# Which jobs will be last to be automated/outsourced? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 9, 2019, 7:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422 "2019-08-09T19:09:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Fiendish\_Astronaut](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fiendish_astronaut/32/3295_2.png) [@Fiendish\_Astronaut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fiendish_Astronaut)\ **Post date:** [August 10, 2019, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/21 "2019-08-10T22:15:47Z")
A comedian will never be automated so I suppose it’s not a good answer to your question. I think a television continuity announcer _could_ be automated soon though, even though that’s thought of as a very human job and at first glance might not seem that different from a comedian’s job (i.e. a human talking to other humans). On some small channels the announcer does little more than “at 9pm it’s programme x, now it’s time for programme y”. Lots of these are pre-recorded and used repeatedly already. It is cheap to get an announcer to record that once and just repeat that audio when you need it but what if there’s a last minute schedule change? Most small channels don’t have an announcer on hand so instead they go with something really generic. A computer could easily generate a realistic sounding voice that says the new message you really need it to say. Scheduled TV channels are diminishing to some extent but they’ll still be around for another decade or two and you can be sure that budgets will be tightened. Announcers are a bit of a luxury for small channels but small channels are numerous and ran by big companies with the technology to make it happen at scale. ---
**Author:** ![Mcmechanic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@Mcmechanic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mcmechanic)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2019, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/22 "2019-08-11T04:17:33Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > I predict that the rate of automation will actually slow down, because we have been picking the low-hanging fruit first. We will NEVER be at a point where even 50% of our citizens are unemployed due to automation. I’d be surprised if we saw the unemployment rate drop by more than a few percentage points because of automation. > > I have been having this debate since the 1980’s in college. The robot apocalypse was always 10-20 years away. And 35 years later, it still is… > > Humans have general intelligence and judgement. AI’s do not. They can do very specific things very well, but they can’t improvise or adapt in a general way. > > There seems to be a misconception that workers are just drones mindlessly carrying out the plans set down from on high. That information flow in a company goes one way - from the planners and the deciders on top, down to the worker bees. If those bees could all be replaced by robots, we couldn’t need jobs any more. > > But that’s not the way organizations actually work. Information flows two ways. Decisions get made on top, then when they are implemented there is a feedback loop where the workers either adapt to flaws in the plan (there are ALWAYS flaws in grand plans), or they tell their supervisors what can or can’t be done, and the plan is modified accordingly. Sometimes they actually find better ways to do things, because the planners don’t know what they know, and the process gets improved. > > If you want to see what happens when the ‘worker bees’ just mindlessly follow the plan regardless of whether it makes sense, watch what happens to any organization when its workers go on a ‘work to rule’ strike. Even with a corporation, the day-to-day activities are far too difficult to perfectly plan, and managers absolutely require that people be able to modify things that don’t work or report them back. Robots won’t do that. Robots always ‘work to rule’. > > I have visited many factories, and looked at many production plans. None of them actually match what’s going on on the factory floor. There are always little exceptions, things missed by the planners, that the workers are smart enough to work around. One of the hardest things about automation is covering the last 1% of exceptions that prevent humans from being taken out of the loop. Elon Musk tried to build a ‘dark’ factory that was just robots. He failed. He then admitted that automation is far harder than he thought it would be - especially for complex products. > > Take the example of truck driver -a favourite candidate for a job that will go away soon. After all, when driving is automated, who needs human truckers? > > Except truck drivers do a LOT more than drive the truck. They are responsible for making sure loads are loaded in order, secured properly, and correct. They act as agents for the trucking company, or are self-employed. They are security for the load, they learn to detect incipient problems with the truck. They deal with emergencies, and have to handle situations like road accidents where police are controlling traffic with visual indications. Sometimes they have to go off-plan, like when they get to a customer’s site and the load isn’t ready, or a vehicle is blocking the loading docks. > > I could go on and on. A million little decisions requiring judgement. The ability to improvise when necessary. These types of characteristics are crucial in many jobs, even if 90% of the time the job is rote. It’s the times when it’s not that automation will fail you. > > Also, you have to look at the environment around the truckers. Before you can automate you need fully digitized processes. You need common databases. You need commonality in loading systems, and probably new systems for allowing automated vehicles to handle things like construction zones, accident zones, road damage and the rest. An ad-hoc, patchwork system cannot be automated. But it can be run by people. A lot of our systems today are like that. Container shipping did that - they standardized processes to allow for automating of loading and unloading. Containers are all uniform in size, attach points, etc. It took decades to get to that level of standardization. And even now, lots of people work on those loading docks. > > Will will see a LOT more automation. But we will also see demand for more workers. That’s been the pattern ever since the Luddites tried to shut down automated weaving, and there’s nothing fundamentally different about automation today - except that now the people being effected have social media to complain about it, and the jobs under threat now are the jobs held by influential people instead of, say, millions of agricultural workers. > > Or as the saying goes, if immigrants were primarily made up of competition for politicians and lawyers, the borders would be closed tighter than a drum. Automation was good so long as it was destroying the jobs of farmers and assembly line workers, but now that it’s coming for the accountants, lawyers, professors and other intellectuals, suddenly it’s a major crisis. I have to agree with this. Just look at apps available on your smartphone, many of them have easily replaced human mental processes. Physical processes are much more expensive and difficult to replace unless it’s a repetitive task in a highly controlled environment, aka moving standardized product in a factory. ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2019, 11:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/23 "2019-08-11T11:19:23Z")
**Sam** , it seems like you’re saying that unemployment as high as 50% would be no big deal. Did I misunderstand? Regarding trucking, self-driving trucks are already here. Just one cite: > **[Self-driving trucks are on the roads in Texas](https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/self-driving-trucks-driverless-houston-dallas-texas)** > > "Driverless" trucks are on the road and making deliveries in between Dallas and Houston in Texas. On the subject of AI, I agree that AIs don’t currently have general intelligence, but I disagree that they never will. That’s a discussion for a different thread, though. Automation has been decried all along, not just now that it may replace some lawyers and other professional positions. Where do you get the idea otherwise? The Luddites are the obvious example, but it has always caused pain and disruption – read Player Piano by Vonnegut. So what, though? That’s not what this thread is about. It’s about which jobs are safest from automation. I disagree about prostitutes being all that safe from automation. Sure, there will always be some high end ones, but I have to imagine that RealDoll version X (that is, some really well-made version in the future) will take the place of some large segment of the working ladies and men. There are already brothels that use dolls, I believe, and I imagine these versions are basically beta compared to what’s coming in the next few decades. ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2019, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/24 "2019-08-11T12:21:49Z")
> [@RitterSport](#): > > **Sam** , it seems like you’re saying that unemployment as high as 50% would be no big deal. Did I misunderstand? Lol yes. ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2019, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/25 "2019-08-11T12:24:03Z")
> [@RitterSport](#): > > So what, though? That’s not what this thread is about. It’s about which jobs are safest from automation. Since automation creates jobs, the jobs that haven’t yet been created are probably the safest. ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2019, 12:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/26 "2019-08-11T12:42:03Z")
> [@Ruken](#): > > Since automation creates jobs, the jobs that haven’t yet been created are probably the safest. Thanks. Very helpful. :rolleyes: Since this thread is about jobs that currently exist, do you have anything to add? Or, did you mean to post this in the “Ban Automation” thread? ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2019, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/27 "2019-08-11T13:22:14Z")
> [@RitterSport](#): > > Since this thread is about jobs that currently exist, do you have anything to add? We can only respond to the thread you started, not the one you imagined you started. If you wanted a different thread than what you actually wrote, then English more better next time. It’s 100% responsive to the title and OP. The last jobs to be automated will be ones that automation hasn’t created yet. ---
**Author:** ![Author\_Balk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e0b2c6/32.png) [@Author\_Balk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Author_Balk)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2019, 1:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/28 "2019-08-11T13:42:09Z")
Professional Athletes should last awhile. ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2019, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/29 "2019-08-11T16:08:54Z")
> [@Ruken](#): > > We can only respond to the thread you started, not the one you imagined you started. If you wanted a different thread than what you actually wrote, then English more better next time. It’s 100% responsive to the title and OP. The last jobs to be automated will be ones that automation hasn’t created yet. Should I ask a mod to change the title to “Which current jobs…”? Everyone else seems to have figured out what I meant. Maybe your post is responsive, but it’s useless and uninteresting. ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2019, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/30 "2019-08-11T16:11:53Z")
> [@Author\_Balk](#): > > Professional Athletes should last awhile. Agreed, and I agree with the comedian comment earlier. Artists as well, I think. I could see a diminished role for actors if CGI continues apace. Even voice actors – there’s this Google service that makes reservations for you and it sounds pretty lifelike, inserting ums and pauses to make it seem more human. Give that a couple more decades. ---
**Author:** ![Fake\_Tales\_of\_San\_Francisco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8491ac/32.png) [@Fake\_Tales\_of\_San\_Francisco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fake_Tales_of_San_Francisco)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2019, 9:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/31 "2019-08-12T09:28:24Z")
> [@RitterSport](#): > > Should I ask a mod to change the title to “Which current jobs…”? Everyone else seems to have figured out what I meant. Maybe your post is responsive, but it’s useless and uninteresting. It’s also entirely correct - unless you did actually want a mindless list of difficult to automate jobs more fitting to IMHO? When asking what jobs will be last to be automated, we’re looking into a future where 99.9% of current jobs are automated (or are some impossible to automate?) This future involves new jobs being created (i.e. maintenance roles in case the automation goes wrong), but those jobs themselves might be replaced eventually too. If we follow automation to its logical conclusion, then yes, all aspects of drudge work will eventually be covered, including roles created to ensure such drudge work is functioning correctly. In this future there are no jobs, only hobbies (politics/art/athletics/etc). Will people even bother with prositutes if VR gives you the same experience (and potentially superior?) ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2019, 10:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/32 "2019-08-12T10:38:37Z")
> [@Fake\_Tales\_of\_San\_Francisco](#): > > It’s also entirely correct - unless you did actually want a mindless list of difficult to automate jobs more fitting to IMHO? > > When asking what jobs will be last to be automated, we’re looking into a future where 99.9% of current jobs are automated (or are some impossible to automate?) This future involves new jobs being created (i.e. maintenance roles in case the automation goes wrong), but those jobs themselves might be replaced eventually too. > > If we follow automation to its logical conclusion, then yes, all aspects of drudge work will eventually be covered, including roles created to ensure such drudge work is functioning correctly. In this future there are no jobs, only hobbies (politics/art/athletics/etc). > > Will people even bother with prositutes if VR gives you the same experience (and potentially superior?) See, I would have thought radiologist would have been a difficult job to replace with an AI, and yet Google is getting results as good or better than humans when using an AI to read some kinds of x-rays. I think that’s interesting, you don’t. That’s fine, no one is forcing you to post here. **Ruken** ’s post was uninteresting to me because there’s nothing to discuss – of course there will be different jobs in the future. Big deal. As I mentioned, other people contributed with their own thoughts on which current jobs will likely stick around. One mentioned prostitutes and gigolos, and you and I are both skeptical that will be the case – see? A debate can happen. If a college student came to me and asked what medical field do I think she should pursue, I’d probably say, well, not radiology. Oral surgeon, maybe? Gynecologist? Will there need to be as many general practitioners in 20 years with the coming combination of expert systems and greater use of physician assistants and nurse practitioners? ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2019, 2:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/33 "2019-08-12T14:09:16Z")
> [@Fiendish\_Astronaut](#): > > I think a television continuity announcer _could_ be automated soon though, even though that’s thought of as a very human job and at first glance might not seem that different from a comedian’s job (i.e. a human talking to other humans). On some small channels the announcer does little more than “at 9pm it’s programme x, now it’s time for programme y”. The US National Weather Service already has some kind of automated, synthesized speech thing that reads the weather forecasts on NOAA weather radio. It’s also clearly been around a while; it sounds like a Speak and Spell. I’d think that if they can already automate the reading of a forecast, they could very easily have a computer interpret the programming schedule (especially if there is some kind of standardized metadata) and spit out little speech blurbs that could be inserted between them. Personally, I think what we’re going to see isn’t going to be wholesale automation and elimination of human jobs, but rather we’ll see the jobs transform into some sort of collaboration between people and the machines. For example, I don’t think that deep learning AI/expert systems and surgical robots are going to replace doctors or nurses. Rather what you’ll have is a collaboration between the two. Same thing for truck drivers- maybe the truck driver can just sleep or whatever on the long distance part, but take over when there’s a situation that the AI can’t quite cope with. Or a sports coach; an AI having watched thousands (millions?) of games will have a very good opinion of what the best play/lineup should be for a given situation, but a good coach isn’t always going to do that either. He’d be stupid to entirely disregard the AI, but just as stupid to rely totally on it as well. I also think that where we’ll see the biggest AI/automation gains is in problems that are currently too dangerous/time consuming/onerous for people to do for a reasonable wage, but that need doing. For example, apparently sorting stuff for recycling is a monumental PITA. But it would seem to me that it could be something ripe for exactly the sort of deep learning/neural net/AI type approach- you’d have to train your garbage picking robot, but once it (and hopefully thousands of networked others) was trained, you could set it loose, and with the appropriate feedback mechanisms, it would learn and get better as it went, AND share that information with all the other garbage picking robots in other cities who would also be sharing that info. So they would all get really good at identifying garbage bags from tissue paper faster than any one would. ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2019, 2:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/34 "2019-08-12T14:20:01Z")
> [@bump](#): > > The US National Weather Service already has some kind of automated, synthesized speech thing that reads the weather forecasts on NOAA weather radio. > > It’s also clearly been around a while; it sounds like a Speak and Spell. > > I’d think that if they can already automate the reading of a forecast, they could very easily have a computer interpret the programming schedule (especially if there is some kind of standardized metadata) and spit out little speech blurbs that could be inserted between them. > > Personally, I think what we’re going to see isn’t going to be wholesale automation and elimination of human jobs, but rather we’ll see the jobs transform into some sort of collaboration between people and the machines. > > For example, I don’t think that deep learning AI/expert systems and surgical robots are going to replace doctors or nurses. Rather what you’ll have is a collaboration between the two. Same thing for truck drivers- maybe the truck driver can just sleep or whatever on the long distance part, but take over when there’s a situation that the AI can’t quite cope with. Or a sports coach; an AI having watched thousands (millions?) of games will have a very good opinion of what the best play/lineup should be for a given situation, but a good coach isn’t always going to do that either. He’d be stupid to entirely disregard the AI, but just as stupid to rely totally on it as well. > > I also think that where we’ll see the biggest AI/automation gains is in problems that are currently too dangerous/time consuming/onerous for people to do for a reasonable wage, but that need doing. For example, apparently sorting stuff for recycling is a monumental PITA. But it would seem to me that it could be something ripe for exactly the sort of deep learning/neural net/AI type approach- you’d have to train your garbage picking robot, but once it (and hopefully thousands of networked others) was trained, you could set it loose, and with the appropriate feedback mechanisms, it would learn and get better as it went, AND share that information with all the other garbage picking robots in other cities who would also be sharing that info. So they would all get really good at identifying garbage bags from tissue paper faster than any one would. I agree about the recycling jobs – advances in computer vision have really blown my mind over the last few years. Point your phone at a plant or animal and it knows what it is. Google Photos can identify people at different ages, facing in different directions, with different expressions, etc. Truly amazing! I also agree that automation likely won’t eliminate all humans doing a particular job, but can certainly imagine much higher productivity, with one human working with many AIs/robots/whatever, where it took multiple people before. So, I could see one surgeon supervising the work of multiple surgery robots, stepping in when necessary. And, that surgeon may be able to work remotely, from a much lower-wage country. The price of routine surgeries could really plummet! ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2019, 9:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/35 "2019-08-12T21:58:41Z")
I also think that child and eldercare will be among the last things automated, and they can’t really be outsourced. Scratch that, they will be among the last things successfully automated - I think someone(s) will try it at least a few times before realizing that the Harlow monkey experiments apply to vulnerable humans too, and wire caretakers just won’t do. I’d like to think that children warehoused in orphanages without much human contact developing RAD would be all the proof needed, but you know it won’t be and we’ll have some little damaged humans or a lot of dead elders before they give up on the idea of having robots wipe butts and fill mouths. ---
**Author:** ![SciFiSam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2019, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/36 "2019-08-13T03:44:09Z")
Fruit picking and some other agricultural jobs. Those skills where there’s some gross motor skills, some fine motor skills, and some skills in detecting what to pick, like colour recognition. Yeah, you could probably make some robot that did all that, though it’s still a distant dream. If you could, it would still be cheaper to employ hordes of people to harvest crops. Looking at a tree, seeing it’s a tree, seeing it’s an orange tree, seeing that the oranges are ripe enough, and then reaching out to various heights, while moving among those trees on slightly uneven ground, and plucking the orange off without squeezing it hard, and putting it down without bruising it. No current technology could pluck an orange off a tree without damaging it. And there are hordes of people out there willing to do it for less than the money you’d spend for robots to do it instead. > [@elfkin477](#): > > I also think that child and eldercare will be among the last things automated, and they can’t really be outsourced. Scratch that, they will be among the last things successfully automated - I think someone(s) will try it at least a few times before realizing that the Harlow monkey experiments apply to vulnerable humans too, and wire caretakers just won’t do. I’d like to think that children warehoused in orphanages without much human contact developing RAD would be all the proof needed, but you know it won’t be and we’ll have some little damaged humans or a lot of dead elders before they give up on the idea of having robots wipe butts and fill mouths. Without the Brave New World concept you’re envisaging, I agree. Three reasons: The human options have many and long-term examples of why they’re better. We’ve had online learning for a long time. Most people will want their children and elders cared for by people. It’s cheap. It’s always been a low-pay job. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [August 15, 2019, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/37 "2019-08-15T22:18:21Z")
I’m surprised at all the people who have put “surgeon” above “plumber” on the easy to automate scale. I’m not sure you’re wrong, but it definitely conflicts with my intuition. I disagree with a lot of **Sam** ’s analysis, although I think it’s well supported historically and I agree that there’s a lot of hysteria over things right now. I don’t think we’re headed for a near-term jobless apocalypse. But there are two claims that I think are fundamentally wrong. 1. Because a job is hard to 100% define, it’s safe from automation until all 100% can be automated For example, the fact that truck drivers do lots of little things that don’t slot nicely into the sorts of things that a driving AI can do (maybe. Jury’s still out a bit on whether a driving AI can do the driving part well enough) won’t help keep most truck drivers on the job. A truck’s load doesn’t need to be secured by the guy piloting it. In the rare cases where police direction needs to be followed, a remote worker can take over, etc. The problem is that if 95% of a trucker’s duties can be automated, the industry can end up needing only 5% of the workers it used to have as the easy stuff is automated. Travel agents are a good example of this. They still exist! They industry has not vanished. But, also, it’s way smaller than it used to be. Because the easy parts got automated away. Remaining workers handle the corner cases that were hard to automate, but there are a lot fewer of them. Corner cases and complexity will not save your job unless you are particularly good at the corner cases. 1. Because humans are adaptable, there will always be work for them. The problem with this is that each individual human has to be trained, and the more complicated the problem, the more training it takes. Algorithms and robots, on the other hand, just keep getting better. Believing that humans’ mental plasticity will always beat that of software seems as misguided as believing that horses’ physical prowess would always beat machinery. The latter was true for a long long time, until it wasn’t. There seems to be a clear natural limit to human intelligence. It’s not clear to me that there is a limit to machine intelligence. ---
**Author:** ![WildaBeast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wildabeast/32/6_2.png) [@WildaBeast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WildaBeast)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2019, 12:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/38 "2019-08-16T00:37:49Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > Auto mechanic and other technician jobs like hvac tech. I agree that auto mechanics are unlikely to be automated or outsourced for the reasons you describe, however if electric vehicles become the predominant type of car then there may be less work for auto mechanics in the future. Sure, EVs will occasionally break and need to be fixed, but they don’t need routine maintenance like oil changes and tune ups. And they have way fewer moving parts than an internal combustion engine car; no transmission, for example. ---
**Author:** ![MollyCatherine](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/bc79bd/32.png) [@MollyCatherine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MollyCatherine)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2019, 1:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/39 "2019-08-16T01:09:25Z")
Psychologists/therapists. No one will want to go talk to the robot who replaced their counselor about their distress at being replaced by a robot. ---
**Author:** ![RaftPeople](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@RaftPeople](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RaftPeople)\ **Post date:** [August 16, 2019, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422/40 "2019-08-16T02:42:35Z")
> [@SciFiSam](#): > > Looking at a tree, seeing it’s a tree, seeing it’s an orange tree, seeing that the oranges are ripe enough, and then reaching out to various heights, while moving among those trees on slightly uneven ground, and plucking the orange off without squeezing it hard, and putting it down without bruising it. No current technology could pluck an orange off a tree without damaging it. And there are hordes of people out there willing to do it for less than the money you’d spend for robots to do it instead. There is a lot of activity in this area and progress is being made. You’re right the economics won’t make sense right away but I think they will start to really be used within the next 10 years. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-jobs-will-be-last-to-be-automated-outsourced/838422.md?page=3)