What jobs are safe in an automated future?

Government jobs protected by politically powerful unions.

• Programmer (AI programmer?)

• Pole dancer

The safest job, the only one safe job - is to be the owner. You can't milk the cow better than a machine, you can't do a thing better than a machine on the long run. But you can own a farm and take the dividends.

Downvoted for groundless assumptions and for failing to google the basics. There are more, not fewer physical documents produced, because it is easier to produce them, the number of bank tellers has actually increased, etc.

Third, there is a misconception that highly theoretical tasks done by skilled experts will be among the last to go. But due to their theoretical nature such tasks are fairly easy represent virtually.

Name three.

My question is: What jobs will be the last ones to go, and why?

If your goal, in asking this question, is to plot a strategy that keeps you employed for as long as possible, then you probably ought to backtrack and look at the goals that's meant to serve. There are better ways to ensure long-term financial security, better ways to maintain a sense of purpose, and better ways to keep busy.

Politician. Not necessarily in its current form, but I suspect humans will continue to want to feel in some way involved in planning their own futures, and be willing to provide status and power to selected other humans who ostensibly represent them in that process, for as long as there are recognizable humans. (The selected representatives will grow less and less actually relevant to planning the future, but that has almost nothing at all to do with the matter. It's not entirely clear to me how relevant to that they are now.)

Athlete. Again, not necessarily in its current form, but I suspect humans will continue to want to identify with humans who win in competitions of physical skill against other humans. To some degree I put soldier in the same bucket, but there are issues with identifying that as a safe job, and I find it more likely that we'll replace soldiers with more effective machines as they become available than that we'll replace athletes

Reality show contestant. This is a field where observing "people like me" rather than "people who are actually any good at what they're doing" is the whole point, after all. Replacing them with more efficient machines would seem to miss the point altogether.

Parent. Dunno if that counts as a "job" by this post's standards, but I think we will continue having humans raise other humans long past the point where we develop technology that's better at it.

We'll probably redefine 'job' long before we've lost them all. As humans lose the ability to work for a living, we'll stop pretending we do need to work for a living. Then, we'll still have professions for the prestige and whatnot that goes along with it, even if everything truly useful can be done by machines instead.

What jobs will be the last ones to go, and why?

Probably management - because they are in charge of hiring and firing everyone else.

All of the research that I've done as an undergrad has basically been data reduction/data analysis; I think that a narrow AI could be developed within 20 years to do all of what I've been doing with much greater efficiency. So much of it is automated/on the computer already that taking the extra step would not be relatively difficult.

Understanding specifically what I was doing and why took some time, and there are still things left for me to learn, but I think that that sort of work is not secure at all from being replaced by automation. If anyone is curious, I'm talking about the field of spectroscopic chemical abundance analysis.

Well, one thing that humans are superior at is modeling other humans, and their reactions to things. So to the extent that people do anything at all, they'll probably do that.

For example, music composition, writing fiction, and similar artistic endeavors require that the artist know what people enjoy. I think that that will be done by humans for the foreseeable future.

Also, things where you actually want the person doing it to be a person will continue. Counseling? I dunno.

"When work is privilege of the rich?" seems sort of relevant to this discussion. Especially:

"The "masses" mostly waste away in cubicles doing makework. The elite do things like install mosquito nets in sunny third world locales"

I assume that anonmouse is referring to activities like the Peace Corps in which young people from well-off families do work in third world countries that would be considered menial low-wage low-status work if done in the United States.

This demonstrates two points.

(1) If people are convinced that a certain activity is high status or in some way “meaningful,” they will gladly do it no matter how objectively stupid it may be.

(2) We currently see jobs becoming a luxury for the rich. Only young people from well-off families can afford to “work” in the Peace Corps.

Jobs are not a scarce resource. Employees are. We do not have approximately 100% employment because the number of people is about the same as the number of jobs. We do because as long as there are people available we will be willing to hire them for some amount of money. If they have nothing better to do, they'll take it. If there's no jobs worth doing, they won't look for them, and won't be counted towards the statistic.

As what some longer living jobs might be:

• AI programmer would be an obvious example. The last jobs will go when they finish their job.
• Engineer. Someone has to design the machines that take everyone's jobs.
• Entrepreneur.
• Maid. Hard for machines to do, and could single-handedly soak up half the workforce, at least. (I'm not sure how maids' maids would work.)
• Any job that machines can do, but targeted towards upper classes.

Automated systems solutions provider.

Lobbyist.

Robotics sales engineer. (A former computer programmer or roboticist versed in the selling of site specific robotics implementation solutions to industrial conglomerates, super heroes, and rogue agents, not a robot acting as a sales engineer)

The US government has listed some trends here: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_203.htm

Manufacturing is clearly out. Services that involve interacting with other humans (health care, teaching) are in.

Personally, I think we've plucked a lot of low hanging fruit. I predict the maturation of some technologies that will make a few fields move towards obsolescence. I expect at major ( >%50) decline in employment for long haul truckers and tax preparers under that maturation. Retail sales will decline in favor of ship-to-home, and obviously some jobs are clearly disappearing altogether ( running a newspaper printing press,camera loader on a movie set, working at a video rental store, telephone line repairman).

It's easier to predict what will decline rather than what will thrive. Engineering is generally a safe bet though.

In my mind the question comes down to what do humans value that other humans do that will be hard to do or hard to value if it comes from a machine?

Art in all forms. Live music performance. Painting, personal photography. Interior design. Even industrial design. For a long time the parts of this that can be automated will be used by experts to improve the quality of their performances.

SImilarly with engineering, I think it will be a long time before the tools replace the tool-bearer. Software will be easier and easier to write because the level at which it is being written will be higher and higher, and more and more (exponentially) cpucycles will be used to compile the software, but that "prime mover" putting it all in place will exist for a very long time. Similarly when math is automated there will still be physicists and mathematicians using the tools to develop theories, they will just develop them faster and more accurately than they used to.

The ownership idea is strong and will take stand you well for a long while (generations more I think). In the same way that patents and copyrights fade and expire, I would expect an increasingly large portion of basic production to be deprivatized in some fashion or another. When there is no human input into changing productivity, no human input in to managing the deployment of capital, it will simply not make sense to attribute that capital (and its earnings) to some particular owner anymore. HOW that transition takes place may be wierd and slow, but natural selection dictates that it will take place in some form in some facets of the human world, and that its greater efficiency over private ownership will make it grow.

But in the mean time, the arts, high end of science/math/engineering.

First of all, in basically all parts of the world the fraction of the population with an academic degree is growing fast. Higher education will probably not be as good as a differentiator in the future.

In that case people will just need to get Masters degrees to differentiate themselves. A world in which more people are educated (ignoring concerns about the automation of learning) will probably be one with more teachers and lecturers.

I'm hoping that some novel jobs come out of deregulation of highly general schooling, inspired by statements early in this video.

Politicians: politicians already find it hard to find jobs after leaving politics....extremely high job insecurity too. Their jobs aren't automated, they're downshifted to beaurocrats as something becomes economic orthodoxy and unpolitical. I reckon politics is a bad career choice irrespective of automation.

Agricultural occupations: already automated - precision agriculture is already automating everything from plant disease identification to treatment. Think about how few agriculturalists there are for a given tract of land? The only good reason I can see that gardeners may not be automated is for their aesthetic skills, not their botanical skills.

Data scientists: automated in 10 years - sexiest profession? I'm sure datascientists, in their current form, won't exist for very long. Machine learning visual programming tools already exist. All someone needs to do is to match a dataset to them and it can optimise for a particular parameter. It could forseeable take a short few hour course to train lay computer users to do data science in 5 years and it becoming a basic skill like Excel spreadsheet use in 10 years.

Escorts: non automatable in our generation - sex bots? pfffft. How can people think gardening is super hard to automate but sex is easy? Speaking as someone who's had my fair share of escorts, good quality sex bots will be ve.ry hard to design. Different Johns vary enormously, and the acting out the emotional elements will be difficult - not to mention that part of the fun comes from the human element. However, escorts tend to have a working life of around 1.5 decades, so that's something to consider if you're choosing your occupation based on this.

Managers: Management is highly nonspecific. Let's take about corporate governance occupations. Will they be automated? That depends on whether political sentiment swings to the right and gets liberated from regulatory burdens, or swings to the left and protects CEO's, chairmen and their ilk. Hold up, left and right isn't the right terms for this. It would be some other parameter based on sentiment around whether we want people to be held to account for others, as responsibility teeters more and more to the technology that manages us, or for the operators or designers to be held to account. Verdict: automatable in 50 years+

Scientific writers methodologists/statisticians/economists: automatable in 20 years, but a new class of them will emerge with the function of public education and such, and innovation/program design.

finance: already largely automated except for those parts involving selling: e.g. Mergers and aquisitions, tellers, etc. See the documentary at the top of this.

lawyers: increasingly automated - legal research already highly automated, adversarial actions like representation by attorneys still exists but is indirectly automated through common pool of cases and protocol through automated systems.

Policing and security: not automatable in forseeable future due to human discretion and negotiation. Good career choice.

Military: already automating.

computer science: already automating, except for AI research.

AI research: highly promising - not automatable in forseeable future (till the singularity, if that ever occurs). However, not a a good career option at the moment since you're likely to be funelled into data science or into finance at the moment.

humanitarian logistics: automatable

entertainment: partially automatable, but diminishing opportunities. Already highly limited opportunities for people to entertain professionally - see documentary.

media: automatable, see above.

healthcare professions: the rate of AI diagnostics and decision rule development is suprisngly slow. Also, incredibly powerful professional associations of incumbants. I reckon automation available in 50 years. A most promising career option for youngsters. However, for those of us with jobs already, the highly general training programs (general science, then medical, then specialised training) and non-evidence base for quite a few allied health practices means that it's probably not a very good option for people looking to make a career move at this very moment or change career directions (huge education investment for later payoff). For general practice, AI is already automating lots - Dr. Google is very capable.

manufacturing: already automated/inting

transport: automating

clergy: not automatable but, good career option

food development and preperation: already automating

sports and recreation: already automating

did I miss anything?

Verdict: become a AI developer or entrepreneur then just hope (or make enough, before things get out of hand) capital or live in a democratic enough rich country to enjoy the rents you capture from AI developers! However, the actual size of the AI field is tiny - say 2000 people at the moment. I reckon we're simply going to be resting on the rents of our past hard work and previous generations for a while until there is some kind of political reform to enable a stable transition to the coming AI developed world.

I'm surprised posts like this are not more commonly discussed around here.