**2. Professional sectors and jobs more exposed to automation**

The Fourth Industrial Revolution does not seem to threaten the human work as a whole.2 The heterogeneity of jobs even within the same professional sector is great. Employees are differently exposed to automation depending on the position they hold and on their tasks. *Routine jobs with a high volume of tasks* related to information exchange, sales, data management, manual work, product transfer and storage, constructions, and office work are more exposed to the risk of automation. *Construction and Manufacturing* and *Wholesale and Retail Trade* are the professional sectors that are expected to be highly automated until 2030, with an estimated automation of approximately 45 and 34%, respectively (for OECD3 countries). On the other hand, the risk of automation is lower for *jobs with high educational requirements*, the tasks of which demand *high communicative and cognitive skills*. Such tasks cannot be defined in terms of codes and algorithms (Engineering Bottlenecks); they are more related to the perception, the ability to manage complex situations, multilevel activity and flexibility, and the *true creativity*, for example, any task that cannot be provided by a machine but requires critical thinking such as the ability to develop new theories, literature, or musical compositions. There are also tasks that require *social intelligence and comprehension* such as elderly care; for these tasks there is a strong social preference to be provided by human employees and not by robots. *Health and* education are the professional sectors with the lowest estimated rates of automation (around 8–9% for OECD countries). This is also clear in **Figure 3** according to which "Transportation and storage" and "Manufacturing" are the economic sectors that are more exposed to the risk of automation (up to 50%), while sectors such as "Human health and social

<sup>2</sup> See [5–7].

<sup>3</sup> Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

#### **Figure 3.**

*Potential impact of job automation across industry sectors.*

work" and "Education" are the most protected against the automation risk implying that there are tasks such as teaching and nursing that cannot be replaced by machines.
