The trends are clear, more and more work that was previously done by humans are being shifted to automated systems. Factories with thousands of workers has been replaced by highly efficient facilities containing industrial robots and a few human operators, bank tellers by online banking, most parts of any logistics chain by different types of automatic sorting, moving, and sending mechanisms. Offices are run by less and less people as we're handling and processing fewer and fewer physical documents. In any area less people than before are needed to do the same work as before. The world is becoming automated.
These developments are not only here to stay - they are accelerating. Most of what is done by humans today could easily be done by computers in a near future. I would personally guess that most professions existing today could be replaced by affordable automated equivalents within 30 years. My question is: What jobs will be the last ones to go, and why?
Often education is pointed out as safe bet to ensure being needed in the future, and while that is true its not the whole story. 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. Second, while degrees in the fields hot in the future is hot in the future there is no guarantee that the degrees hot today will be of any use later on. 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.
Of course as we progress technologically new doors are opening and the hottest job year 2030 might not even exist today. Any suggestions?
I have, in my reply: probably AGI-level, i.e. too far into the haze of the future to be considered seriously.
Probably the 1% that counts the most (I agree, 99% of theoretical physics is math, as I found out the hard way). It's finding the models that make the old experiments make sense and that make new interesting predictions that turn out to be right that is the mysterious part. How would you program a computer that can decide, on its own, that adding the gauge freedom to the Maxwell equations would actually make them simpler and lay foundations for nearly all of modern high-energy physics? That the Landau pole is not an insurmountable obstacle, despite all the infinities? That 2D models like graphene are worth studying? That can resolve the current mysteries, like the High Tc superconductivity, the still mysterious foundations of QM, the cosmological mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, the many problems in chemistry, biology, society etc.? Sure, it is all "symbol manipulation", but so is everything humans do, if you agree that we are (somewhat complicated) Turing machines and Markov chains. If you assert that it is possible to do all this with anything below an AGI-level complexity, I hope that you are right, but I am extremely skeptical.
I agree that the conceptual (non-simply-symbol-processing) part of theoretical physics is the tricky part to automate, and even if I am willing to accept that that last 1% will be kept in the monopoly of human beings, but then that's it; theoretical physics will asymptotically reduce to that 1% and stay there until AGI arrives. Its not bound to change over night, but the change will be the product of many small changes where computers start to aid us not by just doing the calculations and simulations but more advanced tasks where we can input sets of equa... (read more)