If you’re planning a career change, be careful. While today’s top-flight jobs might sound tempting, many of them are at risk of automation. Even lawyers and doctors could be on the chopping block once AI starts performing cognitive labor for them.
Fortunately, there are plenty of roles that still require humans. And barring some miraculous breakthrough, these jobs are going to be here to stay for a long time.
Here are some examples:
Social Services
One area you might consider is social services. As society continues to experience problems, including the fallout from technological change, it will require people trained to keep the social fabric together.
As a social services officer, you’ll need to use sophisticated interpersonal skills to manage clients and members of the public. You will also need to travel freely around cities, something that robots can’t do yet, despite their apparent intelligence.
Research And Innovation
As of the end of 2023, robots cannot autonomously research and innovate by themselves, either. Systems don’t have the reasoning skills or general applicability of the human mind and can’t work on research problems from scratch. While AI might offer some helpful tools in this arena, it still requires substantial human direction for effective deployment.
Again, this aspect is unlikely to change shortly. Organizations will still need individuals with advanced reasoning skills for the foreseeable future, making this another option worth considering.
Teaching
Another area where robots are unlikely to thrive is in teaching. While we’ve had online courses and the ability to deliver education over the Internet for decades, technology hasn’t forced any significant changes. That’s because parents want schools to socialize their children and provide them with daycare. Robots are unlikely to perform that function to anything like the standards a human teacher could, even if they understood all the subject matter.
Fitness Instruction
Fitness instructors are unlikely to see their work go anywhere. That’s because the internet already automated their services with free exercise instruction videos. Even so, people still use them because they want a human to motivate them.
For this reason, we are seeing a boom in pilates instructor training. More people are signing up, despite the prevalence of new technologies in the fitness industry automating work and making training cheap or even free for most people.
Business Leadership
Business leadership is another area where robots are unlikely to make much headway. While some companies are hiring AIs as their CEOs as a token gesture, these systems cannot replace human decision-makers in all their capacities. As such, companies will also need a human in the loop to ensure that AI-based decisions make sense.
Creative Arts
Finally, despite AI taking over writing and image production, it is unlikely to annihilate the arts entirely. That’s because there will always be demand for original work with a human touch. Not everyone wants to read sterile, lifeless AI-generated text or view strange deep-learning image creations (like the eyeball-bejeweled images Google released several years ago). Instead, they want real human creativity, not just elaborate derivatives of what’s already out there.