Job extinction

For any young person about to start their career it's certainly worth thinking about what kinds of jobs are likely to be automated in the foreseeable future and basing your decisions around those expectations.  This article lists 20 jobs which may be in danger of extinction.

Some of these I definitely agree with.  Cashier, garbage collector, toll booth operator, news anchor, pilot and mail man all seem like jobs which if they're not fully automated in 20 years time will probably be significantly more automated than they are now, with fewer job opportunities.

In 20 years, or even in 50, I think there will still be human actors and actresses.  Yes, there are savings to be made with virtual actors, and yes the virtual actors will be highly realistic and glamorous, but I think there will be a backlash with audiences "getting tired of all these fake movie stars".  Some proportion of the acting profession will remain human, simply because people are inherently interested in other people and like to model themselves to some extent after their heroes - even if they're fictitious ones.  Also there is money to be made out of gossip and celebrity which would be hard to recreate with virtual actors.

I could turn out to be wrong about this, but I think that any occupation which involves accurate dexterous manipulation - especially of non-rigid objects - will remain expensive to automate in the foreseeable future.  Building machinery which recreates the movements and sensing of a human hand has not been easy to achieve, and even if it is achieved within this time frame it may remain too expensive for the mass market.  So I think jobs like car mechanic will still exist, although what car mechanics do may change since electrification means that the internals of a vehicle become radically simpler and the increase in use of electronics may mean that this job becomes more like that of an IT technician, doing non-traditional tasks such as sensor calibration.  In principle car maintenance could be fully automated, with appropriate design of the vehicle, but given the slow rate of change in the automotive industry I'm expecting only partial automation within two decades and perhaps more jobs created related to automotive sensing and safety systems and the checking/certification thereof.

Prostitution seems like an unlikely candidate for automation, but there would certainly be advantages to robot prostitution in terms of reduced issues with sexually transmitted diseases and zero probability of unwanted pregnancy.  However, similar to the issues with acting this is a human contact type of situation and I expect that robot prostitution will not be universally deemed to be the most desirable option.  Strange though it may seem, in the future people will still want to have sex with other people - at least some of the time.

Waiters will definitely see job competition from robots, and I expect that within 20 years it will not be unusual to be served by a robot in many dining locations.  However, I expect that human waiters will remain employed in the more upmarket restaurants as a sort of status symbol providing product differentiation from the riff-raff.  Also, jobs are likely to be created in the maintenance, programming and upgrading of robots performing customer-facing retail tasks.  A few jobs will also be created in the "back end" administration of teleoperator systems and teleoperator marketplaces, and of course a whole new market will open up for workers performing teleoperation tasks.

Librarian jobs will probably still remain, despite the near total electrification of books.  I think that libraries will turn into community centres where educational, training, voluntary and maybe even some medical activities take place, and that the job of the librarian will be more like that of a social worker or community manager.  Within the next two decades there will be a shake up of the higher education system, as traditional ways become less cost effective and the economic value of a college degree falls.  Libraries may be a beneficiary of this disruption as a classical university education becomes unaffordable for the majority.  This is really just a swinging back of the pendulum to a time prior to the baby boomer generation when libraries were the primary hub of popular education.

Assembly line workers have been under consistent threat of technological unemployment for the previous two centuries, and this trend is likely to continue.  What I've observed directly for myself is that the kinds of factory jobs which tend to be preserved and resistant to automation are those which require a high degree of dexterous manipulation - the "fiddly little stuff" - especially when dealing with objects which are non-rigid.

It almost seems silly to specify the job of "film processor", because this is a job which is largely already obsolete.  For the foreseeable future digital storage and distribution is the way that all media is going to go.

Security guards I think will be partially automated.  Jobs like patrolling and surveillance are on a trajectory to be fully automated within the foreseeable future, but those which involve human contact will remain either difficult or undesirable to automate.  Chasing then wrestling a suspect to the ground or bungling them into the back of a van is unlikely to be something which a robot could do easily, and even if this were possible there may remain legal liability reasons for having it done by a person.

Supermarkets and other big retailers have been trying to get rid of cashiers for quite some time, and it seems possible that within the foreseeable future they will eventually succeed both in installing appropriate technology and also persuading customers to use it.  I expect that a row of cashiers will be replaced by a couple of (human) security guards at the entrance and that paying for items will be done automatically via a mobile phone.  Probably for reasons of tradition as much as anything else shoppers will still place items onto some sort of conveyor belt where they will be counted and totalled automatically without a cashier.  Any item which cannot be counted (eg with a defective RFID) will be flagged, and the shopper directed to either replace it or put it into a reject bin.  An overhead camera above the belt, with cameras also elsewhere around the store, will deliver internet based cloudsourced security, with the security guards being alerted to any shoplifting or attempts to bypass the conveyors.  Cloudsourcers receive payments if the guard confirms that something suspicious occurred, or have reputation points deducted if it was a false alarm.  The lower your reputation, the less chance of being employed within the teleoperator marketplace, and equal opportunities employment regulations may mean that employers must always choose teleoperators with the highest ranking available at the time of recruitment - a process which can be fully automated.

Surgery will be more automated, but I expect that the automation in most cases will be merely augmenting the abilities of a human operator.  The article mentions malpractice cases, but it should also be noted that fully automated systems can make mistakes too, which may result in malpractice cases against the manufacturer - potentially a bigger problem than a malpractice case against an individual person.  Since surgery involves manipulation of flexible objects, within the next two decades I think that this is unlikely to be fully automated with a high degree of confidence that mistakes can be kept to an acceptable level, except in some niche areas such as eye surgery.  A career as a surgeon still seems reasonably safe.

Construction working also is a mixed bag in terms of employment.  There will be ways of constructing buildings which are much more automated than how things occur now, but to what extent these will be deployed remains unclear.  I'm not an expert on the construction industry, but expect that the cost of human labour is only a very small component of the overall cost of new building, with the biggest cost being merely buying land.  Whilst the capital costs significantly outweigh the labour costs there may not be very much motivation to introduce more automation.  New jobs in construction automation will be created in building, selling, maintaining and operating new types of robotic construction machinery.