What do you want to be when you grow up? A new list released by scholars Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne might make you rethink your options.
The list shows all the things robots are good and bad at. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which transmits information all over the world, used the robot report in its search engine. You can type in whatever job you have (or would like to have). Then the BBC tool will tell you: Will a robot likely take that job in the near future?
Robot jobs don’t come as a surprise to us. Little bots are already doing big jobs that save humans work. The company Amazon is the biggest online store in the world. It uses a bright orange “robot army.” The robots scurry around warehouses. They move packages from the shelves to human employees. That saves Amazon employees 20 miles of walking every day! It also triples the amount of packages they can handle in an hour. Farmers use robots too. Lettuce-bots pull up weeds. Wine-bots prune grapevines.
Bot-jobs can even protect people from danger. In a California pharmacy, robots fill prescriptions. They make very few mistakes. That puts fewer people in danger of taking the wrong medication. Robots are even used to disable bombs. That means fewer humans have to put themselves in harm’s way.
What kinds of jobs do robots do well? According to the research, they’re great at doing the same tasks over and over. They also work well with numbers and other data. That makes them ideal candidates for jobs involving telephone sales or typing. They would also make good bank clerks or post office workers.
Most people don’t like doing repetitive tasks all day long. They usually find it boring. But robots don’t mind it a bit! The study made a prediction: Robots will take about 35 percent of jobs in the next 20 years. That might free humans to do jobs they really love.
But robots can’t do everything. They aren’t smart enough about relating to people. They don’t make good therapists, doctors, or nurses. Creative jobs don’t suit them well either. Robots don’t come up with original ideas. They can’t think on their feet—or wheels.
