When choosing a new career direction, it’s important to stop and think ‘Is technology going to make me obsolete one day?’
There’s so many jobs where actual human people are being told, ‘Sorry, Garry. See that machine over there? Yes, well, how do I put this… goodbye.’ A friend of mine got Lasik eye surgery last week and I don’t actually know why the surgeons were there. He sat back and the machines did the whole thing.
It’s now realistic to think of most jobs as being able to be done by a robot. At least in the foreseeable future (time of integration and acceptance by people by each will vary). Pilots soon won’t be needed at all. With computer-generated articles, writers ditto. Medical research? It’s possible that a computer will be able to analyse the biological makeup of a large group of people who suffer cancer, find where in that data the anomalies lie, find a commonality among them, and then suggest a cure.
What about….. investing? I think yep, robots could do it too. Take Uber… So many top investors thought it was a completely idiotic idea and opted out without a thought (whoops).
As it was being pitched though, what’s to say artificial intelligence couldn’t have analysed people’s growing openness to (and trust in) peer-to-peer reviewed services, people’s growing dissatisfaction with commercial taxi services, economic data such as the Uber pricing system and also the worldwide public’s responses to similar ideas (similar in big ways, or in ways so indiscernible that only artificial intelligence could identify)? Damn, AI would’ve been all over Uber in a (artificial) heartbeat.
What about musicians? Creative jobs are a bit safer. It’s hard to replace the genius creativity of the most inspiring musicians, painters etc. A robotic Bob Dylan would not have had as many fans today. But artificial intelligence could go through every song ever written, find the most well-received beats, the melodies that were most loved by people, the best hooks and Bam – 0100100101011000111000110101010101010101 – Instant classic.
Coming up with new ideas and innovating could be a problem for robots though, as programming is exactly that – behaving in a way that is based on parameters and instructions. But maybe we’ll work out how to program AI to innovate too.
There is one job that would be super weird if done by robots though…
Runway model.
The stuff that’s modelled at runway shows is highly dependent on the models being confident, looking comfortable in even the most ridiculous-to-wear clothing, and owning it. Can you program AI to ‘own it’? I basically know nothing about programming but I’m guessing no.