68% of jobs in Costa Rica could be occupied by robots, according to a study by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) that analyzed the future of work in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Of 12 countries included in the analysis, the highest proportion is found in Guatemala and El Salvador, where 75% of the workforce could be replaced by robots, however, they are closely followed by Ecuador and Costa Rica with 69 and 68 % respectively.
Acceleration of new technologies
And it is that one of the effects left by the COVID-19 Pandemic is the acceleration in the adoption of new technologies that allow tasks to be carried out remotely. However, advances in telecommunications, robotics and artificial intelligence are making certain tasks less dependent on human beings.
According to the study in Latin America and the Caribbean, it is estimated that a large part of the region’s workers occupy positions with a high probability of automation. This implies that almost three out of every four jobs could be filled by machines in the not too distant future.
The opposite is the case in the United States, where only 47% of jobs would be held by robots. However, change will be slow in coming as developing countries have a slower technology adoption rate than more advanced economies. Only 0.6% of robots produced globally end up in the region
While the United States has 131 robots for every thousand workers, Chile and Colombia only have 10 and 3, respectively. One reason is that the cheaper the labor and the more expensive the machines, the less incentive there is to automate tasks.
When observing the most demanded occupations in Latin America, it is concluded that there are jobs that will continue to need human skills, which can be classified into four categories: routine or non-routine, and manual or knowledge.
What is important is not the occupation, but the type of tasks
The highest paying jobs are concentrated in the group of workers who perform non-routine cognitive tasks, such as designing a web page or an advertising campaign. This categorization of occupations between routine or non-routine, and between manuals or knowledge transmits an essential idea: what is important is not the occupation, but the type of tasks that are carried out, the study points out.
