I think you're overestimating the amount of high-skill jobs people do in the west to be honest.
Like we've got a ton of truck drivers, who'll surely disappear within a few decades, which is just one at most two generations. In terms of policy planning this is a short-term timeframe.
Same for most people who work in retail, from clothes shops to supermarkets.
But even higher-level jobs will change massively. I highly doubt education will stay as labour-intensive. And I've got family members who are attorneys, and when I speak to them they'll tell me a ton of their workload is simply going through legal documents to look up stuff, and then preparing mostly template legal documents. A lot of this is manual work that'll disappear sooner than you'd think. We've already seen examples in this field with the automated bot that helps void parking tickets.
The amount of people that work high-skilled labour is really small if you ask me. I think a decent first order approximation is to compare the amount of people that work at the Walmart or Amazon headquarters, versus their stores and warehouses. For Amazon I've seen numbers that it's roughly 24k vs 240k, and consider that this is a tech-oriented company that's already automated a lot. For walmart it'd likely be 1:1000. Take a Facebook with 12k employees, a leader in a high-skill industry, and it's the margin of error of the employee count of a leader in a low-skill industry, not in China, but right here in the west, like say Walmart (> 1m employees) or say a franchise like McDonalds. These are also Dutch or Canadian workers.
An attorney friend of mine told me that discovery is being affected by this. Instead of having a team of higher level attorneys supervise a team of lower level attorneys (and maybe paralegals also) sorting through tons of papers in discovery, those high level attorneys train an algorithm on what documents are of particular interest from a small subset of them all (creating the training set) and then they let the algo do the work.
An anesthesiologist friend of mine went back and got his MBA because he's certain that machines will dramatically reduce the amount of jobs for anesthesiologists; you'll have one anesthesiologist supervising X machines instead of X anesthesiologists.
Artificial intelligence was now out-performing the capabilities of junior
lawyers and paralegals in due diligence, discovery and document drafting.
Upcoming predictive analytics would be able to assess the outcome of court
cases while legal diagnostics systems analysed legal problems and provided
advice.
One thing to keep in mind is that the demand of services is fairly elastic. If the cost of legal services go down dramatically the demand will go up quite a bit. The reason many people don't use these services is because of cost and decide to forgo/settle.
I bet there will be a lot of refinancing of mortgages if the closing costs were $500 and the process was one click.
I presume that this is the case with a lot of professional services. In that sense service based economies are better situated than manufacturing based economies.
Like we've got a ton of truck drivers, who'll surely disappear within a few decades, which is just one at most two generations. In terms of policy planning this is a short-term timeframe.
Same for most people who work in retail, from clothes shops to supermarkets.
But even higher-level jobs will change massively. I highly doubt education will stay as labour-intensive. And I've got family members who are attorneys, and when I speak to them they'll tell me a ton of their workload is simply going through legal documents to look up stuff, and then preparing mostly template legal documents. A lot of this is manual work that'll disappear sooner than you'd think. We've already seen examples in this field with the automated bot that helps void parking tickets.
The amount of people that work high-skilled labour is really small if you ask me. I think a decent first order approximation is to compare the amount of people that work at the Walmart or Amazon headquarters, versus their stores and warehouses. For Amazon I've seen numbers that it's roughly 24k vs 240k, and consider that this is a tech-oriented company that's already automated a lot. For walmart it'd likely be 1:1000. Take a Facebook with 12k employees, a leader in a high-skill industry, and it's the margin of error of the employee count of a leader in a low-skill industry, not in China, but right here in the west, like say Walmart (> 1m employees) or say a franchise like McDonalds. These are also Dutch or Canadian workers.