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Robots Will Take Your Job

They might not know it yet, but some of the most educated workers in the nation are engaged in a fierce battle with machines. Doctors and lawyers beware. Here come the robots.
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What’s the Latest Development?

Artificial intelligence is getting closer to replacing high-skilled workers, a sector once thought to be beyond the reach of our technological abilities. “In the next decade, we’ll see machines barge into areas of the economy that we’d never suspected possible—they’ll be diagnosing your diseases, dispensing your medicine, handling your lawsuits, making fundamental scientific discoveries, and even writing stories just like this one.” Following economic theory, higher productivity in these areas will drive down costs, benefiting society as a whole. 

What’s the Big Idea?

Just as the percentage of Americans working on farms dropped from 41 to 2 between 1900 and 2000, robots are on course to revolutionize our current labor market. Software developer Martin Ford was one of the first to write extensively about the coming changes: “There’s no question that there will be new things in the future. But the assumption that economists are making is that those industries are going to be labor-intensive, that there are going to be lots of jobs there,” Ford says. “But the fact is we don’t see that anymore.”

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