What skills and abilities can automation technologies replicate and what does it mean for workers?: new evidence

What skills and abilities can be replicated through automation technologies and what does it mean for jobs and workers? This paper addresses this question with the specific aim of accounting for the latest progress in [artificial intelligence] AI technologies and robotics. It exploits novel data collected through an original survey on the degree of automatability of approximately 100 skills and abilities. The survey was developed with the help of, and completed by, experts from different AI research fields. In a second step, the degree of automatability of skills and abilities obtained through the survey was applied to occupations using information on skill and ability requirements extracted from the Occupational Information Network database. Similar to previous studies, this allows gauging the number of jobs potentially affected by automation and the workers who are most at risk of automation. The focus on the automatability of skills and abilities as opposed to the automatability of entire occupations also allows for a direct assessment of the share of highly automatable and bottleneck tasks in each occupation.

The study finds that thanks to advances in AI and robotics, several high-level cognitive skills can now be automated. However, high-skilled occupations continue to be less at risk of automation because they also require skills and abilities that remain important bottlenecks to automation. Furthermore, this work shows that jobs at highest risk of automation will not disappear completely, as only 18 to 27 per cent of skills and abilities required in these occupations are highly automatable. Rather, the organisation of work will have to be radically adapted and workers in these jobs will need to retrain, as technologies replace workers for several tasks.

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