CHART OF THE DAY: Find your job on the When Will Robots Replace You Chart

You know the robots are coming for all of our jobs, right?

The question is not 'if' but 'when'. Sure, it will take some time, and I suppose there will always be some jobs that will, at least for the near term, always be the exclusive domain of humans, but lots of really smart people are predicting and anticipating a future where robots/automation do many of the jobs that people do today.

In fact a recently published paper from researchers at the University of Oxford has attempted to quantify the amount of jobs that are likely or most susceptible to being eliminated and replaced with some kind of automation.  Check the chart below for a graphical look at the kinds or types of jobs that the researchers have concluded are the most likely to be automated away:

The main finding that you can see in the chart data above: 47% of total US employment is at high risk of getting replaced by a robots, "meaning that associated occupations are potentially automatable over some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two."

So the takeaway, or advice for you, or more likely for your kids is you probably want to think about focusing your efforts on the kinds of jobs that skew more to the far left on the above chart. Finance, arts, science, engineering - these all seem like the types of vocations that at least in the near term are probably going to remain the domain of puny humans.

And if you or someone you care about is working a job that falls more towards the right side of the chart - jobs like office and admin support, retail, or customer service/support, then you'd be well served to start figuring out how you can make some changes, and fast. 

How long before the robots really come for these jobs?

My guess it will take a little longer to actually start happening than most predictions suggest, but once it does start happening, the takeover will proceed much, much faster than we think.

Happy Thursday.