Gartner says 1/3 jobs will be taken by software or robots by 2025 (1 Viewer)

Dave Upton · Oct 8, 2014

According to research and statistics firm Gartner, the current trend towards automation could eliminate up to one in three jobs by 2025.

I'm always interested in debating these topics, so here are my thoughts:

Any technology (see industrial automation) of this scale usually gets cheaper rapidly as adoption increases. The corollary to robot labor getting cheaper is that the cost of goods should actually go down substantially as they reach the saturation point in food & goods manufacturing.I would think that our overall quality of life will actually go up at that point, provided we control inflation. This sort of free/cheap resource availability is the basic underpinning of any hypothetical utopian society (Star Trek for example). I may be a pessimist about how we'll manage the transition, but if handled properly, I think this could actually mean humanity can focus on far bigger issues like research and science (heavily under-served today) that robots are at least 75 years away from taking over.

Sam Posten · Oct 8, 2014

The future doesn't need us :wacko:

Dave Upton · Oct 8, 2014

Sam Posten said:
The future doesn't need us

I'll happily become a robot mechanic if I have to

Mike Frezon · Oct 8, 2014

When I saw the thread title, I thought it sounded like a prediction someone would have made in the 1960s about the 1980s.

schan1269 · Oct 8, 2014

Problem here...some people like doing dirty work.Would this make "me" Amish in 200 years?

Scott Merryfield · Oct 8, 2014

Will these robots be able to repair the flying car that I was promised many years ago?

TravisR · Oct 8, 2014

I doubt that's the case but if it is, I better get into law enforcement because crime will be increasing by about ten zillion percent when unemployment hits that level.

Northgun · Oct 8, 2014

Well the article said what your friendly neighborhood economist was gonna say lol heres the quote from the article ""The shift is from doing to implementing, so the doers go away but someone still has to implement," said Strohmaier. IT is a shift, although a slow one, to new types of jobs, no different than what happened in the machine age, he said."

The 25% of jobs lost is talking about the ways we do it now. We've seen it in the past and we will continually see these shifts. The question is, how many new jobs are created to replace the lost ones? There could be more or less then the amount lost, but the unemployment rate isn't going to skyrocket 25% because of a technology shift.

RolandL · Oct 8, 2014

Gartner Predicts! I didn't know they were still around. Many years ago I use to go to their seminars. That stopped because of cost cutting by the State of Connecticut.

KevinGress · Oct 8, 2014

Many jobs nowadays could be automated away, but for various reasons are not. Take fast food, for example- it's probably very possible with today's technology to almost completely automate a McDonald's, Burger King, take your pick. Then, if it can be done, why hasn't it? A couple of reasons I could think of

- initial cost. Automation has a lot of upfront costs. (the implementation in the article). Getting sensors and mechanics tuned right would get expensive.
- perception. A lot of people like to try new technology, but by the same token, many do not. You still hear people complaining about having to use automated telephone systems. Are you going to blindly chomp into your food that came from a completely automated 'Burger Shack'?

Sure as time goes on and technology advances, we're going to see more workflows automated. And just like in times past, people are simply going to be 'pushed up the chain', pushing buttons or flipping levers, etc. But we're never going to see a sudden, massive push to automate large sections of business. Human labor is much too adaptive and too sought after to go that path.

Dave Upton · Oct 8, 2014

KevinGress said:
Many jobs nowadays could be automated away, but for various reasons are not. Take fast food, for example- it's probably very possible with today's technology to almost completely automate a McDonald's, Burger King, take your pick. Then, if it can be done, why hasn't it? A couple of reasons I could think of

- initial cost. Automation has a lot of upfront costs. (the implementation in the article). Getting sensors and mechanics tuned right would get expensive.
- perception. A lot of people like to try new technology, but by the same token, many do not. You still hear people complaining about having to use automated telephone systems. Are you going to blindly chomp into your food that came from a completely automated 'Burger Shack'?

Sure as time goes on and technology advances, we're going to see more workflows automated. And just like in times past, people are simply going to be 'pushed up the chain', pushing buttons or flipping levers, etc. But we're never going to see a sudden, massive push to automate large sections of business. Human labor is much too adaptive and too sought after to go that path.

Well put Kevin. I agree with your points, however I have had my own very similar perceptions challenged by the workplace over the past 2 years. In the distribution and logistics business, it has always held that human labor was never going to be effectively replaced, however the massive adoption of AS/RS (Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems), wire guided vehicles etc in all verticals has really shocked me. I think that there is a critical mass where mass adoption begins and that it is firmly related to cost of acquisition. McDonald's may be able to swing it on a national level, but I imagine that smaller businesses will not want to front the cash.

What is more alarming of course is the sheer volume of blue-collar work that CAN be automated. Color me cautiously optimistic that this is an inflated number.

DaveF · Oct 8, 2014

I look forward to the subsequent 25% of all consumers being replaced by robots.

Carl Johnson · Oct 9, 2014

If we were to look back 25 or 50 years, I'd be curious about what percentage of jobs from those timeframes have been replaced by technology. While it is inevitable that some trades will be eliminated, others will be created.

Brian McP · Oct 9, 2014

Forget Gartner -- I'll go with whatever Criswell says....whatever that is....

TonyD · Oct 9, 2014

Mike Frezon said:
When I saw the thread title, I thought it sounded like a prediction someone would have made in the 1960s about the 1980s.

I was trying to figure why anyone would care about Mike Gartner's opinion on this subject.

Dennis Nicholls · Oct 9, 2014

Sam Posten said:
The future doesn't need us

Zardoz!

Dennis Nicholls · Oct 9, 2014

Automation technology's impact on society brings out the cynic in many pundits.

This guy's article starts with a discussion of an automatic fast-food preparation technology, and ends with this historical observation:

Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto back when employers depended on manual labor—in other words, back when hammers and sickles were actually useful devices.
But technology has rendered Marx supremely irrelevant, because it has rendered the value of human labor irrelevant.

http://takimag.com/article/workers_of_the_world_goodbye_jim_goad#axzz3FdO7QqkI

This has been going on for so long. Recall when large teams of stevedores had to load and unload ships on their backs? Now a single crane operator replaces that team as he moves containers on and off ships.

Dennis Nicholls · Oct 9, 2014

It's harvest time here in Idaho, and you should see how silage corn is harvested: one machine harvests the corn and chops it up into silage. The silage is shot via a tube onto a waiting truck that tracks the movement of the harvester.

There's a reason beef is cheap enough to go into $1 McDonalds hamburgers. Centuries ago, only the elite palace guard could afford to eat beef, hence their nickname.

Dennis Nicholls · Oct 9, 2014

Prior to the invention of the cotton gin, slavery was dying out in the South. A slave could only pull the seeds out of a small amount of cotton a day. The cotton gin made slavery profitable, with all that entailed for US history. Slavery was finally abolished by the use of rifles made of interchangeable parts that ensured the Union victory.

A modern computer controlled cotton gin is run by a technician. In a note of supreme historical irony, the tech is an old grey-haired white guy.

Patrick_S · Oct 14, 2014

Dennis Nicholls said:
Centuries ago, only the elite palace guard could afford to eat beef, hence their nickname.

That's really not that accurate.

There is debate about how they got the nick name beefeater but it's not that they were the only ones that could afford beef so they were called beefeaters.

One version is they were allowed to eat as much beef as they wanted off the King's table so they were called "beefeaters".

Another version is that the Grand Duke of Tuscany while visiting the Court noted how the Yeomen of the Guard were given a large ration of beef daily and he was the first to call them Beef-eaters.

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