAvDi

That's +/-320 fewer drivers needed.

Mcdonald’s Is Replacing 2,500 Human Cashiers With Digital Kiosks This Year

The stock market is luvin’ McDonalds stock, which has continued its recent relentless rise to all time highs, up 26% YTD, oblivious to the carnage among the broader restaurant and fast-food sector. There is a reason for Wall Street’s euphoria: the same one we discussed in January in “Dear Bernie, Meet the “Big Mac ATM” That Will Replace All Of Your $15 Per Hour Fast Food Workers.”

In a report released this week by Cowen’s Andrew Charles, the analyst calculates the jump in sales as a result of the company’s new Experience of the Future strategy which anticipates that digital ordering kiosks (shown above) will replace cashiers in at least 2,500 restaurants by the end of 2017 and another 3,000 over 2018. Cowen also cited plans for the restaurant chain to roll out mobile ordering across 14,000 U.S. locations by the end of 2017 (we did not show that particular math, but the logic was similarly compelling).

etc ...

http://theantimedia.org/mcdonalds-is-re ... al-kiosks/

And yet almost exactly the same predictions were made in the early 1980s and for pretty much the same reasons and they were wrong.

That's no reason to be complacent, but it does mean there's aspects of the situation that we simply cant predict.

Nobody predicted Amazon, or facebook ....

I don't know if they have those kiosks in the States yet but they are all over the place up here and they are a pain in the southern regions. They should have painted little army uniforms on them and named them "hurry up and wait". Service has plummeted and you can spend upwards of ten or fifteen minutes waiting for your order to come up.

I've also noticed a difference in staff attitudes since they came in last fall. I used to marvel at how McD's staff were always so cheerful, friendly and full of smiles as opposed to the glum, brain turned off looks in the other fast food places. Now McD's kids are pretty much the same.

I'm not sure the experience of the 80's is going to continue to be repeated. Many of the jobs technology took over in those days were based on repair and service work or on the fact the machines were able to bring the cost of certain goods down to the point where they created whole new markets. Neither circumstance is as clearly available as it used to be. Many of the machines are self repairing at least to the extent of being able to schedule their own maintenance and, if there is a breakdown, to diagnose and prescribe the repairs needed. Half the time a monkey could actually do the repairs.

The other side is that markets are being saturated. Often these machines that can produce hosts of product are working at less than half capacity or even doing "one of's". Companies are trying to rebuild markets by rebranding existing products and calling them "new" and "improved". Apple does it all the time as does Microsoft (which brought us Windows 10) but there comes a time where even that no longer works. How many of us really need a program that does something 1/20,000,000 of a second faster?

I'm still doing a bit of consulting work. Tomorrow I am going to visit a client that 15 years ago employed over 300 on the floor. They installed a new manufacturing system and now average around 60 with many of them there only because the company bought a couple of smaller companies to diversify it's product line.