Nearly half of employed Americans are in danger of being replaced at their jobs by robots, according to a recent University of Oxford study.
Analyzing 702 occupations, researchers estimated that around 47 percent of employment in the United States could be replaced by computerization, The Guardian reported.
The jobs that are replaceable in theory include everything from cab drivers to typists to travel agents; the rise of robotics could signify the loss of scores of middle-class jobs in just one generation.
"These transitions have happened before," said Carl Benedikt Frey, co-author of the study and a research fellow at the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, as reported by Bloomberg. "What's different this time is that technological change is happening even faster, and it may affect a greater variety of jobs."
Artificial intelligence will likely be replacing humans in the future as various algorithms eliminate the need for engineers to specify every command to a computer, according to the Bloomberg report.
The Oxford researchers believe that these algorithm advances will allow computer software to detect patterns and figure out how to make decisions without the aid of humans.
"My initial reaction was, wow, can this really be accurate?" Frey said of the likelihood that so many jobs would be eliminated, as quoted by Bloomberg. "Some of these occupations that used to be safe havens for human labor are disappearing one by one."
One company that works with this kind of smart software is the San Francisco-based Recommind Inc., which developed a program to run through law documents and eliminate any that the lawyers didn't need to read.
"It doesn't mean you need zero people, but it's fewer people than you used to need," Daniel Martin Katz, a professor at Michigan State University's College of Law in East Lansing who teaches legal analytics, told Bloomberg.
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