The website of the Spanish newspaper The Economist recently published an article by Ramon Oliver entitled “Job Automation: Which professions will be the first to be eliminated?” In the era of automation and artificial intelligence, the existing human occupational division of labor will change in the evolution of technology. The article is compiled as follows:

If you think that all or some of the functions you perform at work may be done by machines in the near future, you have a problem. But the problem is not serious. As you would surely expect, this will happen sooner or later due to the evolution of the technology itself. If you and your company aren’t looking for new ways to continue adding value to your role while using robots or AI to take on tasks, you’re going to have a real problem. Some occupations will adapt more easily than others to this change in the shape of the workforce. Some professions have more leeway to adapt to new employment concepts.

According to the World Economic Forum, 75 million jobs will be destroyed worldwide by 2025 as a result of digitalization. Please don’t panic. The same report said 133 million new jobs would be created at the same time. Because of the pandemic, this “data dance” is likely to change pace. “The pandemic crisis is accelerating automation. It’s no longer just a matter of productivity or efficiency, it’s a matter of safety. Because neither the robot nor the algorithm is at risk of being infected or infecting other people. In addition, there are many automated programs that can be managed remotely, which is an advantage in the event of a pandemic that forces us to telecommute, “notes Santi Garcia, co-founder of the Future of Work Institute.

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Anna Abad, a senior public policy analyst at Google, said this is not a new phenomenon. “We’ve been experiencing the automation of work for hundreds of years,” she says. Throughout this process, machines have been our Allies and have helped us improve efficiency, accuracy and agility.” The expert believes that despite warnings that the process could accelerate, it will be beneficial in the long run. “Revolutions always bring disruption, and in this area it is no different,” Abad said. However, for every new job created by a high-tech company, five related jobs are created around it. For Abad, increased productivity and wages, increased leisure time, reduced risk and improved quality of life are other beneficial promises that digitization brings to the future of work.

Yes, the world will take its course. But that doesn’t stop many people from forcing fear into themselves. Because in some cases, that would mean workers losing their jobs directly. The OECD estimates that 14% of jobs will be fully automated in the next 20 years. Mechanical and repetitive jobs are most at risk of automation. Pilar Liacel, a professor at EAE Business School in Spain, predicts: “In the next few years, we will witness the digitization of many job functions previously performed by humans. Anything that can be automated will be automated.” Changing consumer habits will play a part in this process. Liasser said this is because “we are already moving towards automated consumption, where before people had to go to a counter or window to buy a ticket or a product, now we prefer to make our own purchases online”.

Experts point out that technology now allows for automation of all kinds of tasks in addition to occupations. In some cases more than in others. Santi Garcia sums it up: “A profession is more or less at risk of disappearing as a human activity, depending on the extent to which the tasks that make up the profession can be automated.” This could provide professionals with valuable clues about the danger of their jobs being replaced by machines.

If it weren’t for that, Garcia warns, advances in AI technology wouldn’t stop this frontier. “Ai technology can already automate almost any task that consists solely of data exploitation,” he said. This could explain why translators, medical imagers or certain jobs in the financial sector are among the occupations most likely to disappear.”

So it would be a mistake to think that automation is only a problem for low-skilled workers or the digitally illiterate. A case in point is one of the star jobs in the current job market: Big data specialist. Ironically, these high-priced professionals may eventually be replaced by the sophisticated machines they design. “Big data technologists dump data sources into a program to build AI algorithms. However, thanks to machine learning, the algorithm is learning all the time on its own, so one day it will no longer need the programmer to do his job, “Pilar Liasser reminds.