Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Not college professors, surely ...

An interesting article crossed my news feed today, with a clear connection to our lecture: a claim that "47% of US jobs under threat from computerization according to Oxford study":
Almost 47 percent of US jobs could be computerized within one or two decades according to a recent study that attempts to gauge the growing impact of computers on the job market. It isn't only manual labor jobs that could be affected: The study reveals a trend of computers taking over many cognitive tasks thanks to the availability of big data. It suggests two waves of computerization, with the first substituting computers for people in logistics, transportation, administrative and office support and the second affecting jobs depending on how well engineers crack computing problems associated with human perception, creative and social intelligence.
Read the rest here.  Are you worried?  (Should _I_ be worried?)

3 comments:

  1. This looks very similar to the report I posted to this blog last week. The information looks more complete, though, so maybe this is an actual published version of the report, whereas my article was a sort of sneak peak? I also happen to be writing my report on the Ensmenger article right now, and it looks to me like there is a lot of similarity between these fears now and fears of computerization 50 years ago. You will see more of my thoughts on this in my report.

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  2. Stephen, you're absolutely right! I didn't even realize it was the same report when I posted; what a silly mistake. I should try to turn this into a teachable moment, like this is what so much online commentary is all about, just recirculating links with the implicit claim that we have found something new, neglecting to give credit to our original source ... but really, just a mistake on my part having seen a different spin on the same article and not realizing you had already covered it. No hard feelings? Cheers, GREG

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  3. I'm not one to complain when the professor thinks something I thought was relevant to the class is good material to think about. I'll take it as a complement of my intuition on what is relevant to the course. Your source seems to have better information than mine anyway, so it was good to read.

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