Technical writers are 89%, maids and housekeepers are 69%, but "commercial pilots" are 55% and "airline pilots, copilots" are only 18%? Hah. Sure.
30% for "Zoologists and Wildlife Biologists"?
20% for "Funeral Service Managers, Directors, Morticians, and Undertakers"?
34% for "Detectives and Criminal Investigators"?
28% for "Athletes and Sports Competitors"?
What?
Barbers are at 80%. The amount of R&D that would be needed couldn't be justified by the low waged worker the robot would replace ($24k avg apparently). There's just so much hidden complexity with all these fine-motor skill jobs. It reminds me of those old physics problems "assuming a perfectly spherical head...". Nice idea, but in practice the incentives to create a robot barber just aren't there.
I guess it's a question of how to interpret the numbers. Does it mean that there is a 91% chance that no one will work as a Musical Instrument Repairers and Tuners or that we will only need 9% or the current Musical Instrument Repairers and Tuners. The former sounds very unlikely, while the latter sounds quite reasonable.
It starts with them fawning over Siri, claiming that this is somehow evidence that in the future we're going to stop wanting to talk to actual humans when we call up Comcast to complain about their billing mistakes:
"Advances in user interfaces also enable computers to respond directly to a wider range of human requests, thus augmenting the work of highly skilled labour, while allowing some types of jobs to become fully automated. For example, Apple’s Siri and Google Now rely on natural user interfaces to recognise spoken words, interpret their meanings, and act on them accordingly. Moreover, a company called SmartAction now pro-vides call computerisation solutions that use ml technology and advanced speech recognition to improve upon conventional interactive voice response systems, realising cost savings of 60 to 80 percent over an outsourced call center."
Then they show the same amnesiac fawning admiration the financial press does when reporting what Foxconn says:
"Foxconn, a Chinese contract manufacturer that employs 1.2 million workers, is now investing in robots to assemble products such as the Apple iPhone."
Yes, in 2011 they started making threats to their employees about replacing a million or so workers within 3 years with some kind of super-robot:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robot...
The bizarre eemployee union dance party threat didn't exactly pan out. They employ 100,000 more people now than they did then.
The core of this paper's methodology is "we asked a bunch of ML researchers how good they thought AI was and they replied "really, really good":
"First, together with a group of ml researchers, we subjectively hand-labelled 70 occupations, assigning 1 if automatable, and 0 if not."
Real sciencey.