Here's the sad reality: Jobs are a dying breed of animal. Oh, sure, the herd's healthy enough now. But the loping gazelles of employment won't last long against the lions of modernization. And I'm not talking about cutting a few more factory jobs: The 5.7 million professional drivers in this country will soon have to compete with Google's much safer self-driving cars. And while this will mean a renaissance for getting drunk legally in cars, it also means millions of Americans are a few years away from losing their whole industry.
But hey, Taxi hasn't been on the air for years. It's not like robots are going to take over all our jobs in the next, like, 20 years. Only half of them, if the guys from Oxford University can be believed. And considering they have names like "Dr. Carl Benedikt Frey" and "Dr. Michael A. Osborne," I'm inclined to trust them. Both of those names could easily be the bad guy in a sci-fi horror, Spider-Man, or Die Hard movie.
Image Source/Photodisc/Getty Images
Benedikt might be the most sinister name our alphabet can spell.
This study looked into all the jobs that were likely "susceptible to computerization over the next two decades." In addition to all those driving jobs, office and administrative support and service industry jobs were listed as high risk. And this doesn't just mean a disaster for all the English majors in your life. Think of the impact on Hollywood! Twenty years from now nearly all the television we love today will look as archaic as a TV series about John Henry, Steel-Driving Man.
Unless it's set in a post-apocalyptic future where John Henry must drive off the nefarious Legion of Steel ...
665 Comments