Robots will soon do your taxes and your bookkeeper
Up until about ten years ago, choosing a career in accountancy was considered a safe bet. It came with a decent salary, plenty of job opportunities and all sorts of benefits. Robots were still a distant reality. Something to worry about for blue-collar workers, maybe, but in no way threatening to those in the financial industry.
Oh, how times have changed. In 2013, two researchers from Oxford University published a study examining to what extent jobs are susceptible to computerization. The results, at least for accountants and bookkeepers, were pretty grim: Bookkeeping had a 97.6 percent chance of being automated in the near future. Accounting and auditing did only a little better, at 95.3 percent.
Why them? Although there are different factors at play here – for instance, jobs that require less creative thinking, manual dexterity, and social intelligence have a higher chance of being automated – it has to do with risk management as well. When costs per error are relatively low, people will feel more comfortable with robots doing certain tasks. When costs per error are high – leading to injury, or even death – human action is preferred. Think about it: If a robot that fills out expense reports makes a mistake, that’s mainly inconvenient. If a plane-flying robot does the same, people could die. more