Where the Odds are Against You
When you think about robots and automation taking people’s jobs, the first thing that comes to mind might be a factory assembly line in the rust belt. While those jobs are of course being hit, they might not be automation’s primary target. For that, you might want to look to places like San Bernardino and even Las Vegas; “areas with high concentrations of jobs in food preparation, office or administrative support, and/or sales.” (We’re used to losing our income to machines in Vegas, but this is different.) One estimate suggests that 65% of jobs in Las Vegas will be automatable in less than a decade.
+ Working the Core: “Recent tests in Australia, where apple season is under way, proved that the company’s prototype can spot apples roughly as accurately as a human, and pull them down just as gently. The machine deposits apples in the same large crates that human pickers use.” From MIT Tech Review: Apple-Picking Robot Prepares to Compete for Farm Jobs.
+ NPR: Facebook plans to add 3,000 workers to monitor, remove violent content. Yup, the jobs you thought would always be done by humans will be done by machines, and the companies you thought were run by algorithms are hiring more people.