Endangered jobs

18.05.2015

The life of individuals and the society is changing rapidly, entailing the emergence of new jobs, as
well as the obsolescence of old ones. Why is it happening? This process is anything but new and has
been taking place for over three hundred years, ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Specialties appear and disappear faster with the acceleration of technological progress. According to
various estimates, during the coming twenty years, between one-third and half of jobs in developed
industrial countries will be replaced by robots, software and other automatic solutions.
Which laws determine the obsolescence of a job?


Autor’s Curve was devised by the U.S. economist David Autor. It illustrates the change in employment in U.S. industrial sectors between 1980 and 2005, depending on workers’ qualifications. The graph shows employment growth for low and highly-qualified workers and a decrease for medium-qualified workers. This happened primarily due to a wide spread of automated solutions for tasks of medium complexity. Automation in industries always begins with medium qualification jobs. These operations contain enough standard components to be easily automated and are sufficiently paid for to make automation economically attractive for business owners.