Practically human: Can smart machines do your job?

ADVANCE FOR RELEASE UNTIL 12:01 a.m. EST,THURSDAY, JAN, 24, 2013. THIS PHOTO MAY NOT BE POSTED ONLINE, BROADCAST OR PUBLISHED BEFORE 12:01 a.m. THURSDAY, JAN, 24, 2013 This March 23, 2012 photo provided by software maker SAP shows one of the company's server rooms in Walldorf, Germany. Among other tasks, SAP allows companies to use cloud computing to track sales and inventory, and to produce the reports that federal regulators require, without needing to hire IT employees. (AP Photo/SAP, Reto Klar)SAP




From giant corporations to university libraries to startup businesses, employers are using rapidly improving technology to do tasks humans used to do.


To better understand the impact of technology on jobs, the Associated Press analyzed employment data from 20 countries and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, CEOs and workers who are competing with smarter machines.

The AP found that almost all of the jobs disappearing are the mid-skill, mid-pay jobs -- jobs with salaries ranging from $37,000 to $68,000 -- that form the backbone of the middle class in developed countries in Europe, North America and Asia.

In the United States, half of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the recent recession paid middle-class wages, and the numbers are even more grim in the 17 European countries that use the euro as their currency. A total of 7.6 million mid-pay jobs disappeared in those countries from January 2008 through June 2012.


"Everything that humans can do, a machine can do," says Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University in Houston. "Things are happening that look like science fiction."

Google and Toyota are rolling out cars that can drive themselves. The Pentagon deploys robots to find roadside explosives in Afghanistan and wages war from the air with drone aircraft. North Carolina State University this month introduced a high-tech library where robots -- "bookBots" -- retrieve books when students request them. The library's 1.5 million books are no longer displayed on shelves; they're kept in 18,000 metal bins that take one-ninth the space.


In the U.S., nearly 1.2 million secretaries vanished from the job market between 2000 and 2010, their job security shattered by software that lets bosses field calls themselves and arrange their own meetings and trips. Over the same period, the number of word processors and typists plunged by 69 percent, telephone operators by 64 percent, bookkeepers by 53 percent and travel agents by 46 percent, according to Labor Department statistics.




Here's a look at technological factors reshaping the economy and the job markets in developed countries.


Big data

At the heart of the biggest technological changes today is what computer scientists call "Big Data." Computers thrive on information, and they're feasting on an unprecedented amount of it -- from the Internet, from Twitter messages and other social media sources, from the bar codes and sensors being slapped on everything from boxes of Huggies diapers to stamping machines in car plants.

According to a Harvard Business Review article by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more information now crosses the Internet every second than the entire Internet stored 20 years ago. Every hour, they note, Walmart collects 20 million filing cabinets' worth of information from its dealings with customers.

No human could make sense of so much data. But computers can. They can sift through mountains of information and deliver valuable insights to decision-makers in businesses and government agencies. For instance, Walmart's analysis of Twitter traffic helped convince it to increase the amount of "Avengers" merchandise it offered when the superhero movie came out in 2012 and to introduce a private-label corn chip in the American Southwest.





Now that grunge work is conducted by powerful "operations management" software systems developed by businesses such as General Electric Intelligent Systems in Charlottesville, Va. These systems continuously collect, analyze and summarize in digestible form information about all aspects of factory operations -- energy consumption, labor costs, quality problems, customer orders.



The Cloud



Cloud computing "is a catchall term for the ability to rent as much computer power as you need without having to buy it, without having to know a lot about it," McAfee says.



Automated Insights in Durham, N.C., draws on the computing power of the cloud to produce automated sports stories, such as customized weekly summaries for fantasy football leagues. "We're able to create over 1,000 pieces of content per second at a very cost-effective rate," says founder Robbie Allen. His startup, which duplicates work done by human reporters, would not have been possible without cloud computing.


Smarter machines



In addition to becoming more powerful and creative, machines and their software are becoming easier to use. That has made consumers increasingly comfortable relying on them to transact business. As well as eliminate jobs of bank tellers, ticket agents and checkout cashiers.

