Marshall Brain's Blog

Realtors are being replaced by robots. In this case, the robots take the form of software and databases on the Internet. This article discusses the trend:

The 6 Percent Solution: Skip Real Estate Agents

From the article:

Homeowners across the United States are figuring out that they do not need to pay what agents demand and they may not need an agent at all. At the same time, technology is giving consumers tools to nearly circumvent the agent. If enough people try it, agents are at risk of losing a good portion of their commissions - $100 billion last year.

$100 billion is a huge number. With approximately 100 million households in America, it means that every household paid about $1,000 to realtors last year. (!) As we eliminate realtors, each household will save $1,000 per year on average. And that is very good.

The question is this. There are about 1 million realtors in the U.S. Not all of them are "active", but let's say half are. If we eliminate 500,000 good, high-paying jobs, what are those people going to end up doing? See Robots taking jobs and Robotic Nation.

Here are some other good, high-paying jobs that may be heading in the same direction soon:

• Lawyers
  
• Truck drivers
  
• Teachers
  
• Surgical Nurses
  
• Poker players

OK, that last one isn't a "job" per se, but it is interesting that millions of people have started playing poker over the last few years, and the game is about to be dominated by robots.