The safest job, the only one safe job - is to be the owner. You can't milk the cow better than a machine, you can't do a thing better than a machine on the long run. But you can own a farm and take the dividends.
Downvoted for groundless assumptions and for failing to google the basics. There are more, not fewer physical documents produced, because it is easier to produce them, the number of bank tellers has actually increased, etc.
Third, there is a misconception that highly theoretical tasks done by skilled experts will be among the last to go. But due to their theoretical nature such tasks are fairly easy represent virtually.
Name three.
Third, there is a misconception that highly theoretical tasks done by skilled experts will be among the last to go. But due to their theoretical nature such tasks are fairly easy represent virtually.
Actually I think he may be right, since this is basically a consequence of Moravec's paradox.
"The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived.... As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come. "[2]
But why might this be so?
...“Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest
1 Maybe I should clarify: Are the tasks previously done by bank tellers becoming automated? Yes. The fact that the number bank tellers has increased does not invalidate my statement. If there were no internet banking or ATMs then increase would be much larger right? So its trivial to see that the number of bank tellers can increase at the same time as bank teller jobs are lost to automated systems.
2 I'll give you an extreme one. I am a few steps away of earning a degree in theoretical physics specializing in quantum information theory. Theoretical quantum information theory is nothing but symbol manipulation in a framework on existing theorems of linear algebra. With enough resources pretty much all of the research could be done by computers alone. Algorithms could in principle put mathematical statements together, other algorithms testing the meaningfulness of the output and so on.. but that a discussion interesting enough to have its own thread. I just mean that theoretical work is not immune to automation.
Organize all the known mathematics and physics of 1915 in a computer running the right algorithms, the ask it: 'what is gravity?' Would it output General theory of relativity? I think so.
My question is: What jobs will be the last ones to go, and why?
If your goal, in asking this question, is to plot a strategy that keeps you employed for as long as possible, then you probably ought to backtrack and look at the goals that's meant to serve. There are better ways to ensure long-term financial security, better ways to maintain a sense of purpose, and better ways to keep busy.
Politician. Not necessarily in its current form, but I suspect humans will continue to want to feel in some way involved in planning their own futures, and be willing to provide status and power to selected other humans who ostensibly represent them in that process, for as long as there are recognizable humans. (The selected representatives will grow less and less actually relevant to planning the future, but that has almost nothing at all to do with the matter. It's not entirely clear to me how relevant to that they are now.)
Athlete. Again, not necessarily in its current form, but I suspect humans will continue to want to identify with humans who win in competitions of physical skill against other humans. To some degree I put soldier in the same bucket, but there are issues with identifying that as a safe job, and I find it more likely that we'll replace soldiers with more effective machines as they become available than that we'll replace athletes
Reality show contestant. This is a field where observing "people like me" rather than "people who are actually any good at what they're doing" is the whole point, after all. Replacing them with more efficient machines would seem to miss the point altogether.
Parent. Dunno if that counts as a "job" by this post's standards, but I think we will continue having humans raise other humans long past the point where we develop technology that's better at it.
We'll probably redefine 'job' long before we've lost them all. As humans lose the ability to work for a living, we'll stop pretending we do need to work for a living. Then, we'll still have professions for the prestige and whatnot that goes along with it, even if everything truly useful can be done by machines instead.
I predict that the transition period between modern capitalism and post-capitalism will be very awkward and uncomfortable, as the number of jobs that it is economical for a human to perform slowly shrinks and shrinks, putting more people in unemployment. Assuming no singularity beforehand, the point at which we collectively decide that everyone gets a good quality of life provided for them without having to work for it will probably come long after the point at which it is warranted.
What jobs will be the last ones to go, and why?
Probably management - because they are in charge of hiring and firing everyone else.
All of the research that I've done as an undergrad has basically been data reduction/data analysis; I think that a narrow AI could be developed within 20 years to do all of what I've been doing with much greater efficiency. So much of it is automated/on the computer already that taking the extra step would not be relatively difficult.
Understanding specifically what I was doing and why took some time, and there are still things left for me to learn, but I think that that sort of work is not secure at all from being replaced by automation. If anyone is curious, I'm talking about the field of spectroscopic chemical abundance analysis.
Well, one thing that humans are superior at is modeling other humans, and their reactions to things. So to the extent that people do anything at all, they'll probably do that.
For example, music composition, writing fiction, and similar artistic endeavors require that the artist know what people enjoy. I think that that will be done by humans for the foreseeable future.
Also, things where you actually want the person doing it to be a person will continue. Counseling? I dunno.
"When work is privilege of the rich?" seems sort of relevant to this discussion. Especially:
..."The "masses" mostly waste away in cubicles doing makework. The elite do things like install mosquito nets in sunny third world locales"
I assume that anonmouse is referring to activities like the Peace Corps in which young people from well-off families do work in third world countries that would be considered menial low-wage low-status work if done in the United States.
This demonstrates two points.
(1) If people are convinced that a c
Jobs are not a scarce resource. Employees are. We do not have approximately 100% employment because the number of people is about the same as the number of jobs. We do because as long as there are people available we will be willing to hire them for some amount of money. If they have nothing better to do, they'll take it. If there's no jobs worth doing, they won't look for them, and won't be counted towards the statistic.
As what some longer living jobs might be:
Lobbyist.
Robotics sales engineer. (A former computer programmer or roboticist versed in the selling of site specific robotics implementation solutions to industrial conglomerates, super heroes, and rogue agents, not a robot acting as a sales engineer)
The US government has listed some trends here: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_203.htm
Manufacturing is clearly out. Services that involve interacting with other humans (health care, teaching) are in.
Personally, I think we've plucked a lot of low hanging fruit. I predict the maturation of some technologies that will make a few fields move towards obsolescence. I expect at major ( >%50) decline in employment for long haul truckers and tax preparers under that maturation. Retail sales will decline in favor of ship-to-home, and obviously some jobs are clear...
In my mind the question comes down to what do humans value that other humans do that will be hard to do or hard to value if it comes from a machine?
Art in all forms. Live music performance. Painting, personal photography. Interior design. Even industrial design. For a long time the parts of this that can be automated will be used by experts to improve the quality of their performances.
SImilarly with engineering, I think it will be a long time before the tools replace the tool-bearer. Software will be easier and easier to write because the level at ...
First of all, in basically all parts of the world the fraction of the population with an academic degree is growing fast. Higher education will probably not be as good as a differentiator in the future.
In that case people will just need to get Masters degrees to differentiate themselves. A world in which more people are educated (ignoring concerns about the automation of learning) will probably be one with more teachers and lecturers.
I'm hoping that some novel jobs come out of deregulation of highly general schooling, inspired by statements early in this video.
Politicians: politicians already find it hard to find jobs after leaving politics....extremely high job insecurity too. Their jobs aren't automated, they're downshifted to beaurocrats as something becomes economic orthodoxy and unpolitical. I reckon politics is a bad career choice irrespective of automation.
Agricultural occupations: already automated - precision agriculture is already automating everything from plant disease iden...
The trends are clear, more and more work that was previously done by humans are being shifted to automated systems. Factories with thousands of workers has been replaced by highly efficient facilities containing industrial robots and a few human operators, bank tellers by online banking, most parts of any logistics chain by different types of automatic sorting, moving, and sending mechanisms. Offices are run by less and less people as we're handling and processing fewer and fewer physical documents. In any area less people than before are needed to do the same work as before. The world is becoming automated.
These developments are not only here to stay - they are accelerating. Most of what is done by humans today could easily be done by computers in a near future. I would personally guess that most professions existing today could be replaced by affordable automated equivalents within 30 years. My question is: What jobs will be the last ones to go, and why?
Often education is pointed out as safe bet to ensure being needed in the future, and while that is true its not the whole story. First of all, in basically all parts of the world the fraction of the population with an academic degree is growing fast. Higher education will probably not be as good as a differentiator in the future. Second, while degrees in the fields hot in the future is hot in the future there is no guarantee that the degrees hot today will be of any use later on. Third, there is a misconception that highly theoretical tasks done by skilled experts will be among the last to go. But due to their theoretical nature such tasks are fairly easy represent virtually.
Of course as we progress technologically new doors are opening and the hottest job year 2030 might not even exist today. Any suggestions?