I’d like to ask each responder to think about a couple of lines of work they think are next on the chopping block in the next few decades.
Now I’m not being pessimistic since every time a new breakthrough in machine capabilities emerges, people find new jobs to do.
Similarly, what jobs do you think will either appear or see an influx of new employees in the next few decades?
For my part, I think driving jobs (trucks, cabs, delivery) are going to start to vanish in 10 years, and will be pretty much gone in 30 years.
The other would be all those factory jobs that machines aren’t yet quite dexterous enough to do (iPhone assembly, sewing). I think those will start vanishing in 20 years or so.
I predict an increase in massage therapists, personal trainers and cooks because as most jobs become office jobs, our backs suffer, we need more exercise and nutrition is key to avoid obesity and related sicknesses.
Service industries and sales in general will take over for some of the lost manufacturing jobs, but a few won’t make it.
Bookstores won’t make it. I love them, but they will be fed to the inevitability wood chipper.
Silly outdated laws and entrenched small business interests are keeping liquor stores possible, I think they will be gone and booze will be available at every Target and Walmart eventually.
If there are travel agencies still left, they’re dead men walking.
ETA: I’m not sure I share the OP’s optimism in equal number of jobs for first world citizens after the next decades transitions.
Simple repatative knowledge based jobs are expected to gradually disappear. The ones that are often mentioned are in accounting and law.
The one to watch is simple human jobs like greeter. People have been working on this for so long that they’ve simply stopped making predictions of success – but the development is continuing. There is a test program I know about now, but the robot costs (?) around half a million (?). If this is a success, it could replace “reception” and “customer service” jobs.
There is also work going on around “call centres”. So far all we’ve seen has been really poor automated menu systems, and really quite good (but very narrow) personal assistant systems. Just like automated cars, there’s no reason why, with enough effort, it might be made to work eventually.
If I knew for certain what the next wave of jobs would be I’d put all my money into it. The problem is that it’s not easy to predict. Who knows what someone will come up with tomorrow?
I think Gozu is right in that jobs related to health are probably going to increase in number. Massage therapists, absolutely, but also doctors, nurses, technicians, and people in related fields. If you want a really safe job, become a statistician who specializes in pharmaceutical studies. Trust me, you will never lack for work.
The next job to go… I’m not absolutely convinced about drivers, but that’s a possibility.
Booze in supermarkets depends on state law. Some allow it anywhere, some allow it only with a special license, and if a license is needed, how hard it is to get can vary. There are also variations in law on when it can be sold (often, not on Sundays), and the laws can be different for beverages of different strength or origin.
And bookstores have already not made it, at least conventional ones. Those that are still around are functionally coffee shops, with a bunch of books to get people to linger and drink more coffee.
You can buy wine and beer, just not liquor. There tends to be liquor stores in most supermarket plazas to cater to those who want the stronger liquids.
I think the next job to go is fast food related. Right now if I go to McDonalds or similar, I interact with a person to tell them my order and pay. I would expect within the next 10 years that will no longer be the case. I would guess that I would punch in my order on some computer display and then pay with a card.
I think the best way to answer this question is to look backward. Roughly a century ago, the majority of Americans were farmers, today IIRC it’s less than 1%, yet we create more food than we did then and we don’t have a shortage of jobs. A lot of those jobs were lost for similar reasons that automation is changing the job market today too. There were significant improvements in technology, transportation, and science around it.
I think we’re likely on the cusp of a lot of automation taking over a lot of low-skill jobs. Many of them are pretty obvious, like I think it’s pretty clear the entire transportation industry is looking to be significantly automated over the next couple of decades. Similarly, self-service kiosks is stores and restaurants will make it so a McDonald’s might just need one or two people onsite, mostly just to deal with the few things too complex to be automated or fix any mistakes.
However, I think there’s a lot of jobs being automated, or on the verge of being automated, that a lot of people are thinking of. For instance, a lot of programming and IT jobs that most people think are “safe” may not be, especially the lower end ones. 10 years ago, web designers were everywhere and making a lot of money, now a lot of that work is going to websites. There’s significant work in research to make programming languages more and more high level, such that it will take less and less technical skill to get some of them done, or even just let significant portions of code get generated automatically. Hell, particularly the help desk type technology jobs are going to start disappearing as more and more of that stuff is being automated.
I think we’re going to start seeing more of a shift away from that sort of work in the next 20 years or so, as we’ve spent the last few generations building all the foundations, technological and infrastructural, to allow us to get away from that. As a result, I think we’ll start to see more of a focus on things like art/music/content creation, philosophy, the sciences and that sort of thing. Consider, as much as we’ve seen the shift to the internet to replace jobs, we’re also seeing more and more people making their livings on it. Tons of people make a living, or a decent chunk of their income making YouTube videos. Some people can do niche crafts and use social media and the internet to sell them to people all over the world. Automation will create more and more free time for people to read, watch TV and movies, listen to music, and all of that will just create a stronger feedback cycle for people people to create what people want to consume, and with that comes all the other stuff like commenters, critics, professional gamers. Hell, I suspect as China continues to grow and more of that market gets online, not to mention other markets around the world, that will just kick that cycle into overdrive.
They’ll install a lot of expensive computer displays in every store? Why can’t I just select one of my frequent orders from my phone and submit it, charging my account directly without a card?
Real estate broker will go the way of stock brokers. The only real reason to use a broker is to get access to the MLS. The rest can be taken care of with screening and pre-qualification
Plenty of places have both- for example, in the UK, you can buy wine, beer and spirits in the grocery store, yet there are also specialist liquor/wine stores that are pretty common as well. California’s the same way.
Even if the silly blue-laws and 3 tier system laws are repealed, what you’d end up with is a situation where grocery stores would sell the mass-market stuff- Bacardi, Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, Beefeater, Jose Cuervo, Smirnoff, etc…
But you’d still have specialty liquor stores where you’d go to buy your Pappy Van Winkle, Cadenhead Old Raj and Herradura.
Even that’s the case with beer and wine in Texas, where spirit sales are pretty regulated. If you want mass market beer/wine and a very limited selection of national-brand craft beer/imported wine and a few hyper-local beers, your grocery store is the place to go. Otherwise, a specialty grocer or liquor/beer store is the way to go for more interesting craft brews and hard-to-find things, like Hungarian wine, for example.
In the context of pharmacovigilance, “Statistician” is a more expansive job than just doing statistics.
If anything, Automatic Statistician would not replace biostats experts. It’d end up being the tool they use, rather than the (rather expensive) ones they now use.
Actually, I think a few travel agencies will survive, but will be very specialized.
Two years ago, for our honeymoon, my wife and I used a travel agent recommended by a friend because he could beat the best flights we could find using a plethora of flight search engines (kayak, expedia, hipmunk) for about an hour. His price was about ~$50 each better even after his fee was included. Next time I have to plan a flight more complicated than 3 legs, I’m just calling him. Sure, the tools to search for and book flights are generally available, but there’s still room for skilled users to make a premium on them.
I think most retail clerk jobs are on the chopping block. You can already see stores experimenting with self checkout and self ordering, and some places (Apple?) you can just pick something up, buy it on your phone, and walk out. With the increasing crunch on retail from online stores, I expect that it won’t be long before most brick and mortar stores have one employee on duty where there used to be five.
Agreed that California disproves the claim that liquor stores only exist because of blue laws. We have at least 4 basic types of retail stores that sell alcohol: Normal grocery stores; Small Convenience/Liquor stores that sell alcohol, cigarettes, a smattering of food; big box alcohol stores like BevMo with a huge selection that are about as big as a grocery store, but just booze, and specialty wine/beer shops that do tastings and things as well.
Not even low end jobs. I think many more mid-level highly-skilled jobs are disappearing than people realize. Speaking as someone who used to be a system engineer, I remember the days (around a decade or so ago) when a sysadmin could manage around a handful of servers. I saw that ratio changing just as I left the field and heard about sysadmins managing a hundred or two servers. Just as I left the field they were starting to sell businesses on the concept of “lights out data centers”, which meant that the machines could be managed remotely. Today? I don’t know any numbers, but I see them building enormous data centers in my area and there aren’t that many job openings for sysadmins as you’d expect to see working in buildings of that size. I suspect that a few sysadmins are now managing several thousand servers at a time!
Big Box stores may end up automating out most of their store clerks, but it will take a while. At the moment, there are several warehouses, esp. for online shipping companies, that have moved to a robot model. The worker presses buttons depending on what they need, and there are a large number of robots that grab stock from shelves and bring it to them. If anything is damaged, they can request them to bring a replacement.
This model works just as well for Wal-Mart. Have a bunch of kiosks where people press some pictured buttons based on what they need and it comes to them. The only thing that will be awkward about this is how they’d do dressing rooms for clothes, but other than that, it’s really cost and time efficient.
At that point all you really need clerks for is to remove robots that malfunction and unpack stock from boxes (and depending on how deep this rabbit hole goes, even unloading and unpacking the stock from trucks in theory could be automated).
