I'm interested by the classification here.<p>Many backend jobs involve routine work from people who could be doing non-routine work if the CRUD routine job was automated. Within an industry or a profession it seems like there could be a mix of routine and non-routine work.<p>Similarly, how many people's jobs have changed from being routine jobs to non-routine jobs through either retraining or automation allowing them to take on higher order work? Again, doesn't say.<p>Also, interesting to note that the actual unemployment rate for routine congnitive, routine manual etc 2009 shock aside doesn't actually look anomalous compared to much of the last two decades of the graph is to be believed.
Assisting or caring for others is not a low-skill job! It may not require a doctorate in theoretical physics, but it requires a lot of emotional intelligence, stamina and ability to be present with other people. It's far from routine!<p>This immediate nitpick aside - I think it's great that routine task jobs are going away. The bulk of those are mind-numbing, dead-end jobs - do we really need to keep subjecting people to 40h/wk routine boredom?
Scary parallel here with the recent jeff dean talk about NN. He claims he won't let his team touch any 'research task' that takes more than a week, and prefers to stick to experiments that take under a day to set up and run -- that there's so much low-hanging fruit that every ML project should be simple.<p>Very very scary if tech that most of us still haven't touched is also in a sense routine.<p>I hope I'm misquoting him. But my takeaway is that between manually coding processes that could be solved with ML & doing infrastructure profiling, most devs are spending half their time fixing problems that are 'routine' at the big three.
Oh well, please let us not connect softwaredevelopment and management too much with non-routine work. On a daily basis I see so many people who work on less than 50% of their capabilities because they haven't created routines in their work, thinking that their work is 90% non-routine.<p>Think about the last time you heard how a developer tells you that you don't need to learn the ten finger system to program well, or that he is capable of using 10-20 programming languages. How can a person think about usability of his software and a debuggable architecture, if he has to think about how to put an "i" and an "f" in the text editor? How much time is left for genius ideas when he has to look up all the time if the current language requires him to write a try-catch or a try-except block?
Isn't that the purposeful outcome of technology? "I could replace everything you do with a script."<p>I know for a fact that work I have done has contributed to the demise of many positions. Could you imagine the industry for "Internet Cataloging" if we didn't have search engines? Email if we didn't have Gmail?<p>Technology is a job killer. That idea is something that's been a part of society and literature for hundreds of years, sometimes in violent fashion. Our economy needs to evolve in such a way that the destruction of jobs is a net positive for society.
I wonder if you can reliably classify jobs into "nonroutine" and "routine". There is element of routine in every work, and I'm pretty sure that even most boring and repetitive job can be done better with some degree of creativity. It would be really interesting to read more about reasoning behind classification presented in this article. I mean can you seriously say there is no "routine" in programming or management?
All of this points to the fact that work is a consumer good. We need to manufacture work just like we manufacture products. You buy work with time, and in return you get money; after all time is money. It should be work that we actually want to do, in an environment which we find to be psychologically positive. We need to just call it a day for capitalism and all the other garbage that goes with it. Let's throw away idiotic ideas like efficiency and productivity. And let's focus on meaning. Maybe we can build a fulfilling society rather than this madness and busi-ness we have created to produce garbage at breaknecks speeds so capital owners can do more of the same.<p>For instance this <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency</a>
I really like Mike Rowe's viewpoint on unemployment: <a href="http://profoundlydisconnected.com/" rel="nofollow">http://profoundlydisconnected.com/</a>
Note that they <i>were</i> growing faster than any other kind of job:<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/business/economy/recovery-has-created-far-more-low-wage-jobs-than-better-paid-ones.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/business/economy/recovery-...</a>
The site's layout seems to treat my 10" android tablet in landscape mode as if it were a first generation iPhone in portrait mode. I wonder what happens. Faaulty browser sniffing?