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 Factories with thousands of workers has been replaced by highly efficient facilities containing industrial robots and a few human operators, bank tellers by online banking, most parts of any logistics chain by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?
Historically your thesis has been frequently disputed, and the people disputing it have always been proven wrong. Population increases 10-fold? That doesn't mean 90% unemployment, because now there are also 10 times as much demand for the products that new jobs can create. Automation puts 90% of farmers out of work? Fine, they'll just eventually go back to work producing the products newly demanded by the remaining much-more-productive farmers and each other.
There do seem to be a couple limits on how far that process can go, though.
One is the Malthusian limit. Recast in economic terms, there is a finite amount of capital around, and as the population of labor increases past it, the price of the latter in terms of the former can be expected to drop below subsistence level. This keeps conspicuously not happening to humans, mostly because technology keeps improving the capital value of existing material goods, but it seems unwise to count on it not happening forever. This limit happens to other animal species all the time when their expansion into new territory hits its carrying capacity, and the results aren't something we'd be happy with for humanity.
The other is the "robot world" limit. Although fears of "androids will take all our jobs" have mostly been replaced by "computers and industrial machines will work alongside us and make our jobs way more productive", something more like the former could still happen eventually. This one has also already been observed happening to other species, surprisingly. Technologies like saddles, horseshoes, horse collars, carts, etc. made horses more and more productive, more and more popular... right up until the invention of the internal combustion engine, at which point most horses were no longer worth the cost of boarding them.
In either case, the safest job is "person with capital". That either means enough economic capital to be self-sufficient via (possibly collective) production and trade without asymmetric employment, or enough political capital to convince the angry unemployed mob to give you a big share of the spoils when they fleece the people with economic capital. But now we're veering into politics and I'll stop.
The malthusian limit used to happen to people all the time. You can graph population against various supporting resources and watch it rise and fall in large regions historically. What is confusing the issue is that the industrial age has exploded productivity so much that we have not had a modern malthusian disaster. We came within a few inventions of having one in the 1960s or 1970s but the green revolution inventions aced that one out.
Current trends suggest the mid-term future of earth's population is maxing at about 10 billion and then falling slo... (read more)