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There are four major categories of jobs that can resist automation: 1) Entrepreneurs and organizers who initiate new products, services, movements, or new styl
by nopinsight 10y ago
There are four major categories of jobs that can resist automation:
1) Entrepreneurs and organizers who initiate new products, services, movements, or new styles of arts and interactions.
2) People experts--designers, entertainers, artists, experience enhancers, high-level service personnels, value-enhancing salespeople--who understand deep human needs and use their creativity, empathy, interpersonal skills, and technology to realize them. Routine "people jobs" that customers wouldn't pay more to interact with humans could be replaced by AI agents, in some cases in humaniod robotic bodies.
3) Well-rounded analysts who can communicate with clients and stakeholders and translate their needs into fairly high-level specifications for automation technology to perform. Low-level programming jobs will increasingly become more of a niche as software & platforms can adapt better through machine learning and upcoming AI advances. More and more software will be programmable, implicitly and explicitly, by end users.
4) Locomotion specialists--physical therapists, specialist nurses, dentists--who integrate theoretical knowledge and experience with their flexibility and dexterity. Robotics technology will take a good many decades before it can cost effectively compete with these experts. I think we may achieve human-level ability to think and solve problems flexibly before these people are challenged.
(Let me know if there are categories I miss.)
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It seems to me categories 1) and 2) above may have the most openings for workers in the future. Education systems in most of the world are badly inadequate for preparing people for those jobs, however. The worst-fit systems are in developing countries where they are still heavily rooted in models for training 20th century industrial workers. Open-ended educational models like Montessori need to spread much more widely to prevent inequitable jobless future for the masses.
Note: Basic income is orthogonal to having respectable occupations and providing value to community. It is likely that human psychology has been shaped, culturally and even evolutionarily, in a way that people need a purpose and a valued occupation to live and feel well. (Perhaps the average number of working hours will be reduced to 3-4 hours per day and people will be free to pursue their hobbies and social activities.)
- intended 10y agoGreat point. I was looking at education tech, and I think education is not a "solvable problem". Retention and mastery Remain the two ends of the success spectrum. But where a student lies on that spectrum depends on a lot of variables, several of which directly link to economic outcomes in the nation such as 1) nutrition levels of parent and grand parent (in particular female education) 2) nutrition availability 3) average household wealth 4) child labor (more importantly - the necessity for children to work to keep the family unit going) 5) country stability (no war is an obvious one) 6) teacher quality and school funding These in turn impact very personal variables that determine how students codify information such as 1) student age (children vs an adult who needs to retrain while keeping a family afloat) 2) learning style 3) mastery of language of education, and mastery of the language of higher education (multi language societies have to Deal with this) 4) stress 5) health and health availability 6) freedom to study (if you are a girl child, or Of the wrong tribe/caste/color/religion) And this doesn't account for many other variables such as people actively trying to teach you falsehoods or bad syllabi (sort of part of the education quality) And this entire system does not exist in a vaccum - parents tend to push kids into education streams which improve job options, hence the demand for STEM.
- corecoder 10y agoWhat about caregivers, like baby sitters, nurses etc? Will we entrust unattended machines with our children any time soon?
- corecoder 10y agoAlso: we are mainly talking of automating manufacture and transportation, but are we that close to automating house and road building and repairing? Edit: damn autocorrect
- nopinsight 10y agoYes, on-site constructions seem to be among those I left out. The locomotion, weight-balancing, sensory, and reasoning skills required are close to or at AGI level as well. It could probably be grouped with category 4 above.
- nopinsight 10y agoThose professions require a combination of people expertise (category 2) and locomotion skills (category 4). They will be needed for a long time to come. In many ways the jobs require human-level general intelligence to perform properly and thus we may need to solve AGI before they can be fully automated. Bottom line: There are a lot of opportunities to increase the number of people doing those kinds of jobs, if the middle class and the working class receive productivity dividends from automation (through economy or government subsidies).