are they any jobs suspected of being obsoleted by nanotechnology when it has developed further say 25-30 years from? second question, what job opportunities might grow as nanotechnology develops further? i ask because i want to be a car mechanic. but i am afraid that if engines are made of trillions of nanobots, that a car can repair itself in minutes by having nanobots just reorganize themselves into whatever mechanical strucutre they might be programmed to organize themselves into. maybe i’m being too sci-fi on this and i need to consider more how mankind’s priorities are still pretty far from scientific advancement.
Nanotech is nowhere near the point of creating materials out of nanobots or whatever. That’s way beyond the most cutting-edge research. Your career as an auto mechanic is safe.
Now, there may be other developments that will change the job of a mechanic – new designs and materials, a shift to electric power, etc. But as a career it’ll be around for quite some time. As a bonus, it’s a job that can’t be outsourced…
Yeah, that’s what Hollis Mason thought, until Doc Manhattan came up with all that lithium…
And probably never will be. There’s no conceivable solution to the power problem.
Not to mention the XYZ positioning problem.
IMHO.
As far as things to worry about, this should be down on your list.
Worry about getting a career in something that absolutely cannot be outsourced. This means any research, math, science, computers etc are suspect.
Forget teaching as well as that can be outsourced…though it hasn’t happened that much yet, it will.
Mechanic actually sounds pretty good. Police officer, garbage collection are other possibilities.
{Why yes, Monday my company fired 3 people and replaced them with Indians…the ones they were training…why do you ask? Good recent college grad jobs. However, I can see why they did it. You can’t find a single recent college grad looking for work in this day}
Not to mention that nanobots are not exactly things you want to have running around an engine. Honestly, why do so many people think that by applying the word “nano” before something, they can invoke magic pixies to do their imaginative whims?
Well, evolution managed to solve those problems rather well…
Of course, living tissue is a bit too slow-growing and squishy to make a useful car.
Horses and elephants were useful cars. Unfortunately, they’re roadsters; evolution has yet to produce a sedan.
Ditto, the above. Nanobots are just cool science fiction.
yes there is outsourcing to china and india. but that means lost wages for americans and gained wages for chinese and indians. this will result over time in american wages going down and chinese wages and indian wages going up. im not an economist at all but this is how i see it. then jobs can return to america since there wont be lost corporate profits from workers here requiring too much pay since the standard of living has dropped. but maybe this investment in chinese and indian wealth will make them better trading partners able to buy more of our goods.
Well, this assumes cars will still be repaired in 30 years. Look at computers: Forty years ago, it was still reasonable to repair a CPU. It was a case in the middle of the room full of transistors and resistors and wires. At worst, it was composed of a bunch of small-scale integration ICs, which you could test and swap out as needed. These days a CPU is one chip and it either works or it doesn’t. There’s no way to fix it.
On the plus side, CPUs themselves essentially never break: Most of the other components (hard drive, screen, keyboard, etc.) will die long before the CPU does.
‘Repairing’ computers is, to a large extent, swapping out components that can’t be modified. ‘Tuning’ the hardware is not possible. (The software, on the other hand… )
Well, there’s an old adage: When your job is replaced by a little black box, get a job making those boxes.
Or selling them. Or advising companies how to best implement those boxes to improve their business.
Only little ones.
This is true, but I doubt we’re ever going to get to the point where it’s cheaper to toss out a car and buy a new one like we now do with electronics. Cars, computerized as they are, are still big chunks of steel with many components under extreme stresses. Some of those components will inevitably fail, so we’ll always need someone with the proper tools and experience.
Now, the exact job of the mechanic has changed over the last hundred years, and I’m sure it will continue to change. But it’s not disappearing any time soon.