Is your role in the crosshairs?

DALLAS — Dallas-Fort Worth has relatively high exposure to automation, with more than a million jobs in jeopardy of being wiped out or severely disrupted by robots or other forms of artificial intelligence, according to a new report.

The Dallas-Fort Worth area ranks 20th among the nation’s 100 largest metros in the share of jobs in occupations that are highly exposed to automation, said Robert Maxim, senior research analyst in the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution.

“You’re definitely above the median when comes to nation’s largest metros,” Maxim said in an interview with the Dallas Business Journal.

The report, titled “Automation and Artificial Intelligence: How machines affect people and places,” offers projections for how automation will impact the American economy over the next few decades, looking at the susceptibility of tasks in occupations that are potentially automatable.

The tasks involved in 46.5 percent of the DFW area’s 3.54 million jobs are susceptible to automation, the Brookings report found. In Texas, that compares to 46.3 percent of the Houston area’s 3.02 million jobs, 46 percent of the San Antonio area’s 1.03 million jobs and 44.3 percent of the Austin area’s 1.01 million jobs.

The study, published Thursday, found that overall, about 36 million Americans hold jobs with "high exposure" to automation — meaning at least 70 percent of their tasks could soon be performed by machines using current technology.

By 2030, a quarter of U.S. employment will have experienced high exposure to automation, while another 36 percent of U.S. employment will experience medium exposure, and another 39 percent will experience low exposure.

Nationally, places such as Las Vegas, Louisville, Kentucky, and Toledo, Ohio are among the most susceptible to the automation of job tasks, while the list of least susceptible places includes coastal giants such as Washington, D.C., the Bay Area, New York City and Boston, the report found.

Among the occupations most likely to be affected are cooks, servers and others in food services; short-haul truck drivers; administrative workers; and farm workers.

The report also found that on average 43 percent of tasks done by men and 40 percent by women are in jeopardy because men are more likely to hold factory, transportation and construction jobs, which have more automatable tasks. Younger workers are more susceptible to having their jobs automated, Maxim added.

For better educated workers, however, automation tended to make them more productive and better paid too, Maxim said.

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Automation technology has become cheaper, so businesses are able to substitute it for cheaper labor, he said.

“In addition to jobs changing, it’s likely that moving forward, workers will not have just one job throughout their career,” Maxim said. “They may have three, they may have five. So the idea of constantly learning and constantly upskilling is important.”

Education helps combat the negatives of automation, Maxim added: Occupations not requiring a bachelor’s degree are a whopping 229 percent more susceptible to automation compared to occupations requiring at least a bachelor’s degree, the study found. Just 6 percent of workers with a four-year degree or more are employed in jobs with a high potential for automation.

The study’s authors offered five recommendations for federal, state, and local policymakers: