How at Risk is Your Job?

When most Americans think of who gets impacted by accelerating automation empowered by artificial intelligence, images of manufacturing robots leap to mind. It’s pretty visual and easy to imagine. They might miss automated detailed financial analysis, accelerating as self-learning machines gather masses of freely available data combined with propriety data generated by mega-wealthy financial institutions… and analyze, predict and forecast. These same machines then get to test their forecasts against results, refining their ability as time passes.

The vision of robotic medical diagnostics, exponentially increasing their accuracy as they scan results and accumulate patterns of experience, is not particularly visual either. Robotic surgery, as depicted above, is too gory for most laypeople to contemplate. Legal drafting and research are increasingly fully automated. These functions have been the bailiwick of some of this nation’s most brilliant minds, her best educated students from our finest universities, and some of our most successful and most highly paid professionals. 

Even if you were not a fan of Mad Men, we all have images of advertising executives tossing around ideas, mock ad campaigns as well as catchy slogans and tunes. Today, it’s all about data scraping, quantative analysis and interactive adjustment based on consumer behavior. Campaigns are predicated on that analysis, adjusted by AI in the field, and advertising of all forms is tracked with linkage to resulting sales. Educated, white collar work. 

But if a November 20^th Brookings Institution report – What Jobs are affected by AI? Better-paid, better-educated workers face the most exposure by Mark Muro, Jacob Whiton and Robert Maxim – is accurate, it isn’t the remaining lower-paid blue-collar workers who face the greatest job insecurity… The headline: “White-collar, well-paid America—radiologists, legal professionals, optometrists, and many more—will likely get no free pass… and better-educated, better-paid workers will be the most affected” by artificial intelligence (AI).

What makes the Brooking’s report different is how this study separates itself from the world of academic speculation vs some anchor in some empiricism, measurable and quantified. “In part because the technologies have not yet been widely adopted, previous analyses have had to rely either on case studies or subjective assessments by experts to determine which occupations might be susceptible to a takeover by AI algorithms. What’s more, most research has concentrated on an undifferentiated array of ‘automation’ technologies including robotics, software, and AI all at once. The result has been a lot of discussion—but not a lot of clarity—about AI, with prognostications that range from the utopian to the apocalyptic.

“Given that, the analysis presented here demonstrates a new way to identify the kinds of tasks and occupations likely to be affected by AI’s machine learning capabilities, rather than automation’s robotics and software impacts on the economy. By employing a novel technique developed by Stanford University Ph.D. candidate Michael Webb, the new report establishes job exposure levels by analyzing the overlap between AI-related patents and job descriptions. In this way, the following paper homes in on the impacts of AI specifically and does it by studying empirical statistical associations as opposed to expert forecasting.” The report.

The November 20^th FastCompany.com explains further: “This modified view is based on a novel research technique developed by… Webb, who built his own algorithm to compare language from 16,400 AI patents with the specific words used to describe 769 different jobs in the government’s official occupational database, known as O*NET.

“For example, Webb unearthed verb-object combinations in patents related to marketing that included ‘measure, effectiveness’; ‘analyze, data’; ‘identify, markets’; and ‘monitor statistics.’ To a considerable extent, these terms mirror those found on O*NET to explain what a marketing specialist does. Among them: ‘measure the effectiveness of marketing, advertising, and communications programs and strategies,’ ‘collect and analyze data on customer demographics, preferences, needs, and buying habits to identify potential markets,’ and ‘monitor industry statistics and follow trends in trade literature.’

“Such a high degree of overlap between the two sets of texts indicates that AI is poised to have a significant impact on a particular occupation… In all, according to Brookings, some 25 million workers in the U.S. stand to be touched the most by AI. That’s about 15% of the nation’s labor force.” We are learning fast, but there is a “devil may care” attitude among those with professional educational skills and experience that for the foreseeable future, their jobs will be safe. But that myth is eroding as AI is becoming the analytical decider. You see, as an AI driven system consumes data, predicts, measures the results of its predictions, it learns. It gets better, more accurate, and more sophisticated.  Able to replace more sophisticated work.

“All that said, [report co-author Mark] Muro and his colleagues stress that AI is a ‘moving target’ since computers are constantly gaining new forms of ‘intelligence’—planning, reasoning, problem-solving, perceiving, forecasting, and ‘learning’ by gleaning statistical patterns within huge pools of data. ‘Much more inquiry—qualitative and empirical—is needed to tease out AI’s special genius,’ they write.

“Even with the insights provided by Webb, Brookings also takes care not to speculate on how AI will reshape the world of work. AI might eat a ton of jobs. But many, or even most, AI applications could wind up needing a person to work in tandem with the technology. And AI might give rise to new occupations that require the intervention of human hands—and brains… ‘Nobody knows how this will play out,’ says Tom Mitchell, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a pioneer in machine learning. ‘It’s a wild card.’”

What we do know is that college tuition is skyrocketing, well beyond the normal inflation rate. We know massive student loans are often required. And we know that a stable job market is essential not just for the repayment of those student loans… but for the reasonable health of our entire national economic health.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and for those white-collar workers so imperiled, I have two words: “red alert!”