Robotageddon

As I change over my data sources from the Covid Tracking Project to another source, mainly the CDC, I feel like I’m flying blind. That’s a weird feeling, but it appears that I will be in this weird feeling mode as I wrestle with the new sites.

Meanwhile, sometime last week this article from the New York Times popped up: The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting.

Right away I knew what the article was going to be about and sure enough it was about automation coming for your job. I was surprised that I hadn’t seen any articles related to this topic last year because I figured that the pandemic would accelerate the use of automation: if people were sick or couldn’t come in to work, just bring in the robots to do the job. But no such articles popped up in my news feed last year which I thought was weird.

Then last week that one came in and the following quote caught my attention:

“And the consulting firm McKinsey, which predicted before the pandemic that 37 million U.S. workers would be displaced by automation by 2030, recently increased its projection to 45 million.”

“The Robots are Coming for Phil in Accounting”, New York Times, Kevin Rouse, March 6, 2021.

That is like a 22% increase in projected displacement over the next decade. Yep, the pandemic has accelerated things.

In the article, the author mentioned something new that I had never read before: “so-so automations”. These kind of automations are automations that only replace people; they are not designed to dramatically increase productivity or create new kinds of jobs (you know, where laid off people can gravitate to). An example provided in the story is the grocery self-checkout. Yeah, shift the task over to the customer and get rid of the employees.

The article is worth reading so I urge you to go check it out. Hopefully you’ll be able to access some variation of it because it might be behind a paywall.

At the end of the article I noticed that the reporter has authored a new book Futureproof: Nine Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation. That book might be worth reading. Based upon the short blurb I read, it sounds like the book was written for individuals rather than corporations. Most of the time, when I do a search for books on automation and skills, the books discuss what companies can do to stay ahead of the curve, not what individuals can do.