7 ms·

Ask HN: Which jobs will survive and which will disappear in 50 years?

21 points by _448 4y ago

And why?

kuwoze 4y ago
will survive: doctor bricklayer programmer Reasons all the same: difficult to automate with AI due to non-repeating nature of work. However repeating parts will be automated, hence GP likely to be a bot, also things like co-pilot will replace most web-devs. also houses can be mass built in container-like pods and stacked. so this is very nuanced. check-mate cheeky comment section. will not survive: retail worker non-luxury goods delivery driver in cities with regular grid-like streets aka most of the US truck drivers between cities Twitter content moderator Reasons all the same: easy to automate with AI due to repeating nature of work. I think the common theme is that if you want something nice like seeing a human doctor, some personlised service, or a nice brick house you are going to see a human. But this will cost tremenduously. So rich people will interact with humans for most services/products while poor people will be interacting with bots. It's already happening (auto-bot callcentre helplines). Overall very distopian.
- JetAlone 4y ago
  A new line of work will be created; Butlerian Jihadi.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    Kinda yes, in a more serious sense, there will be new roles for humans to play with respect to moderating technologies; "Bladerunners" might not be exactly what P.K Dick imagined, but maybe not so far off. If we take AI to be the science fiction vision we seem to wish for then it will require managing, stewarding, planning, opposing, judging, teaching, healing, hunting down and deactivating, sabotaging, negotiating with.... Bricklayers became architects, surveyors and town planners as complexity increased in the construction world. Cities evolved to have traffic wardens and police... but the same has yet to really mature in digital technology. We imagine all these benefits of "smart cities" and "digital working" - many ideologies that have been around since the 1970s. Yet software engineering is still in its infancy with respect to civic function, ethics, rights and responsibilities, remedies and rules. We have a more or less laissez-faire free-for-all market economy that produces isolated "goods". The failure of this default model can be seen in the tombstones of the Google graveyard. And, while it was a driver of innovation for some time, it isn't really working out in the big "civic" sense, and we certainly cannot rely upon centralised mega monopoly Big-Tech to do the right thing (except in a William Gibson style techno-fascist dystopia). So I think many timeless jobs will adapt so that technologies can fit into our society, as welcome, well-managed friends, rather than allowing them to take-over our society. Maintaining that balance will be a new frontier for human intellectual labour in teaching, legal, planning and policing functions.
- teddyuk 4y ago
  >> delivery driver in cities with regular grid-like streets aka most of the US So no good in any country older than 245 years old?
- oytis 4y ago
  We're getting closer to automate programmer's job too though. In the end it's a text problem - get a textual description (ticket) and generate code that fits it. We have models that can generate non-repeating art, why not non-repeating code?
  - rob74 4y ago
    ...but once you get your "textual description" to be as exact as it needs to be so code can be generated from it directly, it will be basically indistinguishable from code.
    - flir 4y ago
      Unless the AI is allowed to ask questions, like a regular programmer would? I think we're getting close to strong AI there though, so I don't see it happening any time soon.
      - mkmk3 4y ago
        >> I think we're getting close to strong AI there though, so I don't see it happening any time soon. It's unclear which clause is meant to be negative or positive here. If we're close to strong AI, systems which ask clarifying questions would be close as well, no?
        flir 4y ago
        Sorry. To be clear: I think strong AI is "fifty years away" and has been for seventy five years. So yeah, an expert system that can read a natural language description of a feature and ask questions until it has enough detail to generate the code is science fiction in my opinion. Having said that, maybe it could be achieved in a limited domain, SHRDLU-style. But that's just a way to deal with the ambiguity by excising it.
    - oytis 4y ago
      It doesn't have to be exact, no more than your input to Dall-E should be exact. Give the AI some understanding of intent of the project, some automatic metrics that will check AI's job quality and let it optimise against it. If AI doesn't generate what you wanted on the first run, correct it and let it learn. Basically what you would do with a junior developer.
- defrost 4y ago
  > bricklayer Bricklaying was automated 5+ years ago .. locally they've been in heavy use for new homes for three years or so. Robotic bricklayer builds houses 3x faster than humans ( 5 years ago ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s17IAj-XpU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s17IAj-XpU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6IQB5S1N5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6IQB5S1N5I
  - kuwoze 4y ago
    lol you are indeed the cheeky comment section: yes laying bricks in a long straight line is automated. Laying bricks in more intricate ways would take a lot more time. Also the machine still has to have human super vision and they seem to clean the mortar. It's nuanced
jstx1 4y ago
50 years is too far away into the future to make any meaningful predictions. I would be very skeptical of anyone who is confident about their answer.
- rieTohgh6 4y ago
  Nowadays it looks like we are getting close to autonomous vehicles - but it was the same 20 years ago - I predicted then that drivers as a profession will disappear soon - and it still didn't happen. Like many people have already noticed: we overestimate what can be accomplished in the short term and underestimate what can be accomplished in the long term.
- pasttense01 4y ago
  Well look into the past 50 years. Consider all the massive technological innovations. What I think you will see is truly enormous inertia. For example in 1975 Business Week Magazine predicted the paperless office. So tell us how long ago it has been since you saw paper used for information transmission (in other words not packaging)? Weeks? Months? Last time was when your Grandma sent you a birthday card 3 months ago? No. "The average American office worker uses an average of 10,000 sheets of office paper per year." https://www.formstack.com/resources/blog-paper-statistics https://www.formstack.com/resources/blog-paper-statistics
mkmohit 4y ago
[flagged]
jamager 4y ago
Perhaps contrary to popular believe, I think the jobs that have survived thousands of years will likely survive another 50, even when all automatization included: - teachers - writers & artists - doctors - farmers - builders - scientists - what people say is the oldest profession in the world It is the relatively new jobs (< 100 yrs old) that face more uncertainty: they perhaps have proven themselves worthy in the last decades (and they are booming right now), but might not be resilient enough for world that is coming. It is not only about automation, but adaptability to quick / disruptive changes. - programmers - traders - journalists - marketers However, I wouldn't call this a "prediction". I think very few jobs will actually disappear completely.
- antigirl 4y ago
  interesting you say writers and artists would survive over programmers when AI has practically threatened all writers and artists livelihood as of recent.
  - jamager 4y ago
    Right? I don't think, however, that any competent writer or artist feel threatened by AI outputs at all. The threat comes for others abusing AI to misuse their name and steal their work. That is a legitimate concern.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    It'll just become even more of a bimodal distribution of income than at the moment. There will be hundreds of thousands of people writing for free in communities, with whatever anti-AI policing they need to make that work for them, and a few dozen celebrities who make a living from writing.
  - resonious 4y ago
    I hear people say this, but I haven't seen any concrete examples of AI generated art actually threatening the entire art industry. Sure, AI can generate me a nice pic to use for my blog post, but are game studios ready to fire all of their concept artists?
dijit 4y ago
Sysadmins, but they will have yet another name. Why? Tech exists and it needs low level constant work to keep secure and reliable. Idealists think this can be automated. I would wish them to be right, but I know it's not realistic.
ulfw 4y ago
Lawyers. Lawyers, prosecutors, judges etc will survive forever.
bufferoverflow 4y ago
I used to think creative jobs (arts, writing), programming and science will be last to automate, but this year completely destroyed my confidence in that. Stable diffusion, DallE, Midjourney produce absolutely beautiful paintings, drawings, renders, photos of sculptures. We have AIs that write movie scripts, book plots. We are starting to get AIs that are okay at making music. We have transformer models that generate textured 3D models. On the programming side we have Copilot, which can't yet replace a programmer, but it's definitely a first confident step. On the science side we have AI tools that fold proteins, predict material properties of novel materials, the wet lab work is getting automated too. I find it hard to name an area of human work that can't be automated. And not even work, any human activity. It looks like all the problems that can be solved in software, will be solved first. Robotics will be lagging, but not very far behind. Once we perfect artificial muscles, it's game over. The rest is software and scaling everything up.
- CGamesPlay 4y ago
  I feel like this take is a lot like saying that the invention of a car is going to obsolete the profession of carriage drivers. The job of a carriage driver isn't to drive a carriage, it's to drive a vehicle. It's the same with all of these new technologies you've listed: they alter the job description, but don't remove the job.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    Yeah. Look at the millions of words written on tweaking prompts. And while SD is very impressive, it’s going to be a long time before it’s producing high res imagery, at least without ready access to lots of data center grade hardware)
  - avemuri 4y ago
    There are two opposing forces that determine the net change - Greater productivity. A single carriage driver can now drive a bus, so fewer carriages are needed - Lower costs/ higher demand. Everyone who walked can now afford the bus, so the number of drivers goes up even if fewer drivers are needed per traveler.
  - 4y ago
sanxiyn 4y ago
To disappear: ICE car mechanics. Sure, we will need a few to service museum pieces, but it won't be a big occupation like it is now.
- santiagobasulto 4y ago
  Transportation and freight cargo will likely remain, right? Heavy Machinery (excavators, loaders, etc) will likely not transition to electric. I agree that it looks like a diminishing demanded job, but we'll probably have ICE vehicles and machine still for a long time, right?
- randunel 4y ago
  Petrol stations will disappear, they'll get replaced by petrol delivery companies which will simply deliver petrol for your vintage vehicle, possibly with some sort of subscription. I can see the petrol stations near the city centres becoming multi storey parking lots with electric chargers, and the ones on the outskirts becoming cafés with electric chargers. I'm fairly certain battery swapping won't become a thing, people take the piss when it comes to stuff that isn't theirs, just look at the city scooters debacle.
- refurb 4y ago
  Considering the engine is but one small part of the car, i doubt mechanics are going anywhere.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    If we can fully automated building a car, which to me is comparatively low bar compared to AI for other things. Couldn't we also in 50 years design cars that could be dissembled in reverse and then broken parts replaced by automation? So ship car to automated workshop, it removes the parts replaces what is broken and put it back together...
    - qbrass 4y ago
      Bolts rust and seize or strip or bend or break in ways you can't simply reverse the installation process to remove.
dustedcodes 4y ago
I think this will depend hugely on the "where" part of the question. For instance I think self driving technology has near zero chance of being successful in places like Europe in the next 50 years. Streets are not built in grids and are super narrow with a lot of "complex" rules like multi lane roundabouts. Europe also has a lot of common sense driving with unspoken rules. Take a narrow road with two way traffic. It's common that both cars would drive at each other and both drivers see a gap where they know that one of the two cars will sideline to let the other car past it. Sometimes a car is already tucked aside and gives the oncoming car a light signal to indicate that they give them priority. Sometimes this is more formal, where you have narrow bridge crossings where there is an official traffic sign that tells who has priority in case of two cars coming at each other and so on. Then there are so many other things like height restrictions due to low bridges and so much more. Observing the "progress" that self driving cars made in the Valley it is clear that it would be a catastrophe anywhere else in their current state. Having said this, I think we will see a lot more "service" jobs in the future. The wealth gap is widening and there will be more people with a lot of disposable income and many people who will want to make a small cut from those people by providing all sorts of services: - intimacy (non sexual), this is already a thing in Tokyo where you can pay someone to cuddle with you or hug you - friends to hire (e.g. someone to go to the theatre, etc.), again already a thing in Japan - someone to stand in a queue for you in places where you can't make a reservation, Apple stores, etc. (already seen in some places) - getting paid for a surrogacy pregnancy, for couples who want children but the women is too "busy" for being pregnant - etc. There is no end to the creativity of those "service" jobs. Initially it will be weird but in 200 years people will think it's a normal job, just like we think it is normal for someone to file the dead skin of your feet today, cut your nails or wax someone's harry back. The most secure job will be Doctors and other medical professionals. People are getting older and every human being will require medical treatment in their lives and still we will all die from some medical condition. Healthcare is 100% immune to all other external factors such as how well the economy is doing or what not. People are always ill and the population will still grow to approx. 12 billion before it will start to decline and until then there will be an ever growing pressure on the medical sector. Any technology in that sector will see huge growth if they are not completely sh*t.
samwillis 4y ago
Almost all "jobs" will still exist, but will be different. "AI" and automation will make these jobs more efficient, but not replace them. AI in the creative domain (art, music, writing, programming) will not replace the activity of crating and inventing. People still need to drive these tool, have a skill in controlling them, curate the output. Designers will still have a job to do. People will still work in retail, maybe fewer on the checkout (thats already happening). People will still deliver parcel to your front door, the "last mile", just more efficiently with more automation in the rest of the process. That not to say there wont me fewer people doing these jobs, in some cases dramatically fewer. But they will still all exist. The question should be "what do our lives look like in 50 years time?". Are we still working 8 hour days 5 days a week? Do we still travel on "holiday" 1-2 times a year for a couple of weeks? This is where I think we will see the biggest change, the ways work slots into our lives, not the jobs that exist.
toyg 4y ago
Survive: Lawmakers, lobbyists, lawyers, judges; even journalists, although they might not be called that anymore - influencing public opinion will always be valuable enough to be done for some kind of money. Also surgeons, simply because trust in robots will never (and should never) be high enough to let them cut humans unsupervised as a matter of routine. Not survive: people making advertising jingles, or drawing shop signage. That sort of low-effort, barely-creative work will be taken by stats-driven programs ("ai").
- akmarinov 4y ago
  Isn't the lawyer job 90% looking up past cases, documentation, contracts, etc. The part where you go in front of a judge and dramatically defend your client is a very slim sliver of it. And that 90% is ripe for automation.
  - toyg 4y ago
    That's the paralegal's job. The lawyer chooses what makes sense to use among the options the paralegal digs up, using judgement to interpret the actual case and relevant law.
karteum 4y ago
Unless there is a major disruption, in 50 years we will have hit hard the limits of earth natural resources (in terms of metals/minerals/oil) and the consequences of climate change so it's very difficult to predict how the world will be. My guess is that once the system reaches some kind of new equilibrium, jobs will be mostly low-tech and very similar to 1 century ago : farmers (with permaculture), bakers, people who repair stuffs, blacksmiths (but with far less volume of production compared to the industrial world we live in today and mostly simple/repairable/low-techs stuffs : hammers, bikes, shovels, plows...).
- lpcvoid 4y ago
  Sounds pretty good, I hope you're right.
  - karteum 4y ago
    Actually no it does not sound very good and I hope I'm wrong : I wish there would be some major discoveries that would still enable us to keep some degree of comfort / food safety / health safety (and a little bit of fun with high-tech for us geeks :) and restore our half-destroyed environment while still being 8 billion people on earth, but at the moment I am extremely pessimistic about the social and environmental consequences of oil/metals depletion * climate change, and how that transition (or collapse) will be handled (or not handled) to reach such a new equilibrium (where my guess is that anyway people will have to live with low-tech, whatever this means in terms of comfort/longevity/...). Remember that the sustainable world (horses, sustainable agriculture, sailboats, windmills, medicine with herbs, low techs... that many people somehow idealize today) is precisely the one we left 2 centuries ago with the industrial revolution, and there were understandable reasons for that : fossil fuels are infinitely more concentrated than renewables, and all the industrial development they allowed enabled to secure food and health safety, holidays, etc. But now humans are addicted and dependent on those fossil fuels (in particular to sustain 8 billion people on earth), discovering that the party is over will leave us with an extremely bitter hangover. It's just a pity that humanity stupidly wasted all those resources and destroyed their environment so quickly while a different and less greedy economical/political model would have enabled us to live good lives for centuries...
_8j50 4y ago
I wonder if I infosec would still be a thing? I see a lot of improvements in security which if they catch on in that time will make things a lot more secure. I think what people miss on this thread is a lot of jobs will still be around just paying less with less people doing them. 50 years is too far ahead for me to predict anything. Although in IT, I think networking folks would be the last to go, not because you can't automate stuff but because short of a utopia, politics means different networks will exist and by definition networking connects stuff so computers can't fix themselves if they can't connect outside of a failed segment and technical burdens mean networking changes will be last to happen (basically no one uses ipv6 in private lans now for example). I think the global south's prosperity will mean a lot more software jobs, just not in the west. In the short term, I see retail getting decimated. Customer service is horrid and people who work those jobs complain endlessly. If AI is capable it would be much better to deal with than people. I have this idea of a completley unmanned (except one maintenance person) restaurant for example. I manned retail will always be there but there is huge room for unmanned retail. Not now but maybe in 10 years robots that clean up a mess, fold cloths and deliver meals to a table will be a reality (although my idea would have the meals delivered to tables without needing a robot). The police,politicians and lawyers will be plenty even 1000 years from now in my opinion.
rsecora 4y ago
It depends on the resources peak (Oil Peak, Gas Peak, Lithium Peak, Minerals Peak...). Our modern societies maintain themselves via energy consumption, if the energy production problem is solved, then the societies will evolve to more automation and removal of the low specialization jobs. But if we cant produce enough energy to cover the demand, then our societies will go back to previous levels of development and knowledge jobs will achieve the employment levels of the XV century.
jleyank 4y ago
Well, we really didn’t have computers much at all in 1955. That was 67 years ago - what jobs have disappeared since then? Lots of new ones appeared, though, as new “things” appeared and needed to be wrangled. And given the world started from zero, we’re not going to have as much change in tech +50 unless the discontinuity appears.
yucky 4y ago
Plumbers, HVAC technicians, Electricians - not only will they survive, they will never be outsourced to cheaper countries. And since Gen Z seems to have little interest in working with their hands, I suspect there will be an acute labor shortage in the trades that continues to drive their already high incomes, higher. As an added bonus, there is no need to all flock to the same handful of overpriced cities.

21 points by _448 4y ago

And why?

will survive: doctor bricklayer programmer Reasons all the same: difficult to automate with AI due to non-repeating nature of work. However repeating parts will be automated, hence GP likely to be a bot, also things like co-pilot will replace most web-devs. also houses can be mass built in container-like pods and stacked. so this is very nuanced. check-mate cheeky comment section. will not survive: retail worker non-luxury goods delivery driver in cities with regular grid-like streets aka most of the US truck drivers between cities Twitter content moderator Reasons all the same: easy to automate with AI due to repeating nature of work. I think the common theme is that if you want something nice like seeing a human doctor, some personlised service, or a nice brick house you are going to see a human. But this will cost tremenduously. So rich people will interact with humans for most services/products while poor people will be interacting with bots. It's already happening (auto-bot callcentre helplines). Overall very distopian.

JetAlone 4y ago
A new line of work will be created; Butlerian Jihadi.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Kinda yes, in a more serious sense, there will be new roles for humans to play with respect to moderating technologies; "Bladerunners" might not be exactly what P.K Dick imagined, but maybe not so far off. If we take AI to be the science fiction vision we seem to wish for then it will require managing, stewarding, planning, opposing, judging, teaching, healing, hunting down and deactivating, sabotaging, negotiating with.... Bricklayers became architects, surveyors and town planners as complexity increased in the construction world. Cities evolved to have traffic wardens and police... but the same has yet to really mature in digital technology. We imagine all these benefits of "smart cities" and "digital working" - many ideologies that have been around since the 1970s. Yet software engineering is still in its infancy with respect to civic function, ethics, rights and responsibilities, remedies and rules. We have a more or less laissez-faire free-for-all market economy that produces isolated "goods". The failure of this default model can be seen in the tombstones of the Google graveyard. And, while it was a driver of innovation for some time, it isn't really working out in the big "civic" sense, and we certainly cannot rely upon centralised mega monopoly Big-Tech to do the right thing (except in a William Gibson style techno-fascist dystopia). So I think many timeless jobs will adapt so that technologies can fit into our society, as welcome, well-managed friends, rather than allowing them to take-over our society. Maintaining that balance will be a new frontier for human intellectual labour in teaching, legal, planning and policing functions.
teddyuk 4y ago
>> delivery driver in cities with regular grid-like streets aka most of the US So no good in any country older than 245 years old?
oytis 4y ago
We're getting closer to automate programmer's job too though. In the end it's a text problem - get a textual description (ticket) and generate code that fits it. We have models that can generate non-repeating art, why not non-repeating code?
- rob74 4y ago
  ...but once you get your "textual description" to be as exact as it needs to be so code can be generated from it directly, it will be basically indistinguishable from code.
  - flir 4y ago
    Unless the AI is allowed to ask questions, like a regular programmer would? I think we're getting close to strong AI there though, so I don't see it happening any time soon.
    - mkmk3 4y ago
      >> I think we're getting close to strong AI there though, so I don't see it happening any time soon. It's unclear which clause is meant to be negative or positive here. If we're close to strong AI, systems which ask clarifying questions would be close as well, no?
      - flir 4y ago
        Sorry. To be clear: I think strong AI is "fifty years away" and has been for seventy five years. So yeah, an expert system that can read a natural language description of a feature and ask questions until it has enough detail to generate the code is science fiction in my opinion. Having said that, maybe it could be achieved in a limited domain, SHRDLU-style. But that's just a way to deal with the ambiguity by excising it.
  - oytis 4y ago
    It doesn't have to be exact, no more than your input to Dall-E should be exact. Give the AI some understanding of intent of the project, some automatic metrics that will check AI's job quality and let it optimise against it. If AI doesn't generate what you wanted on the first run, correct it and let it learn. Basically what you would do with a junior developer.
defrost 4y ago
> bricklayer Bricklaying was automated 5+ years ago .. locally they've been in heavy use for new homes for three years or so. Robotic bricklayer builds houses 3x faster than humans ( 5 years ago ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s17IAj-XpU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s17IAj-XpU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6IQB5S1N5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6IQB5S1N5I
- kuwoze 4y ago
  lol you are indeed the cheeky comment section: yes laying bricks in a long straight line is automated. Laying bricks in more intricate ways would take a lot more time. Also the machine still has to have human super vision and they seem to clean the mortar. It's nuanced

jstx1 4y ago

50 years is too far away into the future to make any meaningful predictions. I would be very skeptical of anyone who is confident about their answer.

rieTohgh6 4y ago
Nowadays it looks like we are getting close to autonomous vehicles - but it was the same 20 years ago - I predicted then that drivers as a profession will disappear soon - and it still didn't happen. Like many people have already noticed: we overestimate what can be accomplished in the short term and underestimate what can be accomplished in the long term.
pasttense01 4y ago
Well look into the past 50 years. Consider all the massive technological innovations. What I think you will see is truly enormous inertia. For example in 1975 Business Week Magazine predicted the paperless office. So tell us how long ago it has been since you saw paper used for information transmission (in other words not packaging)? Weeks? Months? Last time was when your Grandma sent you a birthday card 3 months ago? No. "The average American office worker uses an average of 10,000 sheets of office paper per year." https://www.formstack.com/resources/blog-paper-statistics https://www.formstack.com/resources/blog-paper-statistics

mkmohit 4y ago

[flagged]

jamager 4y ago

Perhaps contrary to popular believe, I think the jobs that have survived thousands of years will likely survive another 50, even when all automatization included: - teachers - writers & artists - doctors - farmers - builders - scientists - what people say is the oldest profession in the world It is the relatively new jobs (< 100 yrs old) that face more uncertainty: they perhaps have proven themselves worthy in the last decades (and they are booming right now), but might not be resilient enough for world that is coming. It is not only about automation, but adaptability to quick / disruptive changes. - programmers - traders - journalists - marketers However, I wouldn't call this a "prediction". I think very few jobs will actually disappear completely.

antigirl 4y ago
interesting you say writers and artists would survive over programmers when AI has practically threatened all writers and artists livelihood as of recent.
- jamager 4y ago
  Right? I don't think, however, that any competent writer or artist feel threatened by AI outputs at all. The threat comes for others abusing AI to misuse their name and steal their work. That is a legitimate concern.
- pjc50 4y ago
  It'll just become even more of a bimodal distribution of income than at the moment. There will be hundreds of thousands of people writing for free in communities, with whatever anti-AI policing they need to make that work for them, and a few dozen celebrities who make a living from writing.
- resonious 4y ago
  I hear people say this, but I haven't seen any concrete examples of AI generated art actually threatening the entire art industry. Sure, AI can generate me a nice pic to use for my blog post, but are game studios ready to fire all of their concept artists?

dijit 4y ago

Sysadmins, but they will have yet another name. Why? Tech exists and it needs low level constant work to keep secure and reliable. Idealists think this can be automated. I would wish them to be right, but I know it's not realistic.

ulfw 4y ago

Lawyers. Lawyers, prosecutors, judges etc will survive forever.

bufferoverflow 4y ago

I used to think creative jobs (arts, writing), programming and science will be last to automate, but this year completely destroyed my confidence in that. Stable diffusion, DallE, Midjourney produce absolutely beautiful paintings, drawings, renders, photos of sculptures. We have AIs that write movie scripts, book plots. We are starting to get AIs that are okay at making music. We have transformer models that generate textured 3D models. On the programming side we have Copilot, which can't yet replace a programmer, but it's definitely a first confident step. On the science side we have AI tools that fold proteins, predict material properties of novel materials, the wet lab work is getting automated too. I find it hard to name an area of human work that can't be automated. And not even work, any human activity. It looks like all the problems that can be solved in software, will be solved first. Robotics will be lagging, but not very far behind. Once we perfect artificial muscles, it's game over. The rest is software and scaling everything up.

CGamesPlay 4y ago
I feel like this take is a lot like saying that the invention of a car is going to obsolete the profession of carriage drivers. The job of a carriage driver isn't to drive a carriage, it's to drive a vehicle. It's the same with all of these new technologies you've listed: they alter the job description, but don't remove the job.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Yeah. Look at the millions of words written on tweaking prompts. And while SD is very impressive, it’s going to be a long time before it’s producing high res imagery, at least without ready access to lots of data center grade hardware)
- avemuri 4y ago
  There are two opposing forces that determine the net change - Greater productivity. A single carriage driver can now drive a bus, so fewer carriages are needed - Lower costs/ higher demand. Everyone who walked can now afford the bus, so the number of drivers goes up even if fewer drivers are needed per traveler.
- 4y ago

sanxiyn 4y ago

To disappear: ICE car mechanics. Sure, we will need a few to service museum pieces, but it won't be a big occupation like it is now.

santiagobasulto 4y ago
Transportation and freight cargo will likely remain, right? Heavy Machinery (excavators, loaders, etc) will likely not transition to electric. I agree that it looks like a diminishing demanded job, but we'll probably have ICE vehicles and machine still for a long time, right?
randunel 4y ago
Petrol stations will disappear, they'll get replaced by petrol delivery companies which will simply deliver petrol for your vintage vehicle, possibly with some sort of subscription. I can see the petrol stations near the city centres becoming multi storey parking lots with electric chargers, and the ones on the outskirts becoming cafés with electric chargers. I'm fairly certain battery swapping won't become a thing, people take the piss when it comes to stuff that isn't theirs, just look at the city scooters debacle.
refurb 4y ago
Considering the engine is but one small part of the car, i doubt mechanics are going anywhere.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  If we can fully automated building a car, which to me is comparatively low bar compared to AI for other things. Couldn't we also in 50 years design cars that could be dissembled in reverse and then broken parts replaced by automation? So ship car to automated workshop, it removes the parts replaces what is broken and put it back together...
  - qbrass 4y ago
    Bolts rust and seize or strip or bend or break in ways you can't simply reverse the installation process to remove.

dustedcodes 4y ago

I think this will depend hugely on the "where" part of the question. For instance I think self driving technology has near zero chance of being successful in places like Europe in the next 50 years. Streets are not built in grids and are super narrow with a lot of "complex" rules like multi lane roundabouts. Europe also has a lot of common sense driving with unspoken rules. Take a narrow road with two way traffic. It's common that both cars would drive at each other and both drivers see a gap where they know that one of the two cars will sideline to let the other car past it. Sometimes a car is already tucked aside and gives the oncoming car a light signal to indicate that they give them priority. Sometimes this is more formal, where you have narrow bridge crossings where there is an official traffic sign that tells who has priority in case of two cars coming at each other and so on. Then there are so many other things like height restrictions due to low bridges and so much more. Observing the "progress" that self driving cars made in the Valley it is clear that it would be a catastrophe anywhere else in their current state. Having said this, I think we will see a lot more "service" jobs in the future. The wealth gap is widening and there will be more people with a lot of disposable income and many people who will want to make a small cut from those people by providing all sorts of services: - intimacy (non sexual), this is already a thing in Tokyo where you can pay someone to cuddle with you or hug you - friends to hire (e.g. someone to go to the theatre, etc.), again already a thing in Japan - someone to stand in a queue for you in places where you can't make a reservation, Apple stores, etc. (already seen in some places) - getting paid for a surrogacy pregnancy, for couples who want children but the women is too "busy" for being pregnant - etc. There is no end to the creativity of those "service" jobs. Initially it will be weird but in 200 years people will think it's a normal job, just like we think it is normal for someone to file the dead skin of your feet today, cut your nails or wax someone's harry back. The most secure job will be Doctors and other medical professionals. People are getting older and every human being will require medical treatment in their lives and still we will all die from some medical condition. Healthcare is 100% immune to all other external factors such as how well the economy is doing or what not. People are always ill and the population will still grow to approx. 12 billion before it will start to decline and until then there will be an ever growing pressure on the medical sector. Any technology in that sector will see huge growth if they are not completely sh*t.

samwillis 4y ago

Almost all "jobs" will still exist, but will be different. "AI" and automation will make these jobs more efficient, but not replace them. AI in the creative domain (art, music, writing, programming) will not replace the activity of crating and inventing. People still need to drive these tool, have a skill in controlling them, curate the output. Designers will still have a job to do. People will still work in retail, maybe fewer on the checkout (thats already happening). People will still deliver parcel to your front door, the "last mile", just more efficiently with more automation in the rest of the process. That not to say there wont me fewer people doing these jobs, in some cases dramatically fewer. But they will still all exist. The question should be "what do our lives look like in 50 years time?". Are we still working 8 hour days 5 days a week? Do we still travel on "holiday" 1-2 times a year for a couple of weeks? This is where I think we will see the biggest change, the ways work slots into our lives, not the jobs that exist.

toyg 4y ago

Survive: Lawmakers, lobbyists, lawyers, judges; even journalists, although they might not be called that anymore - influencing public opinion will always be valuable enough to be done for some kind of money. Also surgeons, simply because trust in robots will never (and should never) be high enough to let them cut humans unsupervised as a matter of routine. Not survive: people making advertising jingles, or drawing shop signage. That sort of low-effort, barely-creative work will be taken by stats-driven programs ("ai").

akmarinov 4y ago
Isn't the lawyer job 90% looking up past cases, documentation, contracts, etc. The part where you go in front of a judge and dramatically defend your client is a very slim sliver of it. And that 90% is ripe for automation.
- toyg 4y ago
  That's the paralegal's job. The lawyer chooses what makes sense to use among the options the paralegal digs up, using judgement to interpret the actual case and relevant law.

karteum 4y ago

Unless there is a major disruption, in 50 years we will have hit hard the limits of earth natural resources (in terms of metals/minerals/oil) and the consequences of climate change so it's very difficult to predict how the world will be. My guess is that once the system reaches some kind of new equilibrium, jobs will be mostly low-tech and very similar to 1 century ago : farmers (with permaculture), bakers, people who repair stuffs, blacksmiths (but with far less volume of production compared to the industrial world we live in today and mostly simple/repairable/low-techs stuffs : hammers, bikes, shovels, plows...).

lpcvoid 4y ago
Sounds pretty good, I hope you're right.
- karteum 4y ago
  Actually no it does not sound very good and I hope I'm wrong : I wish there would be some major discoveries that would still enable us to keep some degree of comfort / food safety / health safety (and a little bit of fun with high-tech for us geeks :) and restore our half-destroyed environment while still being 8 billion people on earth, but at the moment I am extremely pessimistic about the social and environmental consequences of oil/metals depletion * climate change, and how that transition (or collapse) will be handled (or not handled) to reach such a new equilibrium (where my guess is that anyway people will have to live with low-tech, whatever this means in terms of comfort/longevity/...). Remember that the sustainable world (horses, sustainable agriculture, sailboats, windmills, medicine with herbs, low techs... that many people somehow idealize today) is precisely the one we left 2 centuries ago with the industrial revolution, and there were understandable reasons for that : fossil fuels are infinitely more concentrated than renewables, and all the industrial development they allowed enabled to secure food and health safety, holidays, etc. But now humans are addicted and dependent on those fossil fuels (in particular to sustain 8 billion people on earth), discovering that the party is over will leave us with an extremely bitter hangover. It's just a pity that humanity stupidly wasted all those resources and destroyed their environment so quickly while a different and less greedy economical/political model would have enabled us to live good lives for centuries...

_8j50 4y ago

I wonder if I infosec would still be a thing? I see a lot of improvements in security which if they catch on in that time will make things a lot more secure. I think what people miss on this thread is a lot of jobs will still be around just paying less with less people doing them. 50 years is too far ahead for me to predict anything. Although in IT, I think networking folks would be the last to go, not because you can't automate stuff but because short of a utopia, politics means different networks will exist and by definition networking connects stuff so computers can't fix themselves if they can't connect outside of a failed segment and technical burdens mean networking changes will be last to happen (basically no one uses ipv6 in private lans now for example). I think the global south's prosperity will mean a lot more software jobs, just not in the west. In the short term, I see retail getting decimated. Customer service is horrid and people who work those jobs complain endlessly. If AI is capable it would be much better to deal with than people. I have this idea of a completley unmanned (except one maintenance person) restaurant for example. I manned retail will always be there but there is huge room for unmanned retail. Not now but maybe in 10 years robots that clean up a mess, fold cloths and deliver meals to a table will be a reality (although my idea would have the meals delivered to tables without needing a robot). The police,politicians and lawyers will be plenty even 1000 years from now in my opinion.

rsecora 4y ago

It depends on the resources peak (Oil Peak, Gas Peak, Lithium Peak, Minerals Peak...). Our modern societies maintain themselves via energy consumption, if the energy production problem is solved, then the societies will evolve to more automation and removal of the low specialization jobs. But if we cant produce enough energy to cover the demand, then our societies will go back to previous levels of development and knowledge jobs will achieve the employment levels of the XV century.

jleyank 4y ago

Well, we really didn’t have computers much at all in 1955. That was 67 years ago - what jobs have disappeared since then? Lots of new ones appeared, though, as new “things” appeared and needed to be wrangled. And given the world started from zero, we’re not going to have as much change in tech +50 unless the discontinuity appears.

yucky 4y ago

Plumbers, HVAC technicians, Electricians - not only will they survive, they will never be outsourced to cheaper countries. And since Gen Z seems to have little interest in working with their hands, I suspect there will be an acute labor shortage in the trades that continues to drive their already high incomes, higher. As an added bonus, there is no need to all flock to the same handful of overpriced cities.