Almost everything. I work in digitization in the public sector and there are almost no business processes which can't be improved or turned into a self-service with minimum supervision and we've been doing it for a while now.
The reason it has been going on without anyone really noticing is because very few people get fired because of it. The real effect has been on a slow down in new hires as people retire.
The reason for this is that whatever efficiency you free up isn't directly tied to a single job function. Say you do a self-service system for handling employee transport costs. This might free up an entire job function worth of hours in a HR department, but they are coming from 6 different employees. Doesn't lead to anyone being fired, but eventually you'll automate enough systems that someone retiring won't need to be replaced.
Programming isn't even a safe zone. I mean, think about how much time you save by using things like modern frameworks and the interconnectivity of everything and then compare that to how it was 25 years ago.
Drivers, factory/warehouse workers (ongoing), clerks (ongoing), and secretaries.
And Im in the crowd that doesn't think we'll see it replace all jobs in a field -- just 60-90% of them, which causes major labor problems when talking about common jobs.
But some jobs can perhaps be replaced by "lower-education" jobs.
As a (perhaps contrived) example, family doctors could be replaced by lab workers, who take simple measurements, feed them into a computer, and the AI does the rest (i.e., correlating conditions to a large number of existing patient files, and hence referring patients to specialists).
Suppose right now, we have 1 doctor, 1 nurse, and 3 lab techs per 50 patients per day. I think technology generally lets us do the same job with just 2 nurses and 1 lab tech. So we lose 40% of the jobs from the higher paying side and probably more like 50-75% of the pay.
In less contrived examples, I think we lose a lot of the jobs in the 25th-75th percentile range, which is the middle classes.
So it's not that we see no jobs, it's that we see bad jobs and the elites. The middle gets automated out, and it's starting to be faster than people can retrain.
> Suppose right now, we have 1 doctor, 1 nurse, and 3 lab techs per 50 patients per day. I think technology generally lets us do the same job with just 2 nurses and 1 lab tech. So we lose 40% of the jobs from the higher paying side and probably more like 50-75% of the pay.
You're making the extreme assumption that the amount of medical care demanded remains constant despite the fall in prices (e.g. employees: 5->3, patients: 50->50). An alternative extreme is that employment remains fixed while falling prices improve accessibility (e.g. employees: 5->5, patients: 50->90).
In reality we may easily end up somewhere in between (e.g. employees: 5->4, patients: 50->70). This also highlights two aspects of automation: on the dark side, it reduces demand for work, on the bright side it improves availability (here, of medical care). If as a society we're able to deal with the former (e.g. by conjuring up new occupations) we stand to improve our future significantly through the latter.
I agree automation increases availability. I never implied it didn't have benefits -- just that we're likely to see the disappearance of middle class jobs because we'll be able to fill new ones with computers faster than with people.
Even if it increases employment and availability (4 nurses, 2 techs, 100 customers), we're seeing a decrease in income provided -- 1 doctor and 1 tech for 3 nurses. Less spread across more people.
Unless we're positing a singularity, I don't think the public's demand for better treatment is remotely close to satiation point, or that computerised efficiency and accuracy will reduce the demand for nice, qualified middle-class people to explain what the computer is recommending for them. That's even before we've started considering whole new classes of middle class job that mass adoption of technologies like gene sequencing could entail, or the largely-justifiable layers of regulation and respect that give medical professionals a lot more power to keep their jobs relevant than the average union member
I don't think "surplus of trained doctors" is a real problem I'm likely to see in my lifetime, never mind a likely consequence of the foreseeable future improvements in medical data collection and diagnosis.
