Comment by erikstarck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by erikstarck | Hacker News Reader

I can see two very clear trends when it comes to where new jobs are created.

One is the shift from industry jobs to service jobs.

Did you know that globally, farming has been the most common profession since basically the dawn of civilization up until about a decade ago? [1] Now it's service jobs.

Humans helping other humans, this is a type of jobs that will never go away because humans have qualities that machines can never possess regardless of if they pass Turing tests or not.

The second is the bleeding edge of innovation and super-brands that have shorter and shorter lifespans. The share of the economy belonging to the mega-corps is decreasing. Smaller and faster is the way of the future. This is the era of the startup economy.

So there you have it: services, super-brands and startups.

That's what the economy will look like the next 50 years. Heck, it's what it looks like today! At least the part that's working.

[1] http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/social/farming_bypassed_a...

"humans have qualities that machines can never possess regardless of if they pass Turing tests or not"

I don't think you understand the Turing test.

To be fair, I don't think you do either (in fact most people don't), but I agree with your underlying point that we ought to be able to make a machine that mimics human behavior well enough to fool people and eliminate the human-à-human jobs.

The original Turing test involved two closed rooms and text based terminals. That way of communicating has an extremely low emotional bandwidth. While it may test the machine's ability to reason like a human it does not test whether or not the human connects emotionally to the machine.

For example, a machine can be made to sing better than a human from a purely technical perspective. But once you know that the person singing is a human being with a history of happiness and pain, ups and downs, you can connect on a deeper level. The song gets meaning.

Or a soul.

I mean, would you want a machine or a human singing on your wedding?

When it really matters we will always pick the human.

Now, what is a more likely development is an _augmented_ human, improved by machines. The wedding singer will use autotune (or at least a mic). And that's fine, I guess, it's still a job.

So it's not enough for the machine to pass the Turing test.

So what? That doesn't mean you can't build a machine indistinguishable from a human, except that you don't need to pay it.

Some people might use recorded music instead of a live singer at their wedding.

That job isn't automatic.

You might always pick a human, I'd pick what I liked best. I remain convinced of the possibility of a machine being more creative than any human, and being better able to understand and connect with "our soul", though I hate to use that language. If technical ability is one variable to optimize for, emotional connecting ability is just another.

The shift from industry jobs to service jobs has been going on for a long time. Virtually all developed countries depend more on the service sector than on manufacturing.

I completely agree. It's why creativity and general aptitude is more important than a focused expertise.

Excuse me? Not to say that creativity is unimportant, but to say that it trumps expertise is going very far, even if it is the zeitgeist. Without a thorough understanding of the world around us, aka expertise, creativity is not worth much. General aptitude is great, but experts lead the way to true innovation. Creativity is a commodity: we all have it to some, usually sufficient, degree.

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