10. Service Clerks

The jobs that are already starting to disappear are the minimum-wage service clerks: cashiers,

bank tellers, even librarians. Today, you can withdraw, deposit, and check your bank

balance through an ATM, and speaking to a real live bank teller has become a rare event.

Self-checkouts are available at retail stores across the country, greatly reducing the need

for human cashiers. Retail employment hasn’t increased by much in recent years despite

sales performing strongly. It’s estimated that over $1 trillion will be transacted through

self-service machines in 2014. It’s not hard to imagine a giant retailer like Wal-Mart

or Target developing a completely automated store within the next few years. The technology

is there, and in the case of self-checkout lines it has already proved to save them a

lot of money.

9. Waiters

Next time you go to Applebee’s or Chili’s, check out the tablet computers they now have

on each table. Although both restaurants still employ waiters, food and drinks can now be

ordered through the computers themselves, without ever talking to your server. More

and more restaurants are encouraging their customers to use tablets to order food and

pay their bill. This saves the restaurant money on staff, and customers actually end

up spending more when they’re ordering from a tablet.

One restaurant in Shandong, China has completely done away with human waiters in order to boost

efficiency, and robots that cook and prepare gourmet food at a rapid rate have also been

developed. (LINK 7) It won’t be much longer before large chain restaurants make the move

to entirely robot-run establishments.

8. Telemarketers & Technical Support

Telemarketers and technical support workers already sound like robots, so it’s not difficult

to see how easily their jobs can be replaced by them. In some cases, these jobs have already

been taken over. One example is a telemarketer named Samantha West. An insurance company

in Florida employs the human-sounding robotic operator in order to gather information from

callers before passing them onto a live human to finalize the sale.

But how much longer until even the human closer is completely automated? Enter IBM’s Watson.

After dominating the popular trivia show Jeopardy!, Watson’s next mission is to become a sales

and customer support genius. Seriously. There’s a ton of money in sales and customer service,

and IBM believes they can teach Watson to accurately respond to difficult off-script

questions that sometimes confuse telemarketers and customer support technicians. IBM has

actually created a machine that sells itself. They currently use Watson to sell Watsons

to other companies.

7. Real Estate Agents

The least glamorous aspect of being a real estate agent is spending hours each week showing

off homes to prospective buyers. You make a plate of cookies, brew a pot of coffee,

maintain the cleanliness of the home, and give the same mundane tour over and over.

This entire task is on its way to being completely automated. MIT is developing “highly expressive

humanoids” that move and interact with humans in a natural way. They can learn from people,

and one robot named Rea has been trained to answer questions about property.

There’s also no longer a need for the home owners to even clean their property — they

can just buy a robot. A company called Robomow has come out with a machine that will vacuum

your house, go outside and mow the lawn, and then hop in your pool and give that a clean

too. We’ve come a long way from those first vacuuming Roombas.

6. Journalists

Even supposedly creative career fields, such as journalism, will be replaced with machines.

One expert predicts that over 90% of news articles will be written solely by computers

within 15 years. It’s not hard to see why. News articles do little more than report the

facts in an easy-to-read way. It shouldn’t be too much of a problem to train a computer

to ingest data and spit out a finished news story.

And apparently, it’s not. Narrative Sciences is the leader in machine-generated content.

Their company produces stories completely untouched by humans. And these aren’t just

test articles spit out at some university somewhere. You’ve probably read some robot

written articles already and been none the wiser. The Big Ten Network uses Narrative

Sciences’ machine to produce sports stories, and even Forbes magazine employs robot journalists

to write and publish company earnings reports.

5. Pharmacists robot-pharmicist

Replacement of pharmacists with robots has already begun, as the UCSF Medical Center

has built an entirely automated hospital pharmacy run by intelligent machines. The robots at

UCSF process, prepare, and track medications. Everything is done without any human input,

and the result is improved safety for patients. Experts believe that pharmacists will be the

first highly skilled workers that will lose their careers to robots. The pharmacy bots

of today label vials, count pills, bill insurance companies, and look up patient records. The

best robot pharmacists used today are already faster and commit far less errors than their

human counterparts.

4. Drivers

Everyone has heard of Google’s self-driving car program. These Google cars have autonomously

driven over half a million miles with no accidents at all while under the control of the machines.

It’s only a matter of time before these self driving machines spread, and millions

of people are out of jobs. Bus drivers, truck drivers, taxi drivers, airline pilots, even

the pizza delivery guy will be put out of work.

In Australia, there’s already a large mining facility that has replaced all of its human

drivers with 45 massive robot-controlled mining trucks. Trucks that drive themselves would

save businesses a ton of money. These things can drive constantly, and there’s no need

to pull over to sleep for eight hours or even stop for food. Replacing human drivers with

robots will massively increase productivity. Unfortunately, this may be one of the largest

groups of people left without jobs when autonomous vehicles are available on a massive scale.

3. Soldiers

This is where it gets scary. Robotic Drones have already been in use by the CIA for years,

and over 2,000 people in Pakistan have been killed by drones in the last decade. We’ve

all seen videos of those four-legged pack-mule bots carting army equipment around, but how

much longer until robot warriors are employed on a massive scale? General Robert Cone believes

that by the middle of the century, US Army soldiers will be fighting alongside robo-squadmates.

The Army is already planning on reducing the size of its combat teams from 4,000 human

soldiers to 3,000, with robots and drones filling the gap.

On the one hand it may seem a relief to have machines doing the dirty work of war for us,

but on the other hand this could have terrifying consequences. The International Committee

for Robot Arms Control was formed in 2009 to warn us of the disastrous consequences

building robotic kill-machines could lead to. A future war scenario as outlined in the

Terminator movies doesn’t seem that far fetched anymore.

2. Teachers

Even teachers are at risk for losing their jobs in the next two decades. Computer scientists

are developing super-sophisticated machines that interact with people in a natural way

to teach them basic skills. This includes vocabulary and mathematics. Machines such

as these are currently used to teach autistic children how to play and interact with other

people. In Korea, human teachers have already been largely replaced by robots in some classrooms.

Engkey, a popular English teaching robot, is in use in several schools in a new program

launched by the South Korean government. The Engkey bots are still supported by a human

teacher who appears on a video screen once problems arise. But, how much longer until

even this human is replaced by a Watson-like super-intelligent machine?

1. Doctors

Yes, even doctors are threatened by the rapid increase in machine intelligence. Even today

when you go in for surgery, chances are you will be operated on with the help of a robot.

Most large hospitals, and even many of the smaller ones, have huge octopus-armed machines

that assist the doctors with performing surgeries. The robots are more precise and faster in

many ways, and they even allow surgeons to work remotely. Imagine surgeons of the future

lounging around in their underwear at home, eating cereal, watching Netflix, and at the

same time remotely directing a robot surgery machine somewhere across the country. (LINK

25)

Some predict that four out of five doctors will eventually be replaced with computers.

In India and Brazil, machines have already begun to practice primary care, and in some

ways they perform much more accurately than human doctors. (LINK 26) And with the news

of Apple’s Healthbook, it’s not difficult to imagine annual physicals becoming a thing

of the past. When your phone has the ability to constantly monitor your blood sugar, heart

rate, body weight, hydration, and perform other health tests, is there any reason to

get a follow up from a human doctor?