Skip to main content

What should my kids study if there won't be any jobs.

So I'm 49 staring at the big 50.  I work in technology, and I am always learning the newest tech, and the newest view of project management, and the newest business models.  So the other day I was trying to decide between listening to a podcast of delving into my companies continuous learning tools, and I just didn't want to do either.

I thought to myself, we never really get any of these things to work properly before we move on to the next thing.  Always learning and changing.  Can't it just stop for a moment and let me catch up?  Of course it won't.  I'm just being 50 and realizing that work isn't going to be a coast for the last 20 years of my career.

But it is also something deeper, and scarier. I am not so sure that the future we are heading to is going to be better than today.  In fact I fundamentally believe that there is a good chance it will be worse.  Automation of both mind work and physical work mean that the 7 billion people currently on the planet will be competing for fewer meaningful things to do that add value.

This article sort of gets at what I have been thinking for last year or so.
Deep Learning Is Going to Teach Us All the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs Are for Machines

Anyway, how do I give advice to my kids if the twin trends of outsourcing and AI will eliminate most meaningful work and what remains will be fiercely competed for?
Lawyer. nope, most of that can be automated, except the very last bit.
Technology. maybe, but it will be less rewarding.  The big work will be done by machines helping machines.
Doctor. no way.
Academic. The way society is trending there won't be funding.

We are rapidly coming to a point where the world's oldest profession will become the world's only remaining profession.  But I don't want to think about that.




Comments

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-automation-will-force-governments-to-introduce-universal-basic-income/amp/
https://www.wired.com/story/men-will-lost-the-most-jobs-to-robots/amp

Popular posts from this blog

Is someone is getting really good at target marketing

Everything you’ve read about Vista DRM is wrong (Part 1) by ZDNet 's Ed Bott -- Self-described "professional paranoid" Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland has become the most widely quoted source of information on DRM and content protection in Windows Vista. The trouble is, Gutmann's work is riddled with factual errors, distortions, contradictions, and outright untruths, and his conclusions are equally wrong. In this three-part series, I'll show you why Gutmann's outrageous and inflamatory arguments don't stand up to close scrutiny.

There are manny among us who sense the arrival of the Borg

I just read a post on the Oxford University Press Blog which is typically non-committal on privacy. Privacy in Peril? Then I clicked to the author page for James B. Rule and saw that he also wrote �Bait and Switch� (on the alleged WMDs in Iraq), Dissent, Spring 2004. So why the title of this post. Well, I am one of those who feel a connection and (maybe some are making it more intellectually than I) between the illegal warrantless wiretaps Ad networks and the credit rating agencies. TRW etc. As James Rule points out, it is not that any specific step in the tracking is so objectionable it is that the tracking is so pervasive and systematic. I had this vision as I read of an 18 year old at the shoe store glancing at a screen on the cash register to find out a bit about me before coming to offer me help. And I though well that migh be good. Then I saw some things wrong with that picture. First the word 'Cash' attached machine for paying. Second training an 18