"While technological progress throughout economic history has largely been confined to the mechanisation of manual tasks, requiring physical labour, technological progress in the twenty-first century can be expected to contribute to a wide range of cognitive tasks, which, until now, have largely remained a human domain," write Frey and Osborne. As their paper lays out, jobs associated with hard, physical labor have been mechanized for centuries, with several notable shifts during the Industrial Revolution. Advances in the power of computer processing will allow for new fields to be automated.
"Jobs not at risk of computerization are those which involve tasks at which machines are relatively poor: tasks involving operating in cluttered environments, creative tasks and tasks requiring social intelligences," says Osborne, associate professor of engineering science at the University of Oxford.