Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was the laughing stock of many Twitter feeds recently when his lack of understanding of AI was put on display. He said he was not at all concerned about artificial intelligence automating jobs, but that self-driving cars will be shuttling us from coast to coast in the near future.

“In terms of artificial intelligence taking over American jobs, I think we’re so far away from that that it’s not even on my radar screen. I think it’s 50 or 100 more years. That to me isn’t artificial intelligence, that’s computers and using real technology we have today. But those types of things are very real. That’s very different from artificial [intelligence], you know, R2-D2 taking over your job.” — Steven Mnuchin, Treasury Secretary

The statement is scream-worthy because millions of truck and taxi driving jobs will be eliminated by the same self driving technology (enabled by narrow artificial intelligence) that he thinks isn’t too far away. They will be among the 38% of US jobs reported to be at high risk of being automated within the next 15 years.

It will not take a robot that is better than humans at all intellectual tasks (Artificial General Intelligence) to eliminate these jobs. It will only take a form of existing AI-enabled software, that is better than humans at one or two tasks, like driving from place A to place B, to be introduced into the market.

So, while 15 years may seem like a lot of time, the truth is many work activities that you or someone you love spends most of their time doing, will be automated within 1 to 2 years. There are less protections and regulations in place to keep you from feeling the impacts of AI-driven automation than there are to protect entire industries across the US Economy.

How AI Will Automate Certain Jobs Out of Existence

Source: Unsplash + Prisma

“”By learning from a greater volume of information than we [humans] can process in our own lifetimes, AI software gives us the ability to reach new heights when solving complex problems. AI shows us that today’s state-of-the-art solution is no longer a global maximum, but in fact only a local maximum.” — Nathan Benaich, AI Investor

The AI-related stories landing in your Facebook and Twitter feeds are mostly about doomsday Artificial General Intelligence scenarios. While interesting, they distract from the more pressing issue at hand.

AI-driven automation will create new jobs and help people to be more productive, but the painful truth is that AI-driven automation of both specific work activities and entire jobs will be incredibly disruptive to hundreds of millions of people around the globe. The McKinsey Global institute and The Obama Whitehouse, respectively, believe that “60% of all occupations have at least 30% of activities that are technically automate-able,” and “47% of U.S. jobs are at risk of being replaced by AI technologies” over the next 10–20 years.

When a company stands to gain enormous financial benefits from automating a certain work task, and said task is automate-able with current artificial intelligence techniques, you can expect for it to be automated quickly. If a job consists mostly doing that single task, you can expect people to be replaced, rather than complemented, by AI software. While automation is incredibly painful for us who lose jobs, it can simultaneously improve the quality of life, and in some cases save, the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Here are the activities, jobs, and industries that experts predict to experience the impacts of AI-driven automation in the next 5 years…

Recognizing known patterns

If you, or someone you love, has ever suffered from a medical issue that went undetected by doctors, you know the importance of good injury and disease detection. Diseases are a class of “patterns” that an AI algorithm could help humans recognize.

In the US alone, there are ~38,000 radiologists that make an average of $490,000 annually. According to recent FDA statistics, these radiologists look at 39,275,011 mammograms annually to detect breast tissue abnormalities that require further examination. The UK’s National Health Service recently showed that standard breast cancer checks aren’t sensitive enough to detect ~17% of cases. This is why people were so excited by Google’s recent announcement that it had developed an algorithm to “flag [potential breast cancer] that a human will miss.”

“The algorithm helps you localize and find these tumors. And the doctor is really good at saying, ‘This is not cancer.’ The technology will be especially useful in parts of the world where there’s a shortage of physicians. For patients who don’t have access to a pathologist, an algorithm — even if imperfect — would be a meaningful improvement.” — Matt McFarland, Washington Post

If the technology makes it out of the lab and into hospitals, many thousands of lives and millions of dollars could be saved by early diagnoses and treatment for patients — when procedures are most effective. While the opportunity to automate this skill is massive, it’s more likely that an AI will complement a radiologist than automate her out of a job.

Unlike other jobs that are largely composed of a single task, radiologists have many responsibilities. In addition to recognizing patterns in medical images, they are tasked with consulting physicians to direct patients’ care and working with doctors from different fields to decide on additional treatments to be considered. Neither of these are activities likely to be automated soon, meaning that a machine will augment radiologists long before it puts them out of work.

Driving Cars and Delivering Goods

Morgan Stanley predicts that self-driving truck technology could save the freight transportation industry $168 billion annually and Boston Consulting Group predicts that self driving cars could create a $42 billion market by 2025.

Demonstration of a self-driving Tesla, which relies partially on computer vision to detect objects on the road. Source

Freight companies will save $70 billion annually by putting many of the 1.6+ million people who drive heavy trucks in the US out of jobs. And, they’re estimated to save $36 billion from reduced accidents: 3,852 people died in large truck crashes in 2015 alone.

The Obama White House projected that the jobs of ~1.4 million (taxi, bus, self-employed, etc.) drivers are threatened by autonomous vehicle technology. Researchers also estimate that self-driving cars will reduce traffic fatalities by ~90%. By the 2015 numbers, that’s nearly 1,125,000 lives saved worldwide in a year, 11,250,000 saved over the course of a decade, and 56.3 million fatalities prevented in a half-century. To put that in perspective, in a single year, autonomous vehicles would save the combined populations of Fiji and The Bahamas, the total population of Belgium in 10 years, and the combined populations of South Africa and Botswana in 50 years.

“If it were true that the algorithms are demonstrably, measurably, statistically better than a human driver, then we should not let human drivers on the roads. If you wanted to drive, go to Lego Land….driving can be a fun recreational activity, we just don’t need you on the road.” — Frank Chen, Andreessen Horowitz

The risk of AI automating driving and delivery jobs is so high because of the clear cost (and life) savings opportunities for companies that find a way to remove humans from the picture. The major challenge for society will be training the drivers for new work. So far, much talk has been about skills being automated in lower wage professions, but skills will also be automated in high paying professions (like the radiologist example).

Moving objects

Much has been written about Amazon using robots, that rely on narrow AI, to dominate its competition and cut warehouse operating expenses by 20% (that’s many billions of $). The little robots speed across fulfillment center floors, lifting heavy goods and bringing them to Amazon’s human workers so they don’t have to waste time walking in search of a product. It’s not hard to imagine similar kinds of robots finding their way into other industries.

Major US companies in the waste industry, for example will be incentivized to replace the (as of May 2015) 48,620 waste collectors who earn $34,610 annually with AI-enabled robots that reduce costs to make their biggest revenue center even more profitable (how fast the industry seizes the opportunity is another question). Replacing humans in this role could benefit the environment through more efficient disposal of waste and pick up routes. It would also limit the amount of backbreaking, thankless work done by garbagemen and women — but many people will lose their jobs in the process.