ScapegoatTheory

Quora Answer : What professions do you see becoming obsolete in the next century?

May 28, 2018

Casey Roberts is partly right.

But it's not "unskilled" vs. "skilled".

It's repetitive vs. non-repetitive.

Any job which requires you to do a well defined task repeatedly is in danger of being automated away.

However much skill and training it takes to be good at the repetitive task.

If it's predictable. It's automatable.

Jobs that are hard to automate are the ones where you never quite know what you'll be facing when you go into work in the morning.

Everything else will get done by the machine.

What will happen instead?

I think the most likely growth area, from Uber drivers to marketing managers doing automated A/B testing to brain surgeons driving nanobots, is that people are going to be paid to "supervise" (ie. take responsibility for) machines that actually do the job by themselves. Your job is to sit there, notionally "overseeing" the machine, and getting sued / sacked if it screws up.

Why? Because otherwise, the responsibility would have to go back to the owners of the machine. And of the company that runs it. But they won't want the responsibility for machine failures themselves. So they'll put human shields in the way. People whose role is simply to soak up the law-suits and prosecutions and blame when things go wrong.

This is the shift from "intellectual labour" (ie. selling your ideas and thinking process) to "moral labour" (ie. selling your responsibility and reputation)