I'm hoping that some novel jobs come out of deregulation of highly general schooling, inspired by statements early in this video.
Politicians: politicians already find it hard to find jobs after leaving politics....extremely high job insecurity too. Their jobs aren't automated, they're downshifted to beaurocrats as something becomes economic orthodoxy and unpolitical. I reckon politics is a bad career choice irrespective of automation.
Agricultural occupations: already automated - precision agriculture is already automating everything from plant disease identification to treatment. Think about how few agriculturalists there are for a given tract of land? The only good reason I can see that gardeners may not be automated is for their aesthetic skills, not their botanical skills.
Data scientists: automated in 10 years - sexiest profession? I'm sure datascientists, in their current form, won't exist for very long. Machine learning visual programming tools already exist. All someone needs to do is to match a dataset to them and it can optimise for a particular parameter. It could forseeable take a short few hour course to train lay computer users to do data science in 5 years and it becoming a basic skill like Excel spreadsheet use in 10 years.
Escorts: non automatable in our generation - sex bots? pfffft. How can people think gardening is super hard to automate but sex is easy? Speaking as someone who's had my fair share of escorts, good quality sex bots will be ve.ry hard to design. Different Johns vary enormously, and the acting out the emotional elements will be difficult - not to mention that part of the fun comes from the human element. However, escorts tend to have a working life of around 1.5 decades, so that's something to consider if you're choosing your occupation based on this.
Managers: Management is highly nonspecific. Let's take about corporate governance occupations. Will they be automated? That depends on whether political sentiment swings to the right and gets liberated from regulatory burdens, or swings to the left and protects CEO's, chairmen and their ilk. Hold up, left and right isn't the right terms for this. It would be some other parameter based on sentiment around whether we want people to be held to account for others, as responsibility teeters more and more to the technology that manages us, or for the operators or designers to be held to account. Verdict: automatable in 50 years+
Scientific writers methodologists/statisticians/economists: automatable in 20 years, but a new class of them will emerge with the function of public education and such, and innovation/program design.
finance: already largely automated except for those parts involving selling: e.g. Mergers and aquisitions, tellers, etc. See the documentary at the top of this.
lawyers: increasingly automated - legal research already highly automated, adversarial actions like representation by attorneys still exists but is indirectly automated through common pool of cases and protocol through automated systems.
Policing and security: not automatable in forseeable future due to human discretion and negotiation. Good career choice.
Military: already automating.
computer science: already automating, except for AI research.
AI research: highly promising - not automatable in forseeable future (till the singularity, if that ever occurs). However, not a a good career option at the moment since you're likely to be funelled into data science or into finance at the moment.
humanitarian logistics: automatable
entertainment: partially automatable, but diminishing opportunities. Already highly limited opportunities for people to entertain professionally - see documentary.
media: automatable, see above.
healthcare professions: the rate of AI diagnostics and decision rule development is suprisngly slow. Also, incredibly powerful professional associations of incumbants. I reckon automation available in 50 years. A most promising career option for youngsters. However, for those of us with jobs already, the highly general training programs (general science, then medical, then specialised training) and non-evidence base for quite a few allied health practices means that it's probably not a very good option for people looking to make a career move at this very moment or change career directions (huge education investment for later payoff). For general practice, AI is already automating lots - Dr. Google is very capable.
manufacturing: already automated/inting
transport: automating
clergy: not automatable but, good career option
food development and preperation: already automating
sports and recreation: already automating
did I miss anything?
Verdict: become a AI developer or entrepreneur then just hope (or make enough, before things get out of hand) capital or live in a democratic enough rich country to enjoy the rents you capture from AI developers! However, the actual size of the AI field is tiny - say 2000 people at the moment. I reckon we're simply going to be resting on the rents of our past hard work and previous generations for a while until there is some kind of political reform to enable a stable transition to the coming AI developed world.
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?