Almost 40 per cent of Australian jobs could be replaced by technology by 2025, report finds

Updated

Technology could make almost 40 per cent of Australian jobs, including highly skilled roles, redundant in 10 to 15 years, a new report has found.

The Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) report highlighted the need for more funding and a cooperative approach to prepare for huge changes in the workforce.

Almost five million jobs face a high probability of being replaced in the next two decades, while a further 18.4 per cent of the workforce had a "medium probability" of their jobs being eliminated, the report found.

CEDA chief executive Professor Stephen Martin said the world was on the cusp of another industrial revolution being driven by technology, and it was not just low-paid, manual jobs at risk.

"What we've found is that going right through to dentists, and clergy and chemical engineers — and, dare I say, even editors or newspaper proprietors and, heaven forbid, even economists — all of these are in grave danger of perhaps outliving their usefulness," Professor Martin said.

The report said jobs that involved "low levels of social interaction, low levels of creativity, or low levels of mobility and dexterity" were most likely to be replaced by automation.

While automation had already replaced many jobs in manufacturing, agriculture and mining, in the coming decades industries such as the health sector would also be impacted, it was found.

"Health is an especially significant area likely to be impacted, through automation in clinical data and predictive diagnostics (analysis roles), to robotics assisting in areas from surgery to nursing and from hospital logistics to pharmaceutical dispensary," the report said.

The report found that advances in technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence and big data were largely driving the change.

Autonomous driving to revolutionise labour market

With approximately a quarter of Australians employed in jobs involving driving, the patenting of a driverless car by Google, enabled by big data, could profoundly change the labour market, the report found.

"Based on the progression of Moore's Law, we shall see computing technology improve approximately 10,000 fold over the next 20 years," the report said. "The affordability of autonomous driving systems will improve dramatically. "Furthermore, if the statistic that 90 per cent of road accidents are caused by human error is correct, governments will inevitably regulate that such systems are mandatory because of the savings to life and health costs."

CEDA estimated that in December 2012, of the 11.5 million Australians employed nationally, about 28 per cent had jobs that involved driving.

Australian driving jobs: Commercial vehicles (excluding motorcycles) 3,266,521 Commercial motorcycles 10,000 Train drivers 11,900 Total: 3,288,421



If all vehicles become autonomous in the next 20 years, the report said, those jobs would need to change as the "human skill of driving a vehicle is no longer an essential part of the job".

"The customer service aspects of the job will become far more important," the report said.

If Parliament did not start shaping workplace policy around technological changes, the country would be left behind, Professor Martin warned.

"Every other country in the world is going to be faced with the same sorts of challenges, particularly in the era of globalisation," he said.

"We simply can not sit back and say a short-term political cycle will solve the problem. There are many deep and grave issues that this country needs to face to retain its economic first world status.

"We are competing with the rest of the world and tech disruption is going to affect us just like it's going to affect everyone else."

The CEDA report said Australia had adapted well to the impact of changing technologies on the workforce so far.

"The nation created over six times the number of jobs it lost over the five years to June 2014," the report said.

"We generally know where the jobs are being lost, and knowing which jobs are a lost cause is important to avoid investing expensive tertiary education in the wrong areas and scarce investment capital that could go into growth industries."

But the report said where the new jobs would be and why they were being created was the most important challenge for future governments.

Topics: science-and-technology, work, technical, environmental-technology, information-technology, computers-and-technology, community-and-society, melbourne-3000, australia

First posted