Lawyers, Doctors and Public Servants in Firing Line from Rise of the Machines
January 30th, 2016Via: Canberra Times:
Machines will end about 40 per cent of today’s Australian jobs within two decades and they’re coming for middle class occupations, one of the nation’s automatisation experts has warned.
University of Sydney professor of data science and machine learning Hugh Durrant-Whyte said Canberra’s public servants would be among those in the firing line.
“All jobs that are primarily analysis are capable of automation,” he said. “Those middle jobs will go, the question is whether these people move up to better policy making, or simply out.”
Australia was one of the world’s largest users of robotics in the mining, transport and agriculture sectors, but the “hollowing out” of middle-tier white collar roles was just beginning, he said.
“The curious thing about automatisation and particularly computerisation is that the jobs that are going are not the ones at the low end of the market, it’s the people in the middle like journalists, doctors, lawyers, assistants, bank tellers,” he said.
