18 jobs that might disappear in the next 25 years

In an interview with 60 Minutes, artificial intelligence expert and venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee predicted that 40 percent of the world’s jobs will be replaced by robots in the next 15 to 25 years. As AI progresses, warns an Oxford study, it is inevitable that large sectors of the workforce will face mass unemployment, mainly in jobs that involve manual or repetitious labour.

Peter C. Earle, a research fellow at the Institute for Economic Research, says what we’re seeing now is different from previous industrial revolutions. “My grandfather was trained as a blacksmith and farrier before World War I. When automobiles and trucks replaced horses, the company he worked for sent him and his fellow blacksmiths to mechanics’ school,” he explains. That transition made sense, as the blacksmiths were already adept at working with tools and basic machines, but today, the employees that AI and automation are replacing will not so easily be able to shift their skill sets. “Many of the new jobs are extremely technical,” Earle says, “and don’t lend themselves to quick training for an orderly shift in employment.”

This can obviously pose a big problem for many people – possibly even you. But if you know what to expect, you can start making plans now to develop new skills within your current field or even change careers altogether. Here are the jobs that industry and employment experts believe will disappear within the next few decades.

“The job that is in imminent danger is warehousing people filling orders for online sites like Amazon. [Jeff] Bezos has said multiple times in interviews that he would love to keep the warehouses completely automatic. They are developing robots that could easily fill those positions, and they could work 24/7, unlike their human counterparts. Elon Musk is another one who has been very open about this. He knows that robots get complicated with simple tasks, so his warehouses will never be 100 percent human-free, but the type of job will be very different than it is today.”  – Alberto Navarrete, General Manager of Frisco Maids

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“Autonomous self-driving cars will use AI technology to drive and apps to identify who needs to be picked up and dropped off. Payment will be made with a simple credit-card swipe (as it often is today), and there will be no one holding onto a steering wheel who needs to be tipped.”  – Laura Handrick, Careers and Workplace Analyst at FitSmallBusiness.com

“We see a massive decline in demand for jobs in the payroll department. This includes payroll clerks, payroll coordinators, payroll managers, payroll specialists and more. We believe the advancement of payroll systems like Gusto has made a significant impact on the demand for these positions. Gusto recently received a $3.8 billion valuation, and while exact numbers aren’t made public, they recently passed 100,000 paying businesses.”  – Patrick Algrim, a human-resources expert for product and engineering teams

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“At my company, we are working on an AI algorithm that will eliminate several pricing-analyst positions. The AI will have machine learning so that it can figure out the costs of our products and the market trends. Right now, we have pricing analysts doing this job manually with Excel sheets. The turnover is extremely high for these positions.”  – Becky Beach, a web developer and blogger

“We’ve all seen Tesla making waves in the automotive industry, and this is just the beginning. The industry as a whole is moving toward all-electric and self-driving vehicles. Mechanics are going to be more like computer scientists. It’ll be more like working on a computer than working on a car. So, I see the mechanic who likes to get his hands dirty as a thing of the past. A study from the UK’s Institute of the Motor Industry states, ‘As many as 97 percent of active auto mechanics aren’t qualified to work on electric cars. Worse, of that 3 percent of auto mechanics who are qualified, the vast majority of them are employed at manufacturer dealerships, presenting prospective EV buyers with very limited service options.’” – Sean Pour, cofounder of SellMax, a car-buying service

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“One of the largest anticipated changes has been the transition of assembly-line workers to a heavier emphasis on robotics. Since 1947, more than 3 million manufacturing jobs have been lost, even as economic output grew by $4 trillion. Considering that robotic equipment has the ability to maximise efficiency and lower production costs, soon the only available manufacturing positions will begin to require skilled trades or industry-specific technical requirements.” – Dennis Theodorou, Managing Director of JMJ Phillip Holdings

“For decades, deep-sea divers have been exploring, researching and providing manual treatments on the ocean floors. This work can be dangerous and takes a high level of skill to do well. Increasingly, this area of labour and expertise is leaning on the effort of robots and drones. For example, Australian experiments using robots to repair the Great Barrier Reef have proven successful, and there are near-term plans to [increase] these efforts by 10 to 100 times in the coming years. In addition to removing safety concerns, another advantage of drone divers is that they can go deeper and sustain greater pressures, and stay submerged nearly indefinitely.”  – Michael Alexis, Director of Marketing at Museum Hack

“Automation will most definitely have a severe impact on the job market, but I think where it will hit the hardest are in industries or specific roles where the risk of human error is not only greater, but the consequences from said errors have a more catastrophic impact. People assume I’m talking about air-traffic controllers and things like that. However, there are still technological constraints that will enable humans to keep that type of role. [There are] a ton of abnormal situations arising every day that a computer isn’t yet capable of handling. This isn’t to say that won’t change in the coming decades.”  – Jason Yau, VP of E-Commerce and General Manager at CanvasPeople

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“Already in Japan, human-looking robots take orders and deliver meals in restaurants. And in many countries, the process of ordering has been automated at McDonald’s, for instance. The workers in the back may still be cooking and assembling your order on a cafeteria tray in the future, but there will be little need for a real person to call out, ‘Jack, your order is ready!’ or to deliver it to the table.”  – Handrick