“Technological innovation has been changing the jobs people do, and the way they do them, at least since the first spinning jennies went into service in England’s textile industry in the 1760s. And for about as long, people have sought to forecast what new technologies might mean for the world of work — predictions that tend to be either utopian (2-hour workdays!) or dystopian (massive unemployment). A new Pew Research Center report joins that tradition, gathering the opinions of nearly 1,900 experts on how advances in robotics and artificial intelligence will affect employment in the future. And again, opinions were divided, with about half saying robots and digital agents would leave significant numbers of workers — white and blue collar — idle by 2025, and the other half saying those technologies would lead to more new jobs than they displace. (Nor is this issue confined to the U.S.: The Belgian think tank Bruegel recently estimated how many current jobs in the 28 EU countries were vulnerable to computerization; the rates ranged from 47% in Sweden and the U.K. to 62% in Romania.)  Much as we try, no one can see into the future. But we can look to the recent past to get a sense for how technological change already has reshaped the U.S. workforce — creating new job categories while others fade away. These changes can be tracked using data from the Occupational Employment Statistics program, a federal-state project that regularly surveys business establishments to generate employment and wage estimates for some 800 different occupations. The OES program periodically revises its occupational classification scheme — adding some occupations, dropping some and changing the definitions of others. While that can make year-over-year comparisons tricky, the changes themselves can illustrate emerging and declining job categories.”