Top 10 jobs that robots are already doing better than humans

In this age of ‘everything is possible’, below are ten jobs that robots are already doing better than humans. The list will help you tweak your career, workplace and investment thoughts.

1. STOCKROOM WORKER

Robots are expected to create 15 million new jobs in the U.S. over the next 10 years, as a direct result of automation and artificial intelligence, equivalent to 10% of the workforce, a recent report by Forrester Research found. The downside: robotics will also kill 25 million jobs over the same period. Some 38% of jobs in the U.S. are at “high risk” of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence over the next 15 years, a separate estimate by consulting and accounting firm PwC found, which is still lower than Germany (35%) and the U.K. (30%).

In Amazon AMZN, +1.90%   warehouses, many of your packages may have been handled not by people, but by robots. Indeed, from the 2015 to the 2016 holiday seasons, Amazon upped its fleet of robots by 50% to roughly 45,000 robots in 20 fulfillment centers. This robot army makes Amazon’s operations more efficient: What used to take an hour or more, now might take about 15 minutes.

2. BARTENDER

Hop on board a Royal Caribbean cruise, and you may find that your fruity cocktail is made by a bartender — and the robots can make two drinks a minute, up to 1,000 each day. What’s more, you may even be able to find one of these contraptions on dry land: While your local bartender may fumble when you ask him for a Sex on the Beach or a Tight Twister, the Monsieur robot bartender won’t. You fill it with ingredients, scroll through the list of cocktails it offers (you can customize this to what you want), and it can make up to 65 drinks before it needs to be refilled; you can even teach it to make specialty cocktails.

3. SOLDIER

Robots could replace one-fourth of all U.S. combat soldiers by 2030, according to statements made in 2014 by U.S. Army Gen. Robert Cone. It’s an effort by the U.S. Army to become “a smaller, more lethal, deployable and agile force.” The robots may be able to do everything from dismantling land mines to engaging in front-line combat.

4. PHARMACIST

At the pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco, it isn’t a human who fills the prescriptions—it’s a robot. Computers receive the prescriptions and robots package and dispense them. During its first phase-in, the university says, there were no errors in the 350,000 doses the robot filled. What’s more, robots may be able to do a better job than humans at making sure the prescription a human is picking up won’t interact with other medications he or she is taking, says professor Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business. Center for Digital Business.

5. FARMER

Much of farming involves routine tasks that robots can more efficiently do, including surveying the land, driving the tractors, and cutting, pruning and harvesting the crops, says IBISWorld industry analyst Jeremy Edwards. Indeed, there are already wine-bots, which prune vines in vineyards, and lettuce-bots, which pull up the weeds near the base of the plant, among many other farming robots.

6. BOMB SQUAD

There are more than 450 bomb squads in America, which respond to thousands of bomb-related incidents each year, according to federal statistics. Already, some of these bomb squads use robots, which often can better dispose of the bombs, while minimizing the risk to human lives. The robots have other law enforcement applications as well—like infiltrating hostage situations—says Colin Angle, iRobot CEO and co-Founder of iRobot, maker of the Roomba robot vacuum.

7. JOURNALIST

Fellow journalists, don’t hate the messenger. Robots will likely take some journalists’ jobs in the near future. Brynjolfsoon says that business journalists—especially those who focus on numbers-heavy stories like market reports—and sports journalists who do a lot of numbers analysis—may be most at risk. Indeed, a program by Narrative Science already writes short sports recaps. Brynjolfsson points out, however, that robots aren’t that great at being creative—so fiction writers and long-form creative journalists can rest easy.

8. HOUSEKEEPER

The vacuuming robot has been around for a while, but it’s getting better than ever: The Roomba 980, a newer version of the floor-cleaning robot, has earned stellar reviews, with some testers saying it does a better job than any upright vacuum, especially on pet hair. The company who makes the Roomba, iRobot, also makes the Scooba 450, which scrubs the floors, as well as a sweeping and gutter-cleaning robot. iRobot says it is has sold more than 15 million home robots alone.

9. PARALEGALS AND DOC-REVIEW-FOCUSED ATTORNEYS

Clients pay millions for attorneys and paralegals to do some of the work that robots can simply do better — namely the dreaded “doc review,” in which people search hundreds of documents looking for mentions of certain items or concepts. Silicon Valley-based Blackstone Discovery offers that service — it can search both words and concepts — without the need for human hours. Robots, unlike humans, don’t tire of rote tasks such as this, and thus are often better equipped for it, experts say.

10. TELLERS AND CLERKS

The bank branch is expensive to maintain, thanks in part to the cost of bank tellers’ labor—a cost that robots can, and in some cases already do, help eliminate. At least one bank is trying to drastically reduce that cost: A few years back Coastal Federal Credit Union branches replaced some back tellers with “personal teller machines” that do much of what the teller could. The move resulted in a 40% reduction in teller staff, a spokesperson for the bank said at the time. Other banks are experimenting with similar options, says Better ATM Services CEO Todd Nuttall, whose company enables ATMs to dispense prepaid gift cards. The store and mailroom clerk may also find their employment opportunities similarly downsized.

–Courtesy Marketwatch.com