6 ms·

A lot of current jobs directly tied to some sort of college degrees will be automated out of existence in the near future.

bluedevil2k 8y ago
This is a silly statement - I’d say a lot more jobs currently tied to NOT needing a college degree will be automated out of existence. Jobs that require creativity and critical thinking will be the ones that survive (I believe that’s the quote from the recent Last Week Tonight). Those tend to be college educated jobs.
- SamuelAdams 8y ago
  How about Accountants? Turbo Tax automated many of the individual needs for accountants, and plenty of investing / portfolio management advice can be found online for free. The last big push is for enterprise / business / high net worth individuals to automate their accountants. It's not to say accountants won't exist at all: we still need them as Subject Matter Experts to make changes to the software. But we won't need huge numbers of them like we do today.
  - heartbreak 8y ago
    I think accounting is probably a bad example of this. TurboTax automates the job of tax preparation, not accounting in general. The national tax prep brands (think HR Block) don’t even hire people with accounting degrees to do their manual tax prep.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    TurboTax can't handle even moderately complicated tax situations without forcing the user to learn about tax law. (E.g. where people live and work in different states, which is not unusual in the northeast.) Nor can they handle the human-facing job of sorting through someone's documents. We pay an accountant about $1,000 a year to do our taxes, and being able to simply forward him a bunch of W-2s and email receipts instead of triaging them myself makes it worth every penny. (Fun fact: even though tax preparation software is more than 25 years old, more than half of people still pay a tax preparer to do their taxes.) There is even less of a basis for thinking you can automate actual corporate accounting with known technology. Contrary to popular belief, that does not involve just applying clear-cut rules to ledger entries, but rather lots of judgment about how real-world transactions should be treated under the accounting guidelines.
- jordache 8y ago
  >I’d say a lot more jobs currently tied to NOT needing a college degree will be automated out of existence True, but I was making commentary on a large number of college education required positions. They are mutually exclusive assertions. All the reasons to get Andrew Yang on the debate stage! Andrew Yang 2020! YangGang!
  - bluedevil2k 8y ago
    I had never heard of this guy before your comment. After reading about him, he's certainly an interesting person who has well-thought out policy ideas. He doesn't match all my political ideas, but he's certainly not a Democrat party-line guy.
    - jordache 8y ago
      listen to his joe rogan interview. He is very close to meeting the threshold of being in the DNC debates.
- Kye 8y ago
  This is only true if all the things humans perceive as requiring human creativity and critical thinking actually require them. Human brains are notoriously bad at self-assessment.

bluedevil2k 8y ago

This is a silly statement - I’d say a lot more jobs currently tied to NOT needing a college degree will be automated out of existence. Jobs that require creativity and critical thinking will be the ones that survive (I believe that’s the quote from the recent Last Week Tonight). Those tend to be college educated jobs.

SamuelAdams 8y ago
How about Accountants? Turbo Tax automated many of the individual needs for accountants, and plenty of investing / portfolio management advice can be found online for free. The last big push is for enterprise / business / high net worth individuals to automate their accountants. It's not to say accountants won't exist at all: we still need them as Subject Matter Experts to make changes to the software. But we won't need huge numbers of them like we do today.
- heartbreak 8y ago
  I think accounting is probably a bad example of this. TurboTax automates the job of tax preparation, not accounting in general. The national tax prep brands (think HR Block) don’t even hire people with accounting degrees to do their manual tax prep.
- rayiner 8y ago
  TurboTax can't handle even moderately complicated tax situations without forcing the user to learn about tax law. (E.g. where people live and work in different states, which is not unusual in the northeast.) Nor can they handle the human-facing job of sorting through someone's documents. We pay an accountant about $1,000 a year to do our taxes, and being able to simply forward him a bunch of W-2s and email receipts instead of triaging them myself makes it worth every penny. (Fun fact: even though tax preparation software is more than 25 years old, more than half of people still pay a tax preparer to do their taxes.) There is even less of a basis for thinking you can automate actual corporate accounting with known technology. Contrary to popular belief, that does not involve just applying clear-cut rules to ledger entries, but rather lots of judgment about how real-world transactions should be treated under the accounting guidelines.
jordache 8y ago
>I’d say a lot more jobs currently tied to NOT needing a college degree will be automated out of existence True, but I was making commentary on a large number of college education required positions. They are mutually exclusive assertions. All the reasons to get Andrew Yang on the debate stage! Andrew Yang 2020! YangGang!
- bluedevil2k 8y ago
  I had never heard of this guy before your comment. After reading about him, he's certainly an interesting person who has well-thought out policy ideas. He doesn't match all my political ideas, but he's certainly not a Democrat party-line guy.
  - jordache 8y ago
    listen to his joe rogan interview. He is very close to meeting the threshold of being in the DNC debates.
Kye 8y ago
This is only true if all the things humans perceive as requiring human creativity and critical thinking actually require them. Human brains are notoriously bad at self-assessment.