With the development of AI and its integration with the machines I believe many of the repetitive jobs and even some creative jobs will be gone. So what occupations do you think that will stay in 20 to 30 years? Just want to make some plans for next generation, either boys or girls.
China has two feet dancing robot, US has autonomous taxi …
My two cents would be teacher, surgeon, cook/chef.
Half the replies in ozbargain forums are AI.
Which half, coherent or stupid?
Yes
Theyve tried with teachers, certainly gave it a red hot go during Covid and the results were terrible.
Certainly, and I welcome it, elements of teaching will be automated - administrative tasks, marking, assignment creation, lesson planning etc. But actual teaching, no.
What may come from it is a greater move to Socratic pedagogy in the main combined with 'flipped' delivery (in otherwords, more tertiary style).
alcoholics
Undertaker
Depends what they're undertaking.
The Oldest Profession.
That's not good news if it's the only job left for the whole of humanity.
soldiers?
That'll be one of the first to go. Divisions will become swarms of drones, a few humanoid and dog like drones, auto aiming laser turrets and maybe one or two humans.
have you seen subservience? worth a watch for the.. plot
Have you not seen Jude Law's character in A.I (2001), or the robots in Ex Machina (2014).
It's the same reason people pay more for the GFE than a R&T.
If you can't afford the real thing then a robot/doll will have to do.
I always get the wires stuck in my teeth when I do it with a robot.
11010110010100
Barber/Hair Stylist. Anything that you wouldnt trust a robot with.
like a proctologist?
Proctologist gonna be making bank in the future.
not really necessary, people can cut their own hair
You cut your own hair??
anything to save a few $$, this is ozbargain
govt thugs. aka cops
I don't know, ED209 looked pretty sick
Anything that's personal relationship based
Psychiatrists, because many people will stop thinking and feel depressed as they have more free time to kill and nothing creative to do.
AI will be a tool to expedite your tasks and work but cannot replace your thought process to do something better. It depends on how you look at it. If you use it as a tool, then you optimize this gadget, but if you depend on it, then AI will take over your mind and health.
LOL, ppl stopped thinking a decade ago. One example. Go to a concert. ppl all watching the back of a phone as they film the event. We are an appendage to gadgets and hostage to social media.
People are absent from connection to nature,creativity,empathy and basic humanity already. We created a space and AI filled it.And that paradigm is ramping up as we lurch right via the psychological manipulation and targeted messaging of the right wing MSM and social media. The likes of Musk are herding us into a 'type' for their own purposes.And we lap it up.
Don't expect govts to subsidise mental health treatments for what is basically our default stupidity.
LOL, ppl stopped thinking a decade ago. One example. Go to a concert. ppl all watching the back of a phone as they film the event
"Those people only THINK they're enjoying the concert, but they're not, because they aren't doing it properly the way I would"
WFH employees will be the first target of big corporations, wherever AI can do the role.
What Occupation Won't Be Replaced by Robot
The quick quips by @jv
😲
surgeon
Have you not seen the movie Elysium?
one of my favourite quotes is something to the effect of "despite what the technologists and futurists will tell you, change is a slow and incremental process" and the maxi effect of people extrapolating to the 'everything will be X' rarely eventuates. Robots are not very good at being human.
If AI takes over my job, will it also spend 2 hours a day on Ozb?
If AI takes over your job, you will be able to spend more than 2 hours a day on OzB,
because you are going to need to, with the reduced income.
My two cents would be … surgeon …
Actually I feel surgeons (as those practicing surgery) will be steadily replaced by robots able to use tiny arms, super steady hands and microscopic cameras.
The "human surgeon" needs lighting, needs "to see" and needs physical room/space to operate. And eventually gets tired and/or gets old (experienced but older).
Needles to say but probably many more than 20 years in the future.
replaced by robots able to use tiny arms
like a T-Rex?
Underrated comment - ROFL.
Lets not forget the most important thing. Doctors and surgeons have a terrible track record of making horrible mistakes. Hospitals and other organisations have to take huge medical insurance because of simple stuff ups. Once robots/AI are doing a more consistent and better job, the humans will only be there to supervise the robots.
Hospitals and other organisations have to take huge medical insurance because of simple stuff ups
I think you'll find the insurer for public hospitals is some government agency which basically self-insures and is massively underfunded (at least in NSW, can't imagine other states are different).
The chance of suing a public hospital / salaried doctor and getting a payout is close to 0, because
Private hospitals/doctors might be different.
Anything where relationships are required, particularly therapeutic ones. Social work, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, exercise physiology, some medical specialties, etc etc.
What Occupation Won't Be Replaced by Robot in 20 to 30 Years?
Victorian public servants.
Public Servant is not an occupation. It is a bludge.
Upload footage of your 24/7 productive life as a comparison .
Show by example.
Anything that requires not only knowledge, but practice that is not formalised in form of text, images or videos. For example, surgeon.
Yes, AI can be trained on millions of cases of cancer descrbed in text and images to diagnose cancer better than human. But there is not enough training material out there to train AI to cut a person with scalpel and remove the tumour - how to handle instruments, what feedback to expect etc, that comes only with hours of practice. I'm pretty sure it would be long time before AI would be allowed to learn to cut people.
But who knows, right
But there is not enough training material out there to train AI
I don't think you really understand AI.
Read up on quantum computing…
ok boomer
He's been watching Ed Husic at the NPC
Surgery is relatively easy to 'practice', as AI can be trained on cadavers and animals.
Once trained, it would only require occasional adjustments and refinements as new techniques are added etc
I totally agree, it's just corpus of knowledge is not so easily available as tons of programming code or marketing materials or music on the internet right now, so it would be much slower process, so surgeons would be closer to the end of the line of automating jobs.
i.e. I can train LLM on a billion forum responses right now to automate jv's work right now, but to train some physical robots that are currently in their baby steps on thousands of cadavers/animals would take some time (and regulations and ethics questions would slow that down as well)
Simple example.
AI can write a PHD thesis but can't drive a car.
@greatlamp: AI can already drive a car better than the average human.
edit: Also no, an AI cannot write a PHD thesis, it will be regurgitated and hallucinated garbage.
@trapper: Depends on definition of "drive better". You probably mean "less road accidents per million km in a specially-prepared car with lots of sensors in a well-mapped geofenced area and (remote) human operator ready to override when it stuck, compared with average driver in whole country driving regular $5000 car" then yes, AI can already drive better.
so surgeons would be closer to the end of the line of automating jobs.
While AI inventing entirely new surgical techniques and procedures is still a long way off, using AI to perform routine surgeries will be relatively straightforward.
They had surgeons using robotic arms controlled by joysticks over a decade ago. They can collect data from devices like that and train the AI to operate without the surgeon. It's already been done for chefs.
true, but I expect it to be pretty limited at the moment, and even if motions and sensor data are recorded in proper resolution for AI training, reasoning is probably not - and that would be crucial part. You need to enrich that data with surgeon's reasoning, surgery outcomes etc, and have a good volume of that data - pretty complicated (but achievable at some point) task.
On-call plumber, electrician, etc. Anything that requires high mobility (travelling across multiple sites per day) and navigating systems of varying existing physical layouts (plumbing and room layouts change vary from house to house). Each individual component of those jobs could probably be done by robots in 20 years, but robots are good at specific tasks, whereas this requires various skills to be done for a single job. On a big industrial scale, maybe it could be done by robots (set up a big robot to lay pipes or wiring), but it's not practical to transport one around to someone's house and have it look under someone's sink
it's not practical to transport one around to someone's house and have it look under someone's sink
One drone to do the inspection, another to deliver the correct robot to do the repair … heck the drone could just deliver a small human that lives off shore in a shipping container as v1.0 of the service.
But how is this any more efficient than having a guy that can both assess and perform the repair, show up in a van that may already have the tools/parts necessary. Just because it can be done by robots doesn't mean it's necessarily cheaper or faster, in which case there's no point
But how is this any more efficient
One guy at the dispatch center can dispatch hundreds of drones to do jobs simultaneously. Drones can be mass produced and replaced easily - humans take years to breed and train.
Just because it can be done by robots doesn't mean it's necessarily cheaper or faster, in which case there's no point
Thanks sherlock. At some point the economics will make sense.
@salmon123: "At some point…" The question is within the next 20-30 years, and I don't see that happening. Drones to do the deliveries may be cheap, but what about the robots capable of moving into different tight spaces of varying dimensions, having the dexterity to actually carry out repairs, etc.? Moreover, if those robots are even kind of heavy (let's say 30kg, so much lighter than an adult human), you don't want dozes of them in the air being carried around on drones for obvious safety reasons.
Ozbargain shitposter should still be a safe profession
You think JV is a real person and not some chat bot?
Chat bots can be trained to make better/more useful responses over time.
Eh? I think the quality of JVs shit posts has dramatically improved over the years.
People keep saying that love/relationships/sex will never get replaced. I think these are the first things that will get replaced lol.
Do squishy warm and wet robots even exist yet?
They had one on New Amsterdam. Patient considered her his de facto. Wouldn't leave home without her, had to go to hospital with him.
And then there was Howard in BBT who invented the bionic arm…
People yearn for genuine acceptance and acknowledgement from other human beings.
It's possible that the technology could shift our behaviour, but this has been and continues to be an integral part of society, despite the integral and saturation of technology in our life.
Only said by someone who seldom has any genuine love/relationships/sex.
Wow you really got me bro
Fixing things
Better question: what happens to all the useless eaterns (or the "too many hoomans" as Protractor might say) once they are all perma-redundant? Welfare? Maybe, but then who pays for that? I suspect they're already downsizing the overall world population and just not telling you about it 💉
Long, long time ago, I can still remember..
Australians used to wear loin cloths and hunt with spears for thousands of years.
Some will be good, Darwinism will take care of the rest.
…so bye, bye Miss American Pie. Drove the Chevy to the Levy…
I would have thought teacher is one of the most obvious to be replaced, literally rehashing the same information every year.
Yeah just chuck on a video and pay an illegal immigrant peanuts to babysit them instead of paying fully qualified teachers. Nothing much to it. /s
Back in the day my substitute did way better.
He would consistently tell students to tell their regular teacher that the door was locked and couldn't get in or some other excuse.
Then he would take us to the football pitch. I think he was also an aspiring player for Marconi or some club.
Guess what everyone loved him well all the students did. He was employed throughout and was never sacked.
Win win for all the students. What would AI do? Definitely no bludging. You can kiss your those days goodbye. Robots don't even take sickies.
May I ask if you went to school in Australia?
Yes. Bad substitute teachers did do the ole "chuck on a video" thing.
Tradies - will out last any robots.
Agree. Once robots are as agile as humans and roughly as intelligent, their industry will get disrupted. We are still a long way off that though.
Tradies … agile
lol. Pretty low bar to light a cigarette and hold a phone to your ear.
Soldier to fight skynet
Butlerian Jihad now
Even major leaders in the space, who you would think have the best idea of what is to come… can't seem to make any solid predictions. Musk/Tesla promised full self driving cars in 2017, 8 years ago. They still haven't shipped FSD. That's just one example, but failure to deliver has been basically a hallmark of the AI revolution.
The plateaux is here and the models aren't getting much better. We could be stuck with these dodgly LLMs which aren't that useful… for maybe decades to come.
So I think it's extremely difficult to see what jobs will actually disappear any time soon.
failure to deliver has been basically a hallmark of the AI revolution
Isn't the whole idea with this topic that it will all happen basically at once when AI reaches singularity and explodes? Agree about the LLMs being mostly a show, but their sloppiness isn't really a marker for the future. It's like how we went from no flight to space ships inside a century, the early ideas were sloppy and progress was insanely slow… until it wasn't.
Would love to be wrong though. I hope the "Nothing ever happens" crowd wins this one.
That’s kind of my point. “The whole idea” as you say, is nothing more than a guess - that keeps getting proven wrong as each model proves less exciting than the last.
You even have Apple research engineers publishing papers saying AI cannot “reason” and will not be able to become intelligent.
I’m not even saying that these things WONT happen. But the “next 20-30 years” isn’t clear by a long shot for the AI models themselves, let alone trying to predict entire dead industries for human work, lol. Don’t buy into total hype.
Writer and editor. First to be replaced, first to be on a comeback. Machines have no originality. Machines can't do nuance. Machines can't read between the lines, or say or show something without actually doing it. But yes, a machine can use Grand Theft Autocorrect to bore you with The Avengers part 93, or disguise it as a new franchise.
Sort of disagree.
Once AI gets "good enough" (which it already is with many things), instead of relying on an editor to improve the quality, you simply build in a better feedback mechanism from users that consume it.
Users dropping off on a particular chapter/episode? Dont like a particular character in a book? A particular sentence feels awkward? If theres analytics or explicit ways to give feedback, the AI can be given a chance to try again and improve.
Will editors be needed now? Maybe. All they'll do is help improve the AI models in the next couple of decades.
Remember too that the AI will feed us the exact garbage that we want. Just look how engaged we are with social media. People are addicted and thats content thats prioritized by machines.
Electrician, dentist, any in person job that has danger that can't be eliminated.