Read the first and second parts of our Future of Work series here and here
How does all this look in the real world? The ONS classifies all work into 9 Major Groups, from CEOs and Generals in Group 1 (Managers, Directors and Senior Officials) to warehouse staff and farm labourers in Group 9 (Elementary Occupations).
Each group faces very different risks from automation. Often, though not always, the less skilled a job, the more at risk it is. And because women and young people often do less-skilled, casual work, as they start careers, or juggle the childcare which still falls overwhelmingly to them, these two groups face the greatest risk of automation.
ONS analysis shows that 70pc of the roles at high risk of automation are held by women. And it is people aged 20 to 24 years who are most at risk of having their job automated, compared to other age groups (indeed, at 15.7pc their risk is more than 10x the risk of those aged 35-39).
To understand these risks and realities better, we talked to workers from a specific career within each of the nine groups, looking at the skills involved in their jobs, and assessing the latest technological advances to see how safe those jobs might be from automation and why.
Because of the importance of gender and age, we have recorded the Male/Female breakdown in each career (taken from the ONS’s annual population survey) and the proportion of those in each profession aged 16-24.
Average salaries are taken from the National Careers Service and subject interviews. Also, so you can see what experts think, we include the ONS’s own estimates of the percentage of jobs each career path risks losing to automation, and how automatable each career is — as estimated in a paper by the academics Carl Frey and Michael Osborne which is considered the grandfather of all such guesstimate studies about the impact of automation.
Mandy Hickson, former flight lieutenant
What did the job involve? I flew the Tornado GR4 from 1994-2011, including operational service in Iraq, with 2 Squadron based at RAF Marham. Essentially you are operating a very complex system, trying to calculate risks and take decisions under huge pressure and stress, with, clearly the potential for enormous impact on the ground. Generally, in my career, we were airborne 3-4 times a week, a typical flight is 90 minutes, with 2-3 hour planning before each sortie, an hour preflight briefing, 90 minute debrief after. When we weren’t in the UK, we would spend months in the Gulf, and weeks on overseas exercises with Nato allies.
How long have you been doing it? It costs millions to train pilots, so you have to sign on for 18 years, which makes your 40th birthday a natural stopping point for those who don’t want to fly the desk, as they say, and start a second career.
What training did you get? Elementary flying training for 6-8 months; basic flying training, 11 months; then about a year of advanced flying training, which is where you learn tactical weapons training and air combat, weaponeering, attack profiles. And afterwards of course you are always training: night flying, air combat, dropping weapons, it’s a battle constantly trying to stay current. Low-level flying, for example, is a really erodible skill.
How much does it pay? £27,273 — £42,009 (starter to experienced)
Percentage aged between 16-24 in the role? 8pc
Proportion of male to females in the role? 89pc/11pc
What took longest to learn? Having situational awareness, having that ability not to just react to the now but constantly to project ahead.
What is the most boring bit? None of it was boring, but circuit flying, waiting to land was, well, most routine.
Could a robot do your job? The Tornado was a 2-seat aircraft, with a pilot and “wizzo” (weapons systems operator). Now our fighters — the Eurofighter and F-35 — are all one-seat.
Some of the stuff in the F-35, it’s voice activated, heads-up-display, helmet sighting — stuff we had to do hydraulically, they do automatically. I used to think of myself as the taxi driver for the wizzo, now tech has allowed the jobs to be combined.
Today, hand on heart, I do think that automation can and will go the whole way and take over everything. You lose the weight of the ejection seat, you’re not putting a body over enemy territory; you still have a human in the system flying the machine remotely — people join the RAF these days specifically as UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) pilots. I hate to say it, I’m talking myself out of what was my job, but it’s true.
Analysis
We are all aware of the dramatic impact drones have had on the battlefield in recent years. Today, the line between traditional piloted fighters and unmanned jets is being ever more blurred. Take the Tempest — the RAF’s next generation fighter, due to enter service in 2035. It will have a pilot, but that aircraft might be surrounded by many or few uncrewed Lightweight Affordable Novel Combat Aircraft (LANCA) — providing what the RAF calls “manned, unmanned and optionally-manned platforms”.
The Tempest won’t have a single “dial or screen” in the cockpit. Rather, “augmented and virtual reality helmets will project interactive cockpit displays and controls directly in front of pilots eyes”. It sounds dazzling, but so much wizardry begs the question, why put a person in harms way at all?
The savings would be immense. In the US it costs an estimated $10m to train an F-35 pilot. And then there is the ongoing cost of keeping skills sharp.
Would machines actually do it better? America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has just run a competition to find out, pitting a F-16 pilot, callsign “Banger”, against an AI pilot. The AI won 5-0. Banger didn’t score a single hit. “The US military will have unmanned aircraft that you could give a mission, load it up, have it take off, and have it potentially fight its way in and fight its way back out,” reckons Darpa’s Col Dan Javorsek. “That’s absolutely possible and something likely to happen probably sooner than we ever imagine.”
Flying, combat and civilian, is a fascinating test-bed of technological progress. There was a period during her career, says Hickson, that automation advanced in leaps and bounds, but crash rates stayed stubbornly high. That’s because pilots and crew needed to learn not to abdicate responsibility to the robots, communicate better, and remember to take charge when the tech went wrong. “Flying is a degradable skill,” she says.
Bottom Line: Fighter pilots will probably become coordinators of swarms of unmanned vehicles to create what Darpa calls “overwhelming combat effects”. Will they still the fly the aircraft? Probably not. “The computers will look after the split-second maneuvering during within-visual-range dogfights."
Implications for this job group? Despite the trendlines for fighter pilots specifically, leaders generally — from military officers to CEOs — are forecast to weather the storm of automation well. Overseeing strategy and motivating disparate workforces require a blend of social and professional skills that machines will struggle to emulate in the short term. Those most at risk in this group? Shopkeepers, with 42pc of jobs set to go.
ONS jobs at risk estimate: 23pc
Zac Stamenow, Painter & Decorator
What does your job involve? 80pc of the work is surface preparation, cleaning and repairing surfaces, priming it. But there is also chatting with clients, working out what their requirements are, understanding the relationship between couples who might want different things. I do offer advice.
How has Covid affected life? I can’t do the job remotely so I had less demand; exactly half what I made in 2019. People had to work from home, so they couldn’t handle the disruption. And I felt it put me at risk a bit, going into homes.
How long have you been doing it? 12 years
What training did you get? I studied as an apprentice, stayed for 5 years, then started on my own.
How much does it pay? £15,000-£30,000.
Percentage aged between 16-24 in the role? 7pc
Proportion of male to females in the role? 93pc/7pc
What do you think are the hardest bits? Dealing with customers. Technically, the toughest bit is called “cutting in” — perfecting the straight line between a white ceiling and coloured wall. Some people never master that.
What is the most boring bit? Making good and filling surfaces; washing brushes every day.
Will you always do this? Looks like.
Do you think your job will be the same when you retire? You can see paint spraying machines on big commercial jobs, and machines that do plastering and jointing between plasterboards. But to combine everything at a smaller scale in people’s homes, where every little surface is different, and customers are different, robots couldn’t do it. Maybe in 100 years.
Analysis
Robots — from painters to bricklayers — are certainly coming to the building trade though — as Stamenow points out — most of that innovation will be driven by big new build, commercial projects. The first house in the UK built by an automatic brickie was completed a few months ago.
Fiddly, non-repetitive tasks, on smaller jobs, will be safer for longer, because — as logistics firms like Ocado have shown — robots are good at emulating or bettering single qualities of the human hand — precision, pressure sensing, dexterity, temperature gauging, strength etc — they are still a way off combining those qualities as we do.
Would machines actually do it better? Clearly robots would find “cutting in” a breeze. And augmented reality tools are already helping customers pick paint colours, by projecting shades onto the walls of their homes before they buy.
Bottom Line: There is already a widely lamented skills shortage on UK building sites. As older tradespeople retire, big firms may take the opportunity to invest in machines that don’t tire and are not affected by accidents. Sole tradesmen, however, are unlikely to be displaced.
Implications for this job group: The impact of automation on skilled tradesmen will vary more than for any other group. Groudsmen and greenkeepers, working outside, are hard to automate and less vulnerable, says the ONS, than musicians in Group 3’s “technical occupations”. But more than half of those fixed in place highstreet artisans doing repetitive tasks — fishmongers and butchers and bakers — are likely to lose their jobs to robots. The most vulnerable? Florists, where 63pc of jobs are at risk.
How automatable? 75pc
ONS jobs at risk estimate: 54pc
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