Unfortunately, low-wage workers with relatively little formal education are the least likely to be able to afford retraining or upskilling they may need to change careers. Employers may be less willing to upskill lower-wage, lower-skill workers because doing so would require more resources than upskilling a higher-wage, higher-skill worker.
It's not just low-wage workers: 42,000 supervisor roles are expected to be obsolete by 2030
Low-wage jobs are not the only ones at risk of automation. The Brookings Institution examined the overlap between patents for AI technologies and job descriptions and found that certain roles most commonly occupied by men with bachelor's degrees are most exposed to automation, along with production jobs. The latter category includes managers, supervisors, and analysts, according to Brookings.
The BLS' projections allude to these roles being at risk to automation. BLS projects almost 23,000 fewer office worker supervisors and almost 19,000 fewer supervisors of non-retail sales workers by 2030, for example. As automation and other technology require fewer workers in the roles those supervisors would manage, a decline in supervisors would logically follow.
The Brookings Institution also found that women are less exposed to automation because they have tended toward occupations that involve more interpersonal skills, such as education and healthcare.
A separate Brookings report found that women have historically adapted better to automation than men despite previously being more exposed to automation. Women are also trending toward surpassing men in educational attainment and as a result may be better positioned to cope with and take advantage of automation.
Robots and AI aren't all doom and gloom
Job automation is a double-edged sword. On one side, automation of labor can render certain jobs obsolete and threaten the livelihoods of economically vulnerable individuals. Automation is also a path to productivity gains, lower prices, and new industries.
It's unlikely that automation will erase entire occupations. Workers in any occupation carry out a range of tasks, not all of which can be automated. And there's certainly a debate about which jobs are most threatened by automation and how quickly technology that allows automation will be developed and adopted.
Still, certain tasks can be more easily automated, such as those that are repetitive and don't rely too much on human-to-human interaction. Those tasks make up a larger amount of work in certain occupations. As a result, some occupations are more at risk of job loss to automation than others.
Notably, over half of those 30 occupations provide below-average wages. In other words, hundreds of thousands of economically vulnerable workers are projected to lose their jobs to automation, and at the same time they are less likely to have the financial means to independently retrain or upskill in an effort to switch careers. This is a vexing problem, the solutions to which are hotly debated.
But it's not all doom and gloom. Despite the rapid pace of technological change and the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that total U.S. employment will grow from 153.5 million to 165.4 million jobs from 2020 to 2030.
And if those in lower-wage occupations that are most exposed to automation are given support to learn new skills and retrain, automation -- and a smart response to it -- can be a force that elevates the livelihoods and competitiveness of otherwise at-risk workers.
Full employment decline tables
Largest employment declines predicted by 2030
