Like most Atlantic readers, I go to the site for the nonstop Shell ads but stay for the articles. 

Jerry Kaplan, author of Humans Need Not Apply, has written a piece for the publication which argues that women will fare much better than men if technological unemployment becomes widespread and entrenched, the gender biases among jobs and careers favoring them. I half agree with him. 

Take for instance his argument that autonomous cars will decimate America’s three million truck drivers (overwhelmingly men) but not disrupt the nation’s three million secretaries (overwhelmingly women). That’s not exactly right. The trucking industry, when you account for support work, is estimated to provide eight million jobs, including secretarial positions. Truckers spend cash at diners and coffee shops and such, providing jobs that are still more often filled by females. And just because autonomous trucks won’t eliminate secretarial positions, that doesn’t mean other technologies won’t. That effort to displace office-support staff has been a serious goal for at least four decades, and the technology is probably ready to do so now.

This, of course, also doesn’t account for the many women who’ve entered into white-collar professions long dominated by men, many of which are under threat. But I think Kaplan is correct in saying that the middle-class American male is a particularly endangered species if this new reality takes hold, and there won’t likely be any organic solution coming from within our current economic arrangement.

Kaplan’s opening:

Many economists and technologists believe the world is on the brink of a new industrial revolution, in which advances in the field of artificial intelligence will obsolete human labor at an unforgiving pace. Two Oxford researchers recently analyzed the skills required for more than 700 different occupations to determine how many of them would be susceptible to automation in the near future, and the news was not good: They concluded that machines are likely to take over 47 percent of today’s jobs within a few decades.

This is a dire prediction, but one whose consequences will not fall upon society evenly. A close look at the data reveals a surprising pattern: The jobs performed primarily by women are relatively safe, while those typically performed by men are at risk.

It should come as no surprise that despite progress on equality in the labor force, many common professions exhibit a high degree of gender bias. For instance, of the 3 million truck drivers in the U.S., more than 95 percent are men; of the nearly 3 million secretaries and administrative assistants, more than 95 percent are women. Autonomous vehicles are a not-too-distant possibility, and when they arrive, those drivers’ jobs will evaporate; office-support workers suffer no such imminent threat.•