James Manyika

Well, what does that mean?

What that actually means is that many more jobs and occupations are going to change than get fully automated away.

Because what happens is, sure, some activity that I used to do myself, now that activity can be done in an automated fashion, but I still do other things too, right?

So this effect of kind of the jobs that will change is actually a bigger effect

than the jobs that will disappear completely.

Now, that's not to say there won't be any occupations that will decline.

In fact, what we found in our research, and we ended up kind of titling the research report, Jobs Lost and Jobs Gained, we probably should have fully titled it Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained, and Jobs Changed, because all three phenomena will happen, right?

Yes, there'll be occupations that will decline, but there'll also be occupations that will grow, actually.

And then there'll be lots more occupations that will change.

So I think we need to take the full picture into account.

It's a bit like, I guess, a good example of the jobs change portion is the one of the bank teller, right?

Which is, if you had looked at what a bank teller did in 1968 versus what the bank teller does now, it's very, very different, right?

The bank teller back then

spent all their time counting money, either to take it from you or to give it back to you, right, when you went up to the bank teller.

But with the advent of ATM machines, well, the ATM machine automated much of that.

So we still have bank tellers today.

The majority of their time isn't spent doing that, right?

They may do that on an exception basis, but their jobs have changed dramatically.

But there's still an occupation called a bank teller.

And in fact, until about, I think the precise date is something like 2006, I think,