7 American Jobs In Danger Of Being Automated

One of the biggest threats to U.S. workers is the potential for technology and automation to eliminate American jobs in the coming years.

A report from the Brookings Institute earlier this year found that approximately 25% of U.S. jobs are at high risk of being eliminated in the future due to automation.

At-Risk Jobs

A previous study by Oxford University identified the following seven jobs as being at 99% risk of being automated in coming years:

• Data entry keyers
• Tax preparers
• Insurance underwriters
• Telemarketers
• Mathematical technicians
• Cargo and freight agents
• New accounts clerks

Other Jobs At Risk

But while these seven jobs may be among those most at risk of complete automation, there are plenty of other jobs that may see demand dramatically reduced thanks to automation.

Jobs that are most at-risk include ones that include a large degree of repetition. For example, many repetitive factory jobs from the early 20th century have already been replaced by robots that can work faster, safer and more efficiently than humans.

The Brookings Institute listed food preparation, office administration, retail and transportation jobs as being among this type of highly repetitive work.

Agriculture and manufacturing jobs and other jobs that do not require a high level of education or training are also more at risk.

At the same time, jobs that require extensive technical prowess, creativity and/or personal interaction will be much more difficult to automate. These types of relatively safe jobs include jobs in therapy, education and engineering.

Silver Lining

One silver lining in the rise in automation is that technology is constantly creating demand for new jobs.

For example, the invention of computers led to the elimination of many manufacturing jobs, but it created demand for data entry. As technology advanced further, data entry is now at risk of automation, but automated data collection will create more and more jobs for data analysts and data scientists.

In addition, the threat of automation has also gotten the attention of U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and others that are now seriously discussing the possibility of universal basic income for all Americans.

Yang has proposed that automation will make U.S. companies increasingly efficient and profitable, and a portion of those profits should be returned to displaced American workers via a $1,000 monthly stipend for all adult Americans.

Concerns about the impact of automation and technological advancement on the U.S. jobs market have been around for more than a century. As the U.S. economy evolves, workers will have to do the same.

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