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Will Robots Make Your Work Obsolete? New Report Looks At Automation Risks By City

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Many Americans worry that automation will make their job or business irrelevant A fascinating new study shows that the city where you live may influence the risk of your work being automated. Among metro areas, Boston faces the lowest percentage of jobs likely to be automated, while Fresno, Calif., faces the highest.

The report, Technology at Work v2.0: The Future Is Not What It Used to Bewas conducted at the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology & Employment at University of Oxford, in association with Citi and draws on recently published data from the World Bank Development Report 2016. In an earlier report, researchers Carl Frey and Mike Osborne, co-directors of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment, found that 47% of U.S. jobs are at risk of automation in the next two decades. 

Whether you are a job-creating entrepreneur, a freelancer or an employee, investing your energy in work that is very likely to be automated will put your career in jeopardy down the line, so this study is worth perusing for anyone who wants to stay relevant in the next few decades.

The cities that fared best in the survey have a cluster of skilled jobs, typically because they have developed a strong tech sector, Frey noted in an interview. Boston, for instance, which is home to a number of top universities and has many well educated residents, has become a global technology hub, transitioning successfully from its roots as a shipping center and manufacturing economy to a tech center, notes Frey."Different cities have adapted very differently to the computer revolution," Frey said in an interview.

Nonetheless, even in the cities with the lowest percentage of jobs at risk of automation, nearly 40% of jobs could disappear because of technological innovation, the report finds. That underlines the importance of economic planning to attract new types of businesses to replace those that have become irrelevant, as well as strategic career planning by individuals.

The cities with the lowest percentages of jobs at risk of automation are:

Boston: 38.40% (Percentage of jobs at high risk of automation)

Washington D.C.: 38.40%

Raleigh: 39.70%

Baltimore: 40.40%

New York: 40.70

Bridgeport, Ct., : 41.10%

Toms River.  N.J.: 41.20% (Although Toms River is not a big city, this is not an error. The researchers defined labor markets by commuting patterns. Toms River and surrounding towns have a substantial group of commuters, Frey said).

Richmond, Va. and Minneapolis: 41.40%

Denver: 41.50%

San Francisco: 41.70%

The cities with highest percentage of jobs at risk of automation include many that are manufacturing hubs, the report found.  Manufacturing peaked in the U.S. in the 1970s, notes Frey. "Without efforts to create new industries, manufacturing cities are likely to experience continued decline," the report concludes.

The cites where jobs are at the highest risk of automation are:

Fresno: 53.8%

Las Vegas 49.10%

Greensboro: 48.5%

Reading: 48.4%

Grand Rapids: 47.9%

Oklahoma City and Harrisburg, Pa.: 47.10%

Los Angeles: 47%

Dayton: 46%

Sacramento: 45.9%

Houston: 45.8%

The automation gap also has global implications, with countries that rely on lower-skilled jobs facing the same risks as cities that depend on such jobs do. "What we're seeing is that developing countries are experiencing premature de-industrialization," says Frey.

For instance, in Ethiopa, the country where jobs are at the highest risk of automation, 85% of jobs are likely to be replaced by automation, the report finds. Other countries that face high percentage of jobs being automated are China ( 77 %), Thailand (72%), Argentina (65%) and India (69%).

In countries that saw rapid growth from the shift to an agricultural to manufacturing economy, says Frey, "manufacturing is not going to yield as much employment growth in the future."

That doesn't necessarily mean their economies will stagnate. As manufacturing has shifted to a model driven more by machines and less by human labor, some economies have navigated the transition to more knowledge-based economy successfully, says Frey, pointing to Singapore and Taiwan.

"The key message of this report is that advanced and developing economies alike will have to shift a larger scale of the workforce into relatively skilled jobs," says Frey. "That is going to be the main challenge for China--to make sure that new industries make up for the job loss in manufacturing."

Often, when highly skilled jobs are created in fields like technology, earlier research by Frey and Osborne found that it creates opportunities for businesses that serve the employees in those jobs. For instance, local restaurants and dry cleaners may spring up to meet the needs of employees at a local tech company.

The report predicts that some manufacturing now done overseas will come back to the U.S., as U.S. companies take advantage of technologies such as 3-D printing. Will that help American workers who have lost jobs in the manufacturing sector? Probably not to the extent many people would like.

Frey explained that because manufacturing increasingly relies on automation, these will be lean operations . Instead of being a big job creator, the manufacturing plant of the future will be a wealth creator for the owners. "It's going to boost profits, and the shareholders will  definitely benefit from that," Frey says.

Automation is already contributing to a decline in hours worked around the the world, the researchers note. In the U.S., annual hours worked per person have dipped by 10% from 1950 to 2014, the report points out. (In some countries, the change is more profound. In France, the annual hours worked per person fell by 35% in that same period.) American men have seen an increase of leisure time of six to eight hours per week from 1965-2003, while women have seen an increase of four to eight hours.

So where will the jobs and businesses of the future be? "In general what we find in our studies is jobs that are intensive in creativity and social intelligence are the least susceptible to automation," says Frey. "In general those jobs tend to be more skilled ones."

Careers with the brightest future are in information technology, which has the greatest percentage of occupations (62%) considered to have a "bright outlook," the report says, drawing on data from the O*Net Resource Center, a database of occupational information. The fields with the next brightest future are marketing, sales, and service (50%) and health science (45%).

In the U.S., the greatest growth will be in healthcare, the report says. "Nursing, elderly care, and child care are good examples of where we don’t see that many jobs disappearing in the future," says Frey.

Other growth areas are green jobs such as wind energy operations managers and automotive engineers, the report notes. (O*Net's Bright Outlook tool is worth checking out if you are looking for ideas for your own career).

Clearly, there will be opportunities to find jobs or run a business in the future, but to outrun automation, many of us will have to reinvent ourselves with brand new skills. That's not easy to orchestrate, on a policy level or individually, but as this report points out, it's our best option at the moment.