Jobs for future

During the various counselling sessions at ‘Kashmir Education Initiative’ (KEI), we find that the students are mostly ignorant about career-planning.

In many cases, it’s too myopic and crude to give career advices at the level of whole fields as there are many jobs that won’t get entirely eliminated in the near future, but which will see many of their components automated.

   

We suggest them the careers that machines are bad at, and seem unlikely to get automated in the near future. We advise about the Jobs that require repetitive/structured actions in predictable settings, and that aren’t likely to last long before getting automated away.

We apprise students about jobs that require interacting, using social-intelligence, involving creativity, coming up with clever solutions and requiring work in an unpredictable environment. The more of the questions answered, the better career choice is likely to be.

Imagine a landscape of human competence having lowlands with labels like ‘arithmetic’ and ‘memorization’, foothills, like ‘theorem-proving’ and ‘chess-playing’ and high-mountain peaks labelled ‘locomotion’, ‘hand-eye-coordination’ and ‘social interaction’.

Advancing computer performance is like water slowly flooding the landscape. A half-century ago it began to drown the lowlands, driving out human calculators and record clerks, but leaving most of us dry. Now the flood has reached the foothills and our outposts there’re contemplating retreat.

We feel safe on our peaks but at the present rate, those too will be submerged within another half-century. We don’t know how the job market will look like in 2030 or 2040.

Most of what kids currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they’re forty. Very soon the traditional model of a-period-of-learning- followed-by-a period-of-working will become obsolete.

The only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives and to reinvent them repeatedly. Many, if not most humans, may be unable to do so.

During the Industrial Revolution, people left the fields and flocks, and took jobs in industry/services-sector. As industrial jobs vanished, the services-sector expanded into professions like teachers, doctors, webpage designers etc.

With the physical and cognitive abilities of humans, as long as machines competed with us merely in physical abilities, there were countless cognitive tasks that humans focused on jobs requiring at least some cognitive skills. Imagine once algorithms outperform us in remembering, analyzing, and recognizing patterns.

Horses were initially complemented by plough which greatly increased the horse’s productivity. As horses were substituted for by automobiles/tractors they became obsolete as a source of moveable power. Many were sold-off to meatpackers to be processed into dog-food, bone-meal, leather, and glue. As these animals had no alternative employment through which to earn their keep, a similar fate can befall humans.

  With Machine-learning and robotics, billions will become economically redundant. Jobs that require specialization in a narrow range of routinized activities will be automated.

It’ll be much more difficult to replace humans with machines in less routine jobs that demand the simultaneous use of a wide range of skills and that involve dealing with the unforeseen scenario.

The loss of many traditional jobs will partly be offset by the creation of new human jobs, characterized by human-AI cooperation, rather than competition. Such new jobs will demand higher skills. Despite appearance of many new human jobs, we might nevertheless witness the rise of a new class of useless workers.

Already today few employees expect to work in the same job for their entire life; the idea will soon turn obsolete, because of technological disruptions. During the Industrial Revolution, we started figuring out how to replace our muscles with machines and people shifted into better-paying jobs where they used their minds more. Blue-collar jobs were replaced by white-collar jobs. Now we’re gradually figuring out how to replace minds by machines.

 Forget blue-collar and white-collar. Talk of ‘Creators’ and ‘Servers’. ‘Creators’, drive productivity—write code, design chips, create drugs, and run search-engines. ‘Servers’, service these creators/other servers by building homes, providing food, offering legal advice etc.

‘Creative-Creators’ do their non-routine work in a distinctively non-routine way….the best (lawyers, accountants, doctors, entertainers, writers, professors, scientists); ‘Routine-Creators’, do their non-routine work in a routine way……average (lawyers, accountants, radiologists, professors, and scientists); ‘Creative-Servers’, the non-routine, low-skilled workers do their jobs in inspired ways; and Routine-Servers, do routine serving work in a routine way, offering nothing extra.

Just because you’re doing a non-routine job (doctor, lawyer, journalist, accountant, teacher, or professor) doesn’t mean that you’re safe. If you do non-routine high-skilled job in a routine way… if you’re what we called a routine-creator…. you’ll be the first be fired in an economic squeeze. And just because you’re a server doing some face-to-face job, doesn’t mean you’re safe. You too will be fired in an economic squeeze.

The creative-creators and creative-servers alone will survive by inventing a new product, inventing existing jobs, delivering a routine service with some extra passion, a personal touch, or a new insight. As many servers will be replaced by machines, by computers, and by changes in how business operates, we’ll have to understand future of jobs asking questions, ‘am I adding value by doing something unique and irreplaceable?

 With the onset of gig-economy (on-demand jobs) people are increasingly building flexible careers based on their own terms, passions, desired lifestyle and access to a much broader pool of opportunities than ever before in history. People don’t want to be employed.

They like flexibility, ability to choose, the number of rounds they do, the number of hours they do work. People would like to join companies rather than sell their skills directly when the cost of doing business is higher than the bump in pay they might receive by striking out on their own.

Costs lowered/disappeared, thanks to internet. Software programs handling bookkeeping work, online, negate the need to rent an office, kind of part-time entrepreneurs.

Uber’s app-driven business represents what could be a sea-change in work.  Imagine a point when any type of work could be ordered with the click of an app. The 9 to 5 job, as a concept disappearing altogether, the gig-economy is expected to create more ‘unicorns’.

Gig-economy may not end poverty or provide safety-net protection for employment. As the work is increasingly available, the new set of skills required to access it, are self-promotion and entrepreneurship.

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