Why No One Really Knows How Many Jobs Automation Will Replace

Tech CEOs and politicians alike have issued grave warnings about the capability of automation, including AI, to replace large swaths of our current workforce. But the people who actually study this for a living — economists — have very different ideas about just how large the scale of that automation will be. For example, researchers at Citibank and the University of Oxford estimated that 57 percent of jobs in OECD countries — an international group of 36 nations including the U.S. — were at high risk of automation within the next few decades. In another well-cited study, researchers at the OECD calculated only 14 percent of jobs to be at high risk of automation within the same timeline. That’s a big range when you consider this means a difference of hundreds of millions of potential lost jobs in the next few decades. Of course, technology also has the capability to create new jobs — or just change the nature of the work people are doing — rather than eliminate jobs altogether. But sizing the scope of sheer job loss is an important metric, because for every job lost, a member of the workforce will have to find a new one, oftentimes in an entirely different profession. Read more at Recode.