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Given the number of graduates who join the workforce every year in India, plus the traditional model of companies to maintain a bench for graduate engineer in a

Given the number of graduates who join the workforce every year in India, plus the traditional model of companies to maintain a bench for graduate engineer in anticipation of big contracts, the number doesn't look disproportionate. Apart from all the politics and shifting revenue targets (which are the culprit to a great extent), todays technology trends clearly indicates a lot of "high-valued" job are going to be redundant as well, one report from CBRE predicts 50% of occupations today will no longer exist in 2025. whats shall everyone do? skill up . Is that anything new in software development? Nopes, in my 11 years I have already jumped through hoops of yet another modern day tech stack a few times to stay afloat.So I'd imagine its not just the low value IT jobs which are at risk, even the bleeding edge development practices might face the same fate. Any mobile developer thinking about joining the blockchain, ML bandwagon? or wait, carpentry anyone? :sigh

visarga 9y ago
On the one hand you basically say things will change too much too fast: > CBRE predicts 50% of occupations today will no longer exist in 2025 But on the other hand, things don't change fast enough: > whats shall everyone do? skill up . Is that anything new in software development? Nopes These two positions, change and no change, can't be simultaneously true. If there is change, then there are new applications where humans are needed. If there is no change, then human jobs remain untaken by automation. There will never be a lack of jobs for people as long as people have desires and needs that are unfulfilled. Even if all our needs today are fulfilled, we create new goals and new entitlements for which we have to work. Take, for example, medicine and movies - these two occupations existed as pre-modern medicine and theatre even 1000 years ago. But now, that we have automated many aspects such as blood tests, pill production, medical scanning, and in the case of movies, copying and broadcasting - they should reduce the need for doctors and actors, but instead, they increase 100x the number of doctors and actors. Why? Because we want more, much more than a millenia ago. We have expanded our entitlement more than 100x and we're busier than ever, in the middle of automation. Believe in our desire for more, in our greed and ever raising entitlement! They'll keep us employed.
- forkjoin 9y ago
  Not entirely sure about your inferences from my comment, I didn't say there are not going to be jobs, of course there will be jobs. However, perhaps amidst the Artificial intelligence, jobs will require more creative, social , emotional intelligence. Thats where we need to skill up and point I made above was just to highlight that this re-structuring is not just relevant for todays low valued work but for the entire spectrum of whats a super-skill today and going to be "low valued" few years down the line. Also, I'd argue that in the context of your examples (which are slightly digressing from this thread), medicine and movies , reason why we have more doctors and actors could strongly be attributed to the socio-economic growth of the rising population, a lot more people can/need medical service and go to cinema that what we had 1000 years ago. Technology here solves the problem of efficiency and scale which is just complementing the progression.
  - visarga 9y ago
    I'll try another example. Let's say we automate cleaning of cities. Suddenly people are going to want drones that can trim trees and bushes, devices that can clean walls, bots that can scour woods and lakes for plastic and junk, and 100 other things that we didn't have the time and energy to do, but now are possible. Each of these applications need to be designed, produced, deployed and managed. My point is that automation creates new applications, and thus, jobs that sit on top of it. Like SEO - who would have guessed what SEO is 25 years ago? And now there is a whole field. We create new desires, we raise our entitlement to the equal of what we can achieve, no matter how much it is.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  I'd be curious if the number of full-time paid actors as a percentage of the total population has changed since Classical times. I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't. (No data. I can't tell either way.) Medicine has indeed changed. But plenty of other occupations - manual farming, blacksmithing, even full-time life in a religious communities - have all-but disappeared. (That latter "occupation" holding a very non-trivial percentage of the population for at least a thousand years.) Jobs exist when there's a perceived market for their output. No one is going to argue that today's software dev practices can't be improved and streamlined with AI, or even with dumb automation. So the lower tier of IT jobs will indeed go. And it will not be replaced by new jobs for those with an equivalent (low) level of talent. There's actually something like Maslow's Hierarchy of desirable outputs from jobs. On the lowest tier you have dumb musicle, which is easily automated with animal help and then by machine aid. At the top you (probably) have political leadership - not because it's necessarily genuinely productive, but because it's good at making itself appear critically important. Between those extremes you have various layers that rely on different blends of muscle, IQ, original creativity, ability to command resources, people skills, strategic political skills, and persuasive abilities. (...Not an exhaustive list.) Mechanisation starts low and moves high. Muscle is easier to mechanise than IQ, but a lot of "high IQ" work is repetitive, and easier to mechanise than work that requires strategic political skills and persuasive ability. Bottom line: it's all vulnerable. No one's job is irreplaceable. Not even the privileged "jobs" at the top of the hierarchy, which are really just pure resource accumulation.
hesarenu 9y ago
It is very difficult to get good carpenters.

visarga 9y ago

On the one hand you basically say things will change too much too fast: > CBRE predicts 50% of occupations today will no longer exist in 2025 But on the other hand, things don't change fast enough: > whats shall everyone do? skill up . Is that anything new in software development? Nopes These two positions, change and no change, can't be simultaneously true. If there is change, then there are new applications where humans are needed. If there is no change, then human jobs remain untaken by automation. There will never be a lack of jobs for people as long as people have desires and needs that are unfulfilled. Even if all our needs today are fulfilled, we create new goals and new entitlements for which we have to work. Take, for example, medicine and movies - these two occupations existed as pre-modern medicine and theatre even 1000 years ago. But now, that we have automated many aspects such as blood tests, pill production, medical scanning, and in the case of movies, copying and broadcasting - they should reduce the need for doctors and actors, but instead, they increase 100x the number of doctors and actors. Why? Because we want more, much more than a millenia ago. We have expanded our entitlement more than 100x and we're busier than ever, in the middle of automation. Believe in our desire for more, in our greed and ever raising entitlement! They'll keep us employed.

forkjoin 9y ago
Not entirely sure about your inferences from my comment, I didn't say there are not going to be jobs, of course there will be jobs. However, perhaps amidst the Artificial intelligence, jobs will require more creative, social , emotional intelligence. Thats where we need to skill up and point I made above was just to highlight that this re-structuring is not just relevant for todays low valued work but for the entire spectrum of whats a super-skill today and going to be "low valued" few years down the line. Also, I'd argue that in the context of your examples (which are slightly digressing from this thread), medicine and movies , reason why we have more doctors and actors could strongly be attributed to the socio-economic growth of the rising population, a lot more people can/need medical service and go to cinema that what we had 1000 years ago. Technology here solves the problem of efficiency and scale which is just complementing the progression.
- visarga 9y ago
  I'll try another example. Let's say we automate cleaning of cities. Suddenly people are going to want drones that can trim trees and bushes, devices that can clean walls, bots that can scour woods and lakes for plastic and junk, and 100 other things that we didn't have the time and energy to do, but now are possible. Each of these applications need to be designed, produced, deployed and managed. My point is that automation creates new applications, and thus, jobs that sit on top of it. Like SEO - who would have guessed what SEO is 25 years ago? And now there is a whole field. We create new desires, we raise our entitlement to the equal of what we can achieve, no matter how much it is.
TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
I'd be curious if the number of full-time paid actors as a percentage of the total population has changed since Classical times. I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't. (No data. I can't tell either way.) Medicine has indeed changed. But plenty of other occupations - manual farming, blacksmithing, even full-time life in a religious communities - have all-but disappeared. (That latter "occupation" holding a very non-trivial percentage of the population for at least a thousand years.) Jobs exist when there's a perceived market for their output. No one is going to argue that today's software dev practices can't be improved and streamlined with AI, or even with dumb automation. So the lower tier of IT jobs will indeed go. And it will not be replaced by new jobs for those with an equivalent (low) level of talent. There's actually something like Maslow's Hierarchy of desirable outputs from jobs. On the lowest tier you have dumb musicle, which is easily automated with animal help and then by machine aid. At the top you (probably) have political leadership - not because it's necessarily genuinely productive, but because it's good at making itself appear critically important. Between those extremes you have various layers that rely on different blends of muscle, IQ, original creativity, ability to command resources, people skills, strategic political skills, and persuasive abilities. (...Not an exhaustive list.) Mechanisation starts low and moves high. Muscle is easier to mechanise than IQ, but a lot of "high IQ" work is repetitive, and easier to mechanise than work that requires strategic political skills and persuasive ability. Bottom line: it's all vulnerable. No one's job is irreplaceable. Not even the privileged "jobs" at the top of the hierarchy, which are really just pure resource accumulation.

hesarenu 9y ago

It is very difficult to get good carpenters.