Two themes were prevalent when I was in high school. You will not be able to find a job without a university education, and in the future, robots (automation) are going to put us all out of work. That was almost 50 years ago
Industrial trades are probably as safe as it gets
Firefighter/ paramedic. That's gonna be a real safe path to take for younger folks joining the workforce.
Parts bitches. Body shop techs. Most mechanical diagnosing and repairs.
SV reX said:In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :
That's new construction. It won't do a thing for maintaining the inventory of millions of buildings that already exist.
Same with architecture and engineering.
AI will kill the design market for stuff like preengineered buildings and other relatively simple or mostly utilitarian buildings. AI will easily be able to handle stuff like spec office buildings, tract houses, and the like... for new construction only. But additions, renovations, and high-design stuff will still require human professionals.
When I say "remodeling", I think people imagine someone who installs replacement windows or does basement renovations. Those jobs are fine, but there are much bigger ones too.
I've spent most of the past 10 years working on remodeling jobs that were $10,000,000 and up. Plenty of good paying jobs.
(But very few people want them. I spent years trying to encourage people to consider the trades, but there is so little interest I've stopped trying)
Not really a mainstream career, but it is a thing: Who and how will the Spy vs Spy industry of IT security vs Anti-Security (hacking) be conducted? Will AI take over both sides of this $100 billion + industry or will it require talented humans to play a role?
A career path that has not been touched on and maybe close to a board no-go rule , but what of human Governance? It has to be the most obvious opportunity for AI to take over and yet the least likely to surrender. Worldwide, it is pretty hard to find any kind of "I" in the population governance industry. Currently it is a lucrative career so the question is how AI proof can it remain?
In reply to NOHOME :
That's an interesting question
In reply to NOHOME :
That's an easy one, the governance part. They'll realize we're the biggest threat to our planet and species and just wipe us out.
The big ticket careers, short term, are going to be prompt creators and programmers. Being able to manipulate the AI is a big big skill barely even getting started. Long term, robot repairs and service until we get a good nanotech breakthrough.
What I'm curious to see is effects on accounting jobs.
Bartenders? Psych jobs? Fast food/most service industry positions? Gone. New construction? Maybe another generation left, maybe two. A vast majority of paper pushing office drone work can and will(should) be replaced by computers, should have happened 30 years ago really. Manufacturing? For the most part, they'll be gone. Not just car manufacturers, but injection molding, circuit boards, etc. Stuff you'd be surprised to find out there are still humans doing because $8/HR is cheaper than a robot, for now.
Eventually, and probably sooner than some of you would like to think, the repair and remodel jobs will go too.
I envision in the not so distant future, maybe 25-30 years 40 tops, the ONLY people with jobs will be C suite, a dwindling medical sector, research, and people that can actually work on and fix the robots and computers.
I'll make a prediction: AI will have less effect in developed economies but much greater effect in developing economies that would like to make the shift from providing cheap goods to cheap intellectual work (e.g. India).
My wife is a programmer at a big company. Her job and the other local programmers' jobs will be safe. AI will replace the remote contractors (predominantly in India) whose job is to just write widget code, but not understand how the broader system functions.
Ditto technical/product support. All the jobs doing steps that can be read off a flow chart ("Have you tried turning it off and on again?") will be replaced by AI, but the upper levels of support where you need a manager or tech who understands how to fix big problems (which will largely be domestic jobs) will be perfectly safe.
AI can not do my job as a brewer. It also can't write good ad copy.
Edit: This does NOT mean that no one in the U.S. is going to lose things like programming job to AI. It means that, if 50% of programming jobs are lost to AI, those losses will be global, but 90% of the jobs lost will be in developing countries and 10% will be in developed.
In reply to NOHOME :
I'm just hoping I live long enough to see either the Federation or The Culture come into favor.
RevRico said:In reply to NOHOME :
That's an easy one, the governance part. They'll realize we're the biggest threat to our planet and species and just wipe us out.
I disagree on this one.
As we all know, the majority of people tend to be good when possible.
It is an old saw that "anyone who wants power should not be allowed to have it" and yet those are the people who run the planet. An AI governance would be tasked with breaking that cycle. Would it be a better outcome? Can't say.
Every field will have its holdouts. Someone mentioned bartenders being obsolete. Not hardly. The best ones do very well on charisma and the exact sort of thing that bots and AI will never be able to.
The elephant in the room is what are you going to do with all the unemployment? That's probably worthy of another thread. But I live in a town (Oakland, CA) which has significant sections ravaged by unemployment and homelessness. What will happen when things get worse? And frankly, white collar work is chock full of jobs that are only marginally necessary anyway. Retail districts have been reduced to a selection of restaurants, nail salons, and Tchotchke shops full of curated silly things that you could buy on the internet for a fraction of the price. At some point the basic underpinnings of our economic structure are going to have to be reordered or chaos may ensue.
But that's wandering off topic.
iosman123 said:While AI can offer information and even mimic conversations, there's a genuine human touch, empathy, and connection that it can't fully replicate. Sure, some might prefer AI for convenience, but there's a vast number of people who value that real, human interaction.
Yes, but we are viewing this from the perspective of older humans who like making things and live for the sheer analog pleasure of a screaming engine and tires on the edge of adhesion. For generations who were handed screens as soon as they had the strength to hold them, it's not much of a leap to where an AI will often be one's best friend and companion. And it will be the humans who are mistrusted, because they are so much less predictable and not as pliable to one's needs and wants.
Kreb (Forum Supporter) said:Every field will have its holdouts. Someone mentioned bartenders being obsolete. Not hardly. The best ones do very well on charisma and the exact sort of thing that bots and AI will never be able to.
A bartender's job is *not* to serve drinks. A bartender's job is to give customers an enjoyable experience.
Chatted with a small brewery that had shifted to self-service taps. Take a card that logs what you drink, pour your own beer by the oz, check out later. They *still* used bar staff. They just spent more time interacting with customers and helping guide their selections (as well as collecting, cleaning, and stocking glassware).
If all people wanted was a glass of beer or wine, you can buy that at the store and pour it for yourself for a fraction of the cost of going to a bar.
A bar is not about drinking. A bar is about socializing. The staff is a critical component of driving that.
If I was young today I would get into robotics. Study it at school. Get into the robot building competitions. I have built computers and worked on cars. This area combines those two skills and then some.
Hey. If they do take over the world, somebody has to fix them.
In reply to Beer Baron :
Kreb (Forum Supporter) said:Every field will have its holdouts. Someone mentioned bartenders being obsolete. Not hardly. The best ones do very well on charisma and the exact sort of thing that bots and AI will never be able to.
A bartender's job is *not* to serve drinks. A bartender's job is to give customers an enjoyable experience.
Chatted with a small brewery that had shifted to self-service taps. Take a card that logs what you drink, pour your own beer by the oz, check out later. They *still* used bar staff. They just spent more time interacting with customers and helping guide their selections (as well as collecting, cleaning, and stocking glassware).
If all people wanted was a glass of beer or wine, you can buy that at the store and pour it for yourself for a fraction of the cost of going to a bar.
A bar is not about drinking. A bar is about socializing. The staff is a critical component of driving that.
I want to agree with you, and I do. But I can see an ever growing swath of the population moving away from that at a rapid pace. Well before AI, people assigned human traits to a variety of non human items. Even though the interactions were largely one way, they still bonded with those things as if they had human like qualities. Pets, characters in video games, heck, many people bond with their cars like they are sentient. Soon though your car will be literally telling you, "Hey let's ditch this boring freeway commute and find a twisty back road. I know your favorite." As a child of the '80's, there were countless humanized robots in TV and movies that people bonded with. I just watched Short Circuit with my kid the other night. Tell me Johnny 5 wouldn't make a popular bartender. There will still be humans doing customer service work, but I can see robots/automation/AI filling ever increasing roles, and a growing percentage of the population actually preferring non-human service.
When self checkouts started appearing in supermarkets years ago, I thought they were stupid. Why should I, as the customer, do their job for them? But I soon discovered that I could do it faster and better. And since the average service had declined substantially, I didn't miss the human interaction. My local higher end grocer still has human checkers, no self check, with great service. But I'm too cheap to pay the substantially higher prices.
California just fast tracked automation in the fast food industry, by raising minimum wage for workers to $20 per hour. I predict a 75% decrease in fast food employment in the next 5 years. McDonalds and the like will have few employees, they have been trending that way already. In and Out and Chick-Fill-A will stay largely human staffed, but their standards and pay are higher.
I've been telling my kids for years now, learn robotics.
Robotics was a field I considered going into, I chose not to and I still consider that to be a good decision. Even now robotics is a very small industry, probably on par with motorsport, except if you get a degree in robotics there isn't a big "mainstream version" of the industry to fall back on like production automakers if you don't get a robotics job. You also don't need a robotics-specific education to fix a robot, fixing a robot is not much different to fixing a modern car or even some home appliances or farm equipment. That's a job for technicians and/or mechanics, and it's another area where reliability improvements will decrease the need for repairs over time. Automakers and mechanics are already panicking over the reduced labor needed to produce and maintain EVs, and if autonomous driving delivers the predicted safety improvements, that will eliminate the auto body industry's bread and butter as well.
I'm glad that people are realizing that we're in this coffin corner where wages are having trouble keeping up with the cost of living, and higher wages expand automation which pushes more people out of work, all leading to less consumers to buy these goods that require less and less labor to produce.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
I'm pretty sure we went through that entire chain of thought 150 years ago during the Industrial Revolution.
Humanity not only survived and adapted, but thrived.
Sorry for what looks like a derail of the original thread, but really, I am just looking much further down the road than the OP was really envisioning. I am three generations into the future.
As a species, humans are pretty good at adapting.
One thing that is happening to humanity as a consequence of technology is that we are making less humans. We simply do no need them. Children are for the most part expensive pets.
Do not think just in terms of what jobs are going to be replaced by AI, but also what jobs will not be needed due to a much lower population. I am talking SD levels of population density as the norm. Not a case of what will we do for the machines, but what can the machines not do for us. Then put yourself in line to do those jobs. Bartender might be a winner.
Or not
In reply to Duke :
The difference is now that we're looking at automation that doesn't just replace basic manual labor largely by replacing mechanical force, but forms of artificial intelligence that can compete with skilled labor and knowledge work. It's already putting journalists out of work en masse, even though the result of the automated work is crap in comparison. See also this 9-year-old video:
In reply to GameboyRMH :
I'm glad that people are realizing that we're in this coffin corner where wages are having trouble keeping up with the cost of living, and higher wages expand automation which pushes more people out of work, all leading to less consumers to buy these goods that require less and less labor to produce.
Except we are largely doing this to ourselves artificially. When you raise the minimum wage of a service above the value of that service, it goes away. Either replaced or the business fails or changes substantially. There is no magic fix to make the least valuable labor more valuable, you just end up back where you started at best. With automation and AI, you are likely to end up with nothing instead.
NOHOME said:Sorry for what looks like a derail of the original thread, but really, I am just looking much further down the road than the OP was really envisioning. I am three generations into the future.
As a species, humans are pretty good at adapting.
One thing that is happening to humanity as a consequence of technology is that we are making less humans. We simply do no need them.
I'm not sure on this. In the past 3-4 generations we've increased the population of the earth by about 6 billion humans. Our birth rate may be declining, but it is going to take at least 6 generations to start seeing a decline from where we are now.
In reply to Boost_Crazy :
The way I see it the minimum wage of a service is completely artificial, and it's up to a society to decide the minimum that a person should be able to work for. Naturally it will tend toward 0 and if too low will produce the kind of society seen in gilded/depression era US or victorian England. If it isn't set at a level that allows a worker to fully support themselves then low-paid labor acts as an unorganized corporate subsidy program by allowing corporations to ultimately benefit from society's charity. And trying to keep minimum wages low enough to compete with automation is a race to the bottom since automation tends to decrease the cost of production over time.
Robotic Process Automation (think Excel macros that can go across multiple applications) is another area that has a bright employment future. Along with the process engineers who'll need to document and design processes that will go hand-in-hand with those efforts.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
In reply to Boost_Crazy :
The way I see it the minimum wage of a service is completely artificial, and it's up to a society to decide the minimum that a person should be able to work for. Naturally it will tend toward 0 and if too low will produce the kind of society seen in gilded/depression era US or victorian England. If it isn't set at a level that allows a worker to fully support themselves then low-paid labor acts as an unorganized corporate subsidy program by allowing corporations to ultimately benefit from society's charity. And trying to keep minimum wages low enough to compete with automation is a race to the bottom since automation tends to decrease the cost of production over time.
Agreed, it's completely artificial. The minimum wage should be the minimum someone is willing to do the work for. Instead, it's what society deems to be acceptable. Unfortunately society has shown to be largely ignorant of economics, and fails to understand the negative consequences of an artificial minimum wage. When set at a level which is "reasonable-" a level fairly close to the minimum wage at which the average low skilled employee would accept anyway- it has minor impact. At worst it inflates prices slightly for those goods, at best it prevents a handful from accepting too low a wage. But when society sets it too high- to the point where the consumer is no longer willing or able to pay the extra cost of the good or service, that job goes away completely. Say a worker has $15 an hour worth of skill to sell, but we tell them that they cannot accept less than $20. They get no job instead. Did society really help them?
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