Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Job Disruption

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
AI Battle Royale

Part of the book series: Copernicus Books ((CB))

  • 453 Accesses

Abstract

Presentation of the threats to work by type (full automation, skills downgrading or enhancement) as well as potential substitutes to employment (interns, outsourcing…). Followed by a job introspection, in the form of a SWOT analysis, with the aim of assessing a job’s vulnerability to disruption. What traits make for a fragile job as companies roll out Artificial Intelligence and other 4th Industrial Revolution tools? In the process, we explore measures actionable by workers to up their game and remain relevant.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 19.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 27.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Change history

  • 02 June 2023

    In the original version of the book, author provided belated corrections has been incorporated in the following chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

    The correction chapters and the book have been updated with the changes.

Notes

  1. 1.

    John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.

  2. 2.

    Robert M. Solow: A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol.70, No.1 (1956), Oxford University Press.

  3. 3.

    His brother Louis Malle (1932–1995) was a famous film director, another launched Christian Dior Parfums, while nephew Frederic went on to establish the perfume brand bearing his name.

  4. 4.

    This last category saw its numbers more than halved since 2000 in the US, from 458,720 to 174,930 employees.

  5. 5.

    While it may not fall victim to full automation, the job of a real estate agent is under serious corporate threat as Zillow, Trulia, and other companies harness the power of Big Data, VR visits, and other ground-breaking technologies.

  6. 6.

    Automation and anxiety—Will smarter machines cause mass unemployment? The Economist (June 25, 2016), https://www.economist.com/special-report/2016/06/23/automation-and-anxiety.

  7. 7.

    Ben Dickson: Google’s new deep learning system can give a boost to radiologists, Venture Beat (Sep 16, 2021) https://venturebeat.com/2021/09/16/googles-new-deep-learning-system-can-give-a-boost-to-radiologists/.

  8. 8.

    Eric Topol: Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again, p. 121–135. Basic Books (2019); on the same note, cf. Joshua Gans, Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb: Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence, Chap. 14: Job Redesign: Should we Stop Training Radiologists? Harvard Business Review Press (2018).

  9. 9.

    For automation, cf. Melanie Arntz, Terry Gregory and Ulrich Zierahn: The Risk of Automation for Jobs in OECD Countries: A Comparative Analysis, OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Paper No. 189. For outsourcing, cf. Alan S. Blinder:, How Many US Jobs Might be Offshorable? CEPS Working Paper No. 142 (2007).

  10. 10.

    Peter Cappelli: How Financial Accounting Screws Up HR, in Harvard Business Review, p.39-44 (January-February 2023).

  11. 11.

    Madeline Garfinkle: 'Quiet Hiring' Is on the Horizon—Here’s What Employers and Employees Need to Know, Entrepreneur.com (January 4, 2023), https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/what-is-quiet-hiring-and-how-you-can-use-it-to-your.

  12. 12.

    Suzanne Rowan Kelleher: Qantas Asks Executives To Be Baggage Handlers Amid Labor Shortage, Forbes (August 8th, 2022), https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2022/08/08/qantas-asks-executives-to-be-baggage-handlers-amid-labor-shortage.

  13. 13.

    Roughly, 500 people die of plane crashes each year around the world, versus 3,700 traffic accident deaths per day.

  14. 14.

    Alan S. Blinder: How Many U.S. Jobs Might be Offshorable, Princeton University, CEPS Working Paper No. 142 (March 2007).

  15. 15.

    Richard Baldwin: The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics and the Future of Work, W&N (2020).

  16. 16.

    China’s minimum wage varies by province. Shanghai has one of the highest. In 2005, it was at 635 CNY per month, in 2022 at 2,590 CNY, i.e. a fourfold increase in 17 years. Meanwhile, the U.S. federal minimum wage has remained at $7.25 an hour since 2009, up 24% from $5.85 in 2005. Taking into account the fluctuation in exchange rates, Shanghai’s minimum labor went from being 13 times cheaper than that of the U.S. in 2005 to only 3 times cheaper.

  17. 17.

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/277090/number-of-catering-employees-in-china/.

  18. 18.

    See The Skin Cancer Foundation, Facts and Statistics, https://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-information/skin-cancer-facts/.

  19. 19.

    Cf. Esteva, A., Kuprel, B., Novoa, R. et al.: Dermatologist-level classification of skin cancer with deep neural networks. Nature 542, 115–118 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature21056.

    Also Noel Codella, Quoc-Bao Nguyen et al.: Deep Learning Ensembles for Melanoma Recognition in Dermoscopy Images, IBM Journal of Research and Development, vol. 61, no. 4/5, 2017.

  20. 20.

    Wenzhuo Wu: Can Harmay Take Out Sephora in China? Jing Daily (February 6, 2020), https://jingdaily.com/can-harmay-take-out-sephora-in-china/.

  21. 21.

    Rita Liao: Pinduoduo steals Alibaba’s crown with 788 M annual active users, Tech Crunch (March 17, 2021) https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/17/pinduoduo-surpasses-alibaba/.

  22. 22.

    The level of ease in scanning varies, from scanning each object’s barcode the traditional way (Family Mart) to putting all objects in a small pit that automatically scans everything (Uniqlo) and deducting the merchandise value from your digital wallet as you walk out of the shop (Amazon Go).

  23. 23.

    https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/top-executives.htm#tab-4.

  24. 24.

    Written by Amazon Staff: What robots do (and don’t do) at Amazon fulfilment centres, https://www.aboutamazon.co.uk/amazon-fulfilment/what-robots-do-and-dont-do-at-amazon-fulfilment-centres.

  25. 25.

    Kevin Roose: Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, Random House (2021), p. 136.

  26. 26.

    ATMs and bank tellers present a particular case, as tasks are divided in such a manner that the two need not interact: during a visit, the customer can deal solely with one or the other. It’s when employee and tool work together that the sumo challenge arises.

  27. 27.

    The Excel phone app now allows for taking a photo of any printed list or table to have it transposed into a spreadsheet’s rows and columns.

  28. 28.

    Science-fiction offers an extreme depiction: a supposedly mastermind character exposed as the puppet of an ASI giving orders via an earpiece. Cf. Upgrade, directed by Leigh Whannell (2018), or actor Vincent Cassel’s character in  Westworld’s season 3. Already in several instances of knowledgeable waiters at not-so-fancy venues capable of elaborating in thorough detail their offerings, when noticing their earpiece, I could not help but wonder whether some expert upstairs was feeding them the information.

  29. 29.

    David Autor:, Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth, MIT press (2014).

  30. 30.

    As cited by Andrew Yang in Chap. 6: White-Collar Jobs will Disappear, too, of The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future, Hachette Books (2018).

  31. 31.

    Michael Polanyi: The Tacit Dimension, Anchor Books (1967).

  32. 32.

    A take on the famed “5 Whys” used in quality management systems to unravel the root cause of an issue.

  33. 33.

    An interesting account of these failings of Taylorism and its self-contained instructions can be found in Harold Garfinkel, Studies in ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs (1967), and Lucy Schuman, Plans and Situated Actions, The Problem of Human Machine Collaboration, International Conference on Computational Linguistics (1987).

  34. 34.

    p. 96, John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid: The Social Life of Information, Harvard Business Review Press (2017 updated edition).

  35. 35.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express_Flight_3411_incident.

  36. 36.

    Hector J. Levesque: Common Sense, the Turing Test, and the Quest for Real AI, The MIT press (2018); also https://commonsensereasoning.org/winograd.html.

  37. 37.

    https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=V1eYniJ0Rnk&vl=en.

  38. 38.

    Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market, Princeton University Press (2005), in reference to Autor, Levy and Murnane: The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: an Empirical Exploration, Quarterly Journal of Economics 118 (November 2003).

  39. 39.

    For more on AI’s encroachments into creative realms, cf. Marcus de Sautoy: The Creativity Code, How AI is Learning to Write, Paint and Think, 4th Estate (2019).

  40. 40.

    Suits, Season 1, Episode 2 (2011).

  41. 41.

    Motion picture I, Robot, directed by Alex Proyas (2004).

  42. 42.

    p. 40, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market, Princeton University Press (2005).

  43. 43.

    Carmine Gallo: Talk Like Ted: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds, Martin’s Press (2014).

  44. 44.

    Will AI Replace US, p. 103. Shelley Fan and Matthew Taylor, Thames & Hudson Ltd (2019).

  45. 45.

    https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/11-1011.00.

  46. 46.

    https://jkrishnamurti.org/content/ojai-10th-public-talk-1945.

  47. 47.

    Watts S. Humphrey: Managing the Software Process, Addison-Wesley Professional (1989).

  48. 48.

    Melanie Arntz, Terry Gregory and Ulrich Zierahn: The Risk of Automation for Jobs in OECD Countries: A Comparative Analysis, OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Paper No. 189. Page 14.

  49. 49.

    3.1 million truck drivers versus 0.5 million school bus drivers in 2018. For the school bus driver example, cf. Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb: Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence, p. 195: More than a Driver? Harvard Business Review Press (2018).

  50. 50.

    David Autor: Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth, p. 164.

  51. 51.

    p. 41, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market, Princeton University Press (2005).

  52. 52.

    Cf. Robert H. Perry & Associates: 2009 White Paper on the US Security Guard Market, https://www.roberthperry.com/publications.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., citing Freedonia Group study #2362, https://www.freedoniagroup.com/ReportsAndStudies.aspx.

  54. 54.

    Even this is debatable. Suppose autonomous vehicle infrastructure is legally permitted only on highways, where say 80% of a truck’s time is spent. Highway driving could be automated, and the rest performed remotely. The remote driver could in theory take over the job of five truck drivers.

  55. 55.

    Or so the song goes. The job of paralegal is often brandished as automatable—cf. for instance Chap. 2 of Brynjolfsson and McAfee: Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, Digital Frontier Press (2011); also Andres Oppenheimer: The Robots are Coming! The Future of Jobs in the Age of Automation, Vintage (2019), Chap. 5: They’re Coming for Lawyers!

    Yet for now, statistics tell a difference story: the number of paralegals and legal assistants roughly doubled in the past twenty years (versus a 15% increase in overall US workforce), and is expected to grow further by 12% in the next decade. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/paralegals-and-legal-assistants.htm.

  56. 56.

    Cf. the conclusion of Alec Ross: The Industries of the Future, Simon & Schuster (2016).

  57. 57.

    Onnela, JP., Waber, B., Pentland, A. et al.: Using sociometers to quantify social interaction patterns, Nature, Article number 5604 (2014).

  58. 58.

    Cf. Daniel Coyle: The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, Bantam (2018).

  59. 59.

    p. 277. Amy Webb: The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, PublicAffairs (2016).

  60. 60.

    Cf. Richard Feloni: A Zappos employee had the company’s longest customer-service call at 10 h, 43 min, Business Insider (July 26, 2016), https://www.businessinsider.com/zappos-employee-sets-record-for-longest-customer-service-call-2016-7.

  61. 61.

    Cf. The Economist: Welcome to the era of the hyper-surveilled office, May 14th, 2022).

  62. 62.

    For cafes and teachers alone, cf. Chap. 7: Sweating Bullets on the Job, of Cathy O’Neal, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, Crown (2016).

  63. 63.

    Of course, this is hypothetical. Nothing would prevent a company from adding biases into the system, altering, or discarding the results. Not to mention that a worker’s ties and golf skills could partake in their assessment if they contribute to generate sales or reduce risks—such as the Finance Department sloth whose connections at the local Tax bureau alone justify her presence on the payroll.

  64. 64.

    Anna Davies, Devin Fidler, Marina Gorbis: Future Work Skills 2020, Institute for the Future for the University of Phoenix Research Institute (2011).

  65. 65.

    Linday Sharkey and Morag Barrett: The Future-Proof Workplace: Six Strategies to Accelerate Talent Development, Reshape Your Culture, and Succeed with Purpose, Wiley (2017).

  66. 66.

    Cf. Chap. 6: Choose Your Own Adventure. Alexandra Levit: Humanity Works: Merging Technologies and People for the Workforce of the Future, Kogan Page (2018).

  67. 67.

    Hans Moravec: Mind Children, Harvard University Press (1988), p. 15.

  68. 68.

    Paul Mason: Our Problem isn’t Robots, it’s the low-wage car-wash economy, The Guardian (December 12, 2016) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/12/mark-carney-britains-car-wash-economy-low-wage-jobs.

  69. 69.

    This parable may appear ill-placed, considering the butcher appears in the chart’s low-wage category. But butchers comprise only 14% of that category—the rest are meat cutters. Butchers earn 25% more than meat-cutters; taking these figures into account brings the country’s 20,000 butchers to an average hourly salary of $20, thus in the second category. Cf. https://www.zippia.com/butcher-jobs/demographics/ and https://www.zippia.com/meat-cutter-jobs/demographics/.

  70. 70.

    Zhuangzi: The Basic Writings. To be fair, roots of the butcher legend stretch earlier than the fourth century BC and probably descend from an oral Indian tradition, there to be later enshrined in the Mahabharata epic, where the butcher goes by the name of Dharmavyadha.

  71. 71.

    Daniel Kahneman:, Thinking Fast and Slow (2011) Penguin.

  72. 72.

    Marvin Minsky: The Society of Mind, Simon and Schuster (1986), p. 29.

  73. 73.

    Brian Heater: Amazon debuts a fully autonomous warehouse robot, TechCrunch (June 23, 2022), https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/22/amazon-debuts-a-fully-autonomous-warehouse-robot/.

  74. 74.

    Cf. p. 145, Jeremy Rifkin: The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era, G.P. Putnam’s Sons (1996).

  75. 75.

    Richard Yonck: Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence, Arcade Publishing (2017).

  76. 76.

    Kai-Fu Lee:, AI Superpowers, p. 171.

  77. 77.

    Kevin Roose: Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, Random House (2021), p. 130.

  78. 78.

    Byron Reece: The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity, p. 111, Atria Books (2018).

  79. 79.

    Quoted in GQ magazine: https://www.gq.com/story/netflix-founder-reed-hastings-house-of-cards-arrested-development.

  80. 80.

    Amos Zeeberg: D.I.Y. Artificial Intelligence Comes to a Japanese Family Farm, The New Yorker (August 10, 2017) https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/diy-artificial-intelligence-comes-to-a-japanese-family-farm.

  81. 81.

    Clayton Christensen: The Innovator’s Dilemma, Chap. 10: Managing Disruption.

  82. 82.

    Amy Webb:, The Signals are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe is Tomorrow’ s Mainstream, p. 47.

  83. 83.

    With the notable exception of algorithms or software provided by a third-party, as the vendor will usually account for the customer’s size in their quotation, for instance based on its headcount or number of licenses. But as the democratization trend pursues its course, more in-house algorithms could be deployed.

  84. 84.

    Cf. Max Roser: Our world in data, https://ourworldindata.org.

  85. 85.

    Dollars in 2011 purchasing power parity. The “more recent” data mostly comes for 2016–2019, though for some countries it may be older (cf. next note for sources).

  86. 86.

    Sources used for Figs. 6.21 and 6.22:

    For 1984 population above $2.15: Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion, Absolute poverty measures for the developing world, 1981–2004, Development Research Group, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (October 23, 2007).

    For latest population data above $5.5: data source World Poverty Clock and World Bank data, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.UMIC; also available on Wikipedia’s entry List of countries by percentage of population living in poverty, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_living_in_poverty#cite_note-wdipov_550-6.

  87. 87.

    Homi Kharas: The Unprecedented Expansion of the Middle Class, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/global_20170228_global-middle-class.pdf.

  88. 88.

    Cf. Brookings Institute 2018 article: A global tipping point: Half the world is now middle class or wealthier, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/09/27/a-global-tipping-point-half-the-world-is-now-middle-class-or-wealthier/; also World Bank 2018: Nearly Half the World Lives on Less than $5.50 a Day, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/10/17/nearly-half-the-world-lives-on-less-than-550-a-day.

  89. 89.

    The percentage of Chinese below $1.25 a day fell from 84% in 1981 to 16% in 2005. Cf. United Nations report on poverty, Chap. 2, p. 25. https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/chapter2.pdf.

  90. 90.

    Notice middle class is a porous concept—Fig. 6.23 places the bar higher than the aforementioned 5.5 USD per day.

  91. 91.

    Homi Kharas: The Unprecedented Expansion of the Middle Class, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/global_20170228_global-middle-class.pdf.

  92. 92.

    Mapping China’s middle class, https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/mapping-chinas-middle-class. Of course this was prior to Covid and the actual China of 2022.

  93. 93.

    Source: data compiled by the Author from Population Pyramid.net, https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2019/.

  94. 94.

    Cf. Jobs lost, jobs gained: workforce transitions in a time of automation, McKinsey Global Institute (December 2017).

  95. 95.

    Franklin Andrews: Megachange, p. 24, The Economist publications (2012).

  96. 96.

    Strong disparities between African countries warranted a representation of the continent as a whole in Fig. 6.25. Cf. Appendix E for a detail by country.

  97. 97.

    Jean-Philippe von Gastrow: African White Collars that Return to the Homeland, Les Echos (August 4th, 2016), https://www.lesechos.fr/2006/08/ces-cadres-africains-qui-retournent-au-pays-577452.

  98. 98.

    Aldrich Achani: 7 Young Africans out of 10 wish to go home after studying abroad, https://irawotalents.com/jeunes-africains-retour-afrique-etudes-entrepreneuriat-developpement/.

  99. 99.

    Dollar figures from 2020. These two jobs comprise roughly four and a half million workers. Cf. Bureau of Labor Statistics, codes 31–1014 (Nursing Assistants) and 31–1120 (Home Health and Personal Care Aides).

  100. 100.

    Jacques Attali: A Short History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the 21st Century (2011).

  101. 101.

    This was expected even before Covid-19 precipitated humanity off its spin. Cf. December 2019 report from World Economic Forum: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/12/asia-economic-growth/.

  102. 102.

    McKinsey: The future of work in America: People and places, today and tomorrow (July 11, 2019), https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/the-future-of-work-in-america-people-and-places-today-and-tomorrow.

  103. 103.

    Cf. The Future of Jobs Report 2020, World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2020.

  104. 104.

    The location quotient compares the ratio of an occupation’s share of employment in a given area (e.g. a State or city) to the national ratio. For example, in 2021 the U.S. has 66 dermatologists per million American workers. In the Killeen-Temple-Forth Hood metropolitan area, some 50 miles north of Austin, that number rises to 256 per million—a quotient of 3.92, whereas in Dallas Fort Worth it drops to 23 per million workers—a quotient of 0.35. All else considered equal, one would assume better prospects setting up shop in the latter. For State, Metropolitan and Non-Metropolitan data, cf.: https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm.

  105. 105.

    The self-evaluation of their latest 10-year prediction shows that the BLS was right around 80% of the time as to gauging whether an occupancy grows or declines, and half the time as to whether it grows faster or slower than the overall job market. https://www.bls.gov/emp/evaluations/projections-evaluations.htm.

  106. 106.

    Boston Consulting Group (2015): Back to the Future: The Road to Autonomous Driving, http://de.slideshare.net/TheBostonConsultingGroup/the-road-to-autonomous-driving.

  107. 107.

    Hermann Kellenbenz, The Rise of the European Economy: An Economic History of Continental Europe from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, Holmes & Meier (1976).

  108. 108.

    https://www.nano.gov/about-nni/what/funding.

  109. 109.

    Cf. Bloomberg News, China Raises 2025 Target of Electric-Car Sales to around 25%, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-03/china-raises-2025-sales-target-for-electrified-cars-to-about-25.

  110. 110.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-eu-transport/eu-to-target-30-million-electric-cars-by-2030.

  111. 111.

    Jacob Dreyer: China’s Revolution Turns Green, Noema Magazine (October 20, 2022), https://www.noemamag.com/chinasrevolution-turns-green/.

  112. 112.

    Cf. Global Investments in R&D, http://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/fs59-global-investments-rd-2020-en.pdf; 2021 data is not available yet at the time of print, but seems to indicate that China may have surpassed the US in R&D spending. If so, the change might be short-lived though, given the impact of China’s imposed lockdowns in 2022.

  113. 113.

    For example, Inditex’s Zara saw the extension plan of a store in Bordeaux refused by authorities on the grounds of its use of cotton from Xinjiang. Cf. Bordeaux: l’extension de Zara refusée sur fond d’exploitation des Ouïghours, Sud-Ouest (November 11, 2021), https://www.sudouest.fr/gironde/bordeaux/bordeaux-l-extension-de-zara-refusee-sur-fond-d-exploitation-des-ouighours-7030350.php.

  114. 114.

    Michael Kanaan: T-Minus AI: Humanity’s Countdown to Artificial Intelligence and the New Pursuit of Global Power. Chap. 12: Moments that awaken nations, Benbella Book (2020).

  115. 115.

    While based in Belgium and supposedly neutral, the Board of Directors of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (composed of executives from the world’s largest banks) have demonstrated a certain obedience to the United States, for instance in 2012 when it cut off ties with Iranian banks. In response, China in 2015 launched its own Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) for bank clearing and settlements.

  116. 116.

    Cf. Financial Times, Inside China’s controversial mission to reinvent the internet, https://www.ft.com/content/ba94c2bc-6e27-11ea-9bca-bf503995cd6f.

  117. 117.

    Latest Intel Study Finds People Expect Self-Driving Cars to Be Common in 50 Years (October 23, 2018), https://newsroom.intel.com/news/latest-intel-study-finds-people-expect-self-driving-cars-common-50-years/#gs.xrkk61.

  118. 118.

    Cf. Americans Feel Unsafe Sharing the Road with Fully Self-Driving Cars (March 7th, 2017), https://newsroom.aaa.com/2017/03/americans-feel-unsafe-sharing-road-fully-self-driving-cars, Three in Four Americans Remain Afraid of Fully Self-Driving Vehicles (March 14th, 2019), https://newsroom.aaa.com/2019/03/americans-fear-self-driving-cars-survey.

  119. 119.

    Cf. Everett M. Rogers in Media and Values, Issue #42, http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/video-here-stay.

  120. 120.

    Engen Tham: China bank protest stopped by health codes turning red, depositors say, Reuters (June 16, 2022), https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-bank-protest-stopped-by-health-codes-turning-red-depositors-say-2022-06-14.

  121. 121.

    More Americans Willing to Drive in Fully Self-Driving Cars (March 7th, 2018), https://newsroom.aaa.com/2018/01/americans-willing-ride-fully-self-driving-cars.

  122. 122.

    Whereby self-replicating nanobots go out of control and end up gobbling the planet’s entire ecosystem. A recurrent sci-fi theme, from the Gunnm manga that saw planet Mercury become inhabitable as a result of uncontrolled autonomous replication of nanobots, to Nick Bostrom’s paperclip example, to the 2015 video game Grey Goo.

  123. 123.

    Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg: A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control our Evolution, Chap. 8: What Lies Ahead, Mariner Books (2017).

  124. 124.

    Cf. figure from the Nuclear Energy Institute, https://www.nei.org/advantages/jobs.

  125. 125.

    Erik Brynjolfsson et al.: “COVID-19 and remote work: An early look at U.S. data,” NBER working paper 27,344, June 2020.

  126. 126.

    Cf. Mark Mortensen, Amy C. Edmonson: Rethink Your Employee Value Proposition: Offer Your People More Than Just Flexibility, in Harvard Business Review (January-February 2023), p.45-49.

  127. 127.

    Namely an Uber driver, a Mechanical Turk worker, and the cleaners and janitors of Managed by Q, among a pool of other jobs from proofreaders to call center operators. Reference to the botched attempts at unionization also comes from this book.

  128. 128.

    Nandita Bose: U.S. Labor Secretary supports classifying gig workers as employees, Reuters (April 29, 2021) https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-us-labor-secretary-says-most-gig-workers-should-be-classified-2021-04-29/; also Forbes: 57 Million U.S. Workers Are Part Of The Gig Economy (May 13, 2021) https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2018/08/31/57-million-u-s-workers-are-part-of-the-gig-economy/.

  129. 129.

    Cf. Anne Garrigue: Japonaises, la révolution douce (Japanese women, the quiet revolution), Editions Picquier (1998).

  130. 130.

    These correspond to the Bureau Labor of Statistics’ occupational codes 53–2011 and 53–2031, respectively.

  131. 131.

    These stats are available for all jobs on the BLS website; here data used from 2019: https://www.bls.gov/oes/special.requests/oesm19st.zip.

  132. 132.

    Cf. Air France bosses attacked in jobs protest, Financial Times, October 6th 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/c0d167e6-6b59-11e5-8171-ba1968cf791a.

  133. 133.

    While in the past, actors needed to cope with technological disruption of the enhancement type (recall the movie Singing in the Rain for a caricature of the painful move to “talkies”), CGI  and deepfakes could amount to a full automation/substitution threat, putting actors in the horses’ shoes, so to speak.

  134. 134.

    Estimates based on publicly available figures from the financials of Delta, United and Southwestern for the year 2019. That is, $32 billion of staff costs for $99 billion of expenses and $113 billion of revenue, and finally the assumption that the 6,000 pilots in these airlines earned at least the BLS’s average annual income of 174,870$.

  135. 135.

    Eighteenth-century reverend Thomas Bayes is most revered today for the theorem he developed that describes the probability of an event based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to it, and more specifically on how new evidence that pours in effects that likelihood. His formula is widely used in statistics and machine learning.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shanghai, China

    Ashley Marc Recanati

Authors
  1. Ashley Marc Recanati
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Recanati, A.M. (2023). Job Disruption. In: AI Battle Royale. Copernicus Books . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19278-4_6

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation