The Robots Are Coming! : The Future of Jobs in the Age of Automation

A jobless world? -- They're coming for journalists! : the future of the media -- They're coming for service workers! : the future of restaurants, supermarkets, and retail stores -- They're coming for bankers! : the future of banking -- They're coming for lawyers! : the future of law, accounting, and insurance firms -- They're coming for doctors! : the future of health care -- They're coming for teachers! : the future of education -- They're coming for factory workers! : the future of transportation and manufacturing -- They're coming for entertainers! : the future of the acting, music, sports, and leisure industries -- The job of the future -- Epilogue: The top ten job fields of the future.;"How will automation affect the jobs of factory workers, executives, lawyers, physicians, bankers, accountants, journalists, artists, and many other people over the next decade? Will robots and artificial intelligence lead us to a jobless world? These are increasingly pressing questions as robots and artificial intelligence are already replacing growing numbers of workers, and several studies predict that they may take over an even greater number of occupations in the near future. In his new book, Oppenheimer--a Miami Herald columnist and a member of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team--tells us what the workforce will look like. He traveled to Japan to sleep in a robot-staffed hotel; visited forward-thinking high-tech companies in South Korea, Israel, and Silicon Valley; studied the sales strategies of motorcycle-riding bankers in Costa Rica; dined at a fully automated restaurant in San Francisco; and interviewed some of the world's leading futurists in nearly a dozen countries. The Robots Are Coming! is a trepidatious and alarming exploration of the rise of automation and a cautionary tale about the future of jobs."--Back cover. Staying true to his trademark journalistic approach, Andrés Oppenheimer takes his readers on yet another journey, this time across the globe, in a thought-provoking search to understand what the future holds for today's jobs in the foreseeable age of automation. The Robots Are Coming! centers around the issue of jobs and their future in the context of rapid automation and the growth of online products and services. As two of Oppenheimer's interviewees -- both experts in technology and economics from Oxford University -- indicate, forty-seven percent of existing jobs are at risk of becoming automated or rendered obsolete by other technological changes in the next twenty years. Oppenheimer examines current changes in several fields, including the food business, legal work, banking, and medicine, speaking with experts in the field, and citing articles and literature on automation in various areas of the workforce. He contrasts the perspectives of "techno-optimists" with those of "techno-negativists" and generally attempts to find a middle ground between an alarmist vision of the future, and one that is too uncritical. A self-described "cautious optimist", Oppenheimer believes that technology will not create massive unemployment, but rather will drastically change what work looks like. A keen assessment of the future of work amid sweeping advances in technological automation.In an alternately thrilling and frightening narrative, Miami Herald foreign affairs columnist Oppenheimer (Innovate or Die!: How to Reinvent Yourself and Thrive in the Innovation Age, 2016, etc.) expertly gauges the pros and cons of the automation revolution, a world rife with robotic replacements, self-driving cars, and virtual bankers, doctors, and lawyers. He offers an eye-opening interview with two European researchers who made headlines with their 2013 predictive study that half of all jobs could vanish over the next two decades. The author then globe-trots through a variety of major world innovation centers to discover how "technological unemployment" could disrupt work forces worldwide. The greatest fear, he writes, is that artificial intelligence will create such a workforce disruption that it will erase more jobs than it can produce. Oppenheimer presents both sides of this argument, with supporting opinions from a gallery of "futurologists" who believe careers won't evaporate; they'll just become more interdisciplinary, with robotic intervention managing the more manually repetitive jobs