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If your job doesn't require college, then pretty soon it won't require a human either. The more brain required the longer you have until a robot or computer can
by Apreche 10y ago
If your job doesn't require college, then pretty soon it won't require a human either. The more brain required the longer you have until a robot or computer can do it better.
- nugget 10y agoLots of automation-resistant jobs require "cleverness" which is different than intelligence, and isn't much taught in school anyway.
- jakubp 10y agoCan you give a few examples of such jobs, and what consitutes "cleverness" in them? Really curious.
- ThomPete 10y agoCleaning lady, construction worker, janitor, plumber, electrician, building inspector I could go on.
- analog31 10y agoAh, but those jobs are being eaten away by automation, even if it's happening slowly. Cleaning ladies are being displaced by disposable products that don't need to be cleaned. Plumbers and electricians are being displaced by labor saving technologies. A new house contains no copper tubing or sweat fittings -- they use flexible hose and swaged connections. Wiring is no longer done with hard conduit. Framing is done with machine made components such as roof trusses. Inspection is done by bribery. ;-)
- ThomPete 10y agoSure but before that ex. radiologist will have been replaced.
- analog31 10y agoAh, yes, but the person who owns the AI radiology business, and the equipment, will happen to be a radiologist.
- ThomPete 10y agoNo they wont. In fact they aren't today so why should they be in the future. And furthermore you need only very few people running a whole radiology business for billions of people.
- analog31 10y agoMaybe radiology is an exception (or my understanding is outdated), but from what I've read, a large portion of the medical industry is doctor-owned. For instance I've read that doctors provide a large portion of the investment pool for big ticket diagnostic equipment, and for businesses such as clinics, provider systems, and malpractice insurance companies. "The workers own the means of production." ;-)
- ThomPete 10y agoDoctor owned not doctors owned. The point is that you don't need the amount of radiologist you are currently education if pattern recognition gets done by machines.
- nugget 10y agoFull stack web development, growth hacking, lead generation/user acquisition, on- and offline marketing and entrepreneurship in general. I have half a dozen close friends who dropped out of high school and/or college and used their raw "ingenuity or shrewdness" rather than any learned skills in order to achieve enormous success (tens of millions of dollars). Some of them in Silicon Valley, but others in boring places and boring fields. In the past there were significant barriers to entry in many fields that required expensive, time consuming, often discriminatory pedigree to pass. These barriers have largely been destroyed over the last decade. The walls have been torn down and the ladders burned (much to the discomfort of those mid-climb), and they aren't coming back. Persistence and cleverness are the deadliest combination these days.
- paulcole 10y agoPlenty of jobs that require a brain don't require college-- creative work, trades that can be learned through apprenticeship...
- pcurve 10y agoWhether a job requires college degree or not is a pretty lousy predictor of whether it can be replaced a robot or computer.
- randomdata 10y agoDesigning robots doesn't require college. Once the robots are left to do that autonomously, what jobs are left?
- iamacynic 10y agothis is a bimodal distribution. my plumber/electrician/mechanic and my investment banker/lawyer aren't going to be replaced by robots any time soon.
- eru 10y agoYour investment banker might be replaced sooner than your plumber.
- komali2 10y agoWhy wouldn't your investment banker be replaced? Most trades are by bots anyway.
- Const-me 10y agoI once worked for a company that aimed to replace investment bankers with their robots. Basically an AI that reads news and other data sources, and gives stock trading advices.
- malthaus 10y agoinvestment banker != trader or investment manager an investment banker typically advises on M&A transactions which is a very human business where your career path is strongly correlated with your social skills and status rather than technical knowledge.
- joefourier 10y agoThat is one of the point the article argues against: thinking a college education is required to be highly skilled is confusing cause and effect. Especially for programming, the most important skills are acquired either through self-study or on-the-job training, making a formal 4 year program a waste of money, time and productivity.
- ThomPete 10y agoYou ironically couldn't be more wrong and you are looking at this the wrong way. A cleaning lady is going to be able to keep her job longer than a radiologist as the radiologist requires mostly the ability to understand visual patterns where as a cleaning lady requires general purpose AI. It's way harder to lift the rug, get in between the books etc. Furthermore you get it wrong. Specialization requires knowledge yes but mostly requires less of the brain. A cleaning lady have to use all sorts of different parts to do their jobs. So your rule is right in some way but you apply the wrong people to it. It's the cleaning lady who uses most of her brain not the specialist.
- wsxcde 10y agoYou're being biased by presentism. In an age where robots are cheap and ubiquitous, we won't still hire cleaning ladies (interesting assumption they're still ladies) just because they'll be able to clean under the rug. Instead, home furniture will change so that it becomes easier to clean for robots.
- zigzigzag 10y agoThat hasn't happened yet though. Stock brokers, on the other hand, once the quintessential white collar job, have been completely replaced by automated trading algorithms.
- wsxcde 10y agoBecause robots aren't cheap, at least for now. We're still at a stage where compute is cheap but interacting with real world using interfaces that go beyond screens and keyboards is still cumbersome and expensive. But coming back to stock brokers, is there an epidemic of college educated stock brokers ending up unemployed due to automation? I don't think so and that's because they have other skills they gained from their education. Automated trading algorithms don't make stock brokers useless in the same what that automated garbage collection doesn't make programmers useless.
- 10y ago
- esja 10y agoIn many cases the reverse is true: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
- Grustaf 10y agoMore likely it's the other way around. Most jobs requiring college education are actually pretty simple, and I think the next wave of AI powered automation will replace many of them. Meanwhile, it will take longer for people to build robots for each particular manual job. Not to mention the service industry where a lot of people prefer to deal with other humans, even when it wouldn't be necessary.
- snuxoll 10y agoArguably many jobs that require a degree are still nothing more than desk work that can be automated with relative ease.
- coldtea 10y agoYou'd be surprised. Some of the last jobs to go will be ones that require human judgement and motor skills but not much in the way of education.
- gremlinsinc 10y agoI'm a web developer, self-taught, some college, but no degree. Teaching myself ML now, so someday I can code AI -- pretty sure I'll keep teaching myself into a career without college, until all jobs are obsolete and we live in a post-scarcity society.
- pkaye 10y agoJust curious so you are learning the statistics and linear algebra background yourself so you can learn ML?
- IAmGraydon 10y agoNot quite. Some medical jobs could be among the first to be in jeopardy, for example. I believe those will be replaced before some very simple, low wage jobs like tech support in a call center. Why is this? Because many medical jobs consist of looking at information, making a diagnosis, and suggesting the course of action most likely to work. This is something that machines excel at. Many medical professionals never even communicate directly with the patient, leaving that to the doctor, while they assist the doctor with diagnosis behind the scenes. Take a radiologist, for example. On the other hand, a call center employee must be able to communicate in real time with a human at conversation level. That is doable by AI, but is much more difficult, and requires something closer to AGI. So the jobs that will be replaced first have nothing to do with education. They have to do with jobs which are reliant upon pattern recognition and information analysis. Those will go first, and some of them are very high paying and require quite a lot of education.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- alacombe 10y agoAll the plumbers, electricians, welders, drivers & construction & assembly folks who build the infrastructure you rely on will appreciate.
- dsfyu404ed 10y agoIt's gonna be a long time before we can automate the trades. Pretty much everything they do is non-repetitive except at the lowest level.
- maxerickson 10y agoComplete automation sure. Tools and techniques that remove a lot of direct labor? Those have already had a big impact on trades.