Is your job at risk from the rise of robots and Artificial Intelligence?

If you’re a persuasive construction manager with good negotiation and social skills, you can probably breathe a sigh of relief – two recent reports conclude that your skills are likely to be in demand in the coming decades.

But if your job involves data sifting and analysis then you’re vulnerable to being replaced by data-wrangling algorithms, while many skilled trades will be on a downward path as the industry shifts to offsite factory production which is likely to be increasingly robotised.

These are the conclusions of The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? a study by two academics from the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford.

Many of the findings are also echoed in a March 2014 report from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, called Future of Work: Jobs and Skills in 2030.

The 2013 Future of Employment report rated 702 occupations by assigning a numerical value to their vulnerability to be replaced by various forms of computerisation, including robots, sophisticated data-scanning software or autonomous vehicles. The authors looked at factors such as the degree of manual dexterity, originality, social perceptiveness and negotiation skills required in the role. 

Jobs ranked nearest “0” are deemed to be not computerisable, while jobs with a value of “1” are highly vulnerable. Construction managers rank at 154 (out of 702) with a score of 0.071, while supervisors of construction trades score 0.17.

Onsite skills are deemed to be more vulnerable to automation, either offsite, near-site or onsite. The report says construction labourers are ranked at 0.88, along with terrazzo workers and finishers, while stonemasons are at 0.89 and roofers are 0.9.

The rise of autonomous self-driving vehicles will eliminate many current roles, including rail track laying and maintenance operatives (0.89), and crane operators (0.89).

Vulnerability ratings of jobs at risk of automation

The UKCES Future of Work report also examined construction as one of the UK’s key employment areas, concluding it would be affected by the continuation of current trends towards 3D printing and automated manufacturing, as well as IT development and the age of big data.

But the report also lists 10 “disruptions” that are plausible by 2030, including the penetration of artificial intelligence or robots into skilled occupations. The report was designed to stimulate debate and inform training decisions for both individuals and employers.

Peter Glover, senior research manager at the UKCES, told CM: “We could be looking at ‘smart factories’ where there is a high degree of automation in the factory. One possibility is ‘Manufacturing 4.0’ where you have automatic links between logistics and manufacturing, with little need for human intervention.

“The automation of processes will also have a potential impact on employment – there will be productivity gains, but it will apply downward pressure on employment.”

The Oxford Martin report cites the example of Baxter (see image), a $22,000 general-purpose robot, developed in the US but launched in the UK in March. According to the report, the robot features an LCD display screen with eyes that take on different expressions. When the robot is first installed or needs to learn a new pattern, no programming is required – a human just has to move the robot arms through the motions that will be needed for the task.

Baxter has cameras on his wrist that act as a vision system and can detect the location of components, and vacuum suckers to grip objects.

However, the UKCES’s Glover pointed out that some construction trade roles would be resistant to robotisation: “It’s hard to imagine how you could replace a plumber going into someone’s home.”

The Oxford Martin report also looks at how many “knowledge-based” tasks are highly vulnerable to sophisticated algorithms that can sift data, and detect patterns and exceptions. These include accountants and auditors (0.94), surveying and mapping technicians (0.96) and tax examiners (0.93).

The report says: “While technological progress throughout economic history has largely been confined to the mechanisation of manual tasks, requiring physical labour, technological progress in the 21st century can be expected to contribute to a wide range of cognitive tasks, which, until now, have largely remained a human domain.

“Of course, many occupations being affected by these developments are still far from fully computerisable, meaning that the computerisation of some tasks will simply free up time for human labour to perform other tasks. Nonetheless, the trend is clear: computers increasingly challenge human labour in a wide range of cognitive tasks.”

Examples of the rise of Artificial Intelligence include data analysis algorithms developed to replace professions in the insurance and legal sectors, and in the diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions. “That could be very disruptive, and we have to be careful not to stray into the realm of science fiction,” warns Glover.

However, for some journalists, that era has already dawned. A company called Narrative Science has developed software called Quill that has can analyse formatted data sets – such as ONS construction output figures, for example – and produce natural language reports that are apparently indistinguishable from those written by humans. Oh dear…