It's not just low-wage workers: 72,300 supervisor roles are expected to be obsolete by 2034
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.
BLS projections suggest these roles are at risk of automation. BLS projects 72,300 fewer first-line supervisors of retail sales workers by 2034, for example. As automation and other technologies require fewer workers in roles that supervisors would manage, a decline in the number of supervisors would logically follow. AI may also be able to complete some tasks that supervisors have traditionally done.
The Brookings Institution also found that women are less exposed to automation because they have tended to work in occupations that require 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 benefit from automation.
Robots and AI aren't all doom and gloom
Automation is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, automation can render certain jobs obsolete and create hardship for economically vulnerable individuals. On the other hand, automation may also lead to productivity gains, lower prices, and new products.
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 the technology that enables it will be developed and adopted.
Still, certain tasks can be more easily automated, such as repetitive ones that don't rely heavily on human-to-human interaction, or those that involve activities that large language models (LLMs) are becoming particularly adept at. Those tasks account for a larger share of work in certain occupations. As a result, some occupations are more at risk of 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 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, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that total U.S. employment will grow 3.1% to 175.2 million jobs from 2024 to 2034.
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.
