Automation Attack
A look into how Artificial Intelligence and Automation are affecting the job market.
Project Background
A final project for the Introduction to Data Journalism class of the Northwestern Bay Area Immersion Program, we wanted to see if the hysteria around how automation is going to eliminate jobs is warranted. To do this, we used Google Trends to explore what people around the US are searching in relation to this problem, as well as academic reports that forecast how the job market is going to change.
My role in this project was creating the original story idea, finding sources of data, and then creating two of our visualizations, showcased below:
The first visualization compares the Google search "Unemployment Benefits" with "Artificial Intelligence" over the last five years using Flourish. The higher the number, the more the search was "trending" compared to the other. Since the beginning of 2017, AI has been trending more than unemployment benefits, with a sharp increase at the beginning of 2019. This goes against our hypothesis that as AI begins to take jobs away, unemployment benefits would be searched more.
The second visualization, done in Adobe Illustrator, takes a look at the predictions of what top-paid industries will be affected the most by automation in the next few years. This data comes from a report by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne.