Cashier, the first profession affected by automation in the US

Cashiers will be the first employees affected by automation in the US, according to a report on Statista.com, which cites the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment Projections analysis.

According to the 2022-2023 analysis, a paper that looks at the US labor market as a whole for the next 10 years, projecting changes in employment by occupation and revealing which jobs are most at risk of automation or other technological and societal changes, four occupational groups have been identified that are expected to experience significant job losses over the next decade: clerical and administrative support, manufacturing, sales and related occupations , as well as various occupations in agriculture, fishing and forestry.

According to the study, cashiers, who are at risk of being replaced by self-checkouts, are projected to experience the largest decline in employment over the next decade in the U.S., with 348,100 fewer jobs in 2032 than in 2022. Other the jobs at the top of the list are secretaries, office workers and customer service workers, each of these occupations expected to see a decline in jobs by more than 150,000 by 2032.

Looking at relative employment changes, word processors and typists (-39%) and watchmakers and watchmakers (- 30%) are most at risk of losing their jobs, along with other relatively rare occupations found at the top of the list.

The authors of the Statista article also point out that prior to the advent of ChatGPT and other AI tools that threatened to take over our jobs, technological advances had changed the way people work, causing some occupations to disappear while others emerged. For example, people used to work as live alarm clocks before alarm clocks were invented. "Knocker uppers", as they were called, walked around industrial England wielding a long stick with which they knocked on the doors of workers' homes to wake them up in time for their shifts. There were also "computers" long before the arrival of personal computers. They were people who performed mathematical calculations, a service that is no longer needed today.