Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Machines Can Replace Millions of Bureaucrats

Many public sector jobs have a high potential for automation-- it's just that there's little incentive for change.

February 9, 2017 at 1:11 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Pushing paper is easy for this chap.
Photographer: ROB LEVER/AFP/Getty Images

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When it comes to robots displacing humans from the job market, government bureaucrats are generally not what springs to mind. The recent McKinsey report on the future of jobs estimates the automation potential of administrative jobs at just 39 percent, far less than the 73 percent potential for accommodation and food services.

And yet the public sector is one of the biggest potential arenas for such displacement -- and one in which most people wouldn't mind seeing more automation. The reason it's barely happening now is largely, and predictably, an absence of political will.