Such as creativity, emotional intelligence, leadership/people management, negotiation skills, motor/hand eye coordination, critical thinking skills...
AI might have mastered just about every skill or capability within 10 or 20 years. Some people suspect less.
Your list isn't really just skills but more generally abilities.
Emotional IQ - See the Inflection 2.5 model (Pi).
Creativity - Ask ChatGPT to help you be creative writing poetry and then creating paintings of the poems.
Leadership/management - Claude 3 or GPT4 might be better than the average manager. 70% of my bosses have been barely competent pr!cks though, so I may be biased.
Negotiation is not that complex actually. It's boils down to being willing to walk away. Leading LLMs can be good negotiators already.
Hand-eye coordination - not for every single task, but we have robots that can play ping pong, juggle, catch balls, and solve a Rubik's cube faster than humanely possible.
Critical thinking skills: put the average person off the street against Claude 3 Opus or GPT-4 Turbo and have them take a GRE or similar test. I would bet on the AI.
For your list, we are already there.
I think that "replaced" is not necessarily the best way to think about it though. People still play chess. Or run. Or Jeopardy. We still have plenty of amateur artists that just want to imitate their favorite cartoon or whatever. Even though AI can do all of that better and faster now.
But wait 10 or 20 years. There will be very realistic and fully capable simulations of humans.
So sometime between FSD and fusion as an energy source.
A robot solving a Rubik's cube is less impressive than a human doing so, since Rubik's cube is basically about memorizing the algorithm.
Chatgpt might be better than your manager, but managers don't lead. Every manager I've reported to has basically had the job of primarily relaying communication from above.
You won't be able to replace doctors, because you want someone to say "I'm a doctor and you need this surgery". What will happen is the doctor will get an AI to help him, and then he will rubber stamp the diagnosis. He captures the gains.
Pilots and captains are also one of these. Someone's gotta be responsible for the people on board, even if a computer is already doing everything on a normal day.
Military planes have been way beyond unassisted human control for a long time now. I see no reason why airliners won't go down the same road (you can literally see it happening as we speak).
It turns out that dynamic instability has some real advantages (e.g., maneuverability), if you have a computer to help keep the thing from going out of control.
The AI may fly the plane, but the trigger is squeezed by a human.
However when AI does a job better people will be fine with AI taking on the role. We are fine with computer controlled subway lines, dishwashers, and some even driverless cars. We are happy let machines do tasks if we're confident they will do them well.
Also, things where the point is to be human. Working for rich people in any capacity may fill this role, for the same reason they by watches which cost more than apartments yet keep worse time than a Casio F91W.
[0] I'm also assuming this is more likely to happen after we get a significant number of android robot workers; if it happens before that point, then it may take a year or two for the global economy to shift.
It could be that in practice an AI can't really generalise well to All People compared to humans, because the humans are so diverse and the humans who are doing some jobs generalise to just the small set of people they are working with.
Right now it does look like prompts like "answer this as if you're one of Napoleon's generals" work fairly well, but I wonder if in practice we'll find out that specific human experiences which are hard to document will turn out to create niches which AI is very very poor at dealing with.
Potential examples:
* what does it feel like to fall in love? humans can't describe well.
* what does it feel like to summit Everest for the first time? ditto.
* what are spiritual experiences like?
Probably many other areas which are clearly important to people, particularly falling in love, but language is weak, and at the end of the day...
It's a large language model.
Though I suppose AI could be part of something that squashes small businesses and funnels work to huge companies. Which would make that entrepreneur angle a bit harder.
There's already a fair amount of SEO gaming to make something that isn't "local" appear to be local.
I don't think it would be hard at all to design a robot to roof the large flat areas typical of modern architecture (if it can be dignified by that name), maybe with a human or two to make sure the robot keeps working, and to handle any peaks, valleys, plumbing or heating penetrations, or other weird areas.
source: used to dispatch for HVAC, roofing, and paving services.
Are you sure about that?
Feels a little early to call.
I pitched the idea of an AI directly generating art sometime around 2008, only to have the idea curtly dismissed.
Deep Fakes (by a different name) were a plot point in an episode of Sliders, and the audio version a throwaway line in an episode of Babylon 5, at the time I thought each were completely impossible.
My bet would be androids doing plumbing around ten years after cars lose their steering wheels; but even then, that's just anchoring on Moore and the available power envelope for a car vs. a bipedal robot.
But if/when robots are doing a majority of plumbing jobs, they'll be doing 99%+ of all jobs. So society will have changed drastically and unknowingly, for better or worse. And that societal change will affect all jobs, robot-replaced or not.
So IMO a relatively robot resistant job (like plumber) is as good as a robot proof jobs.
We don't even have a commercial robot to unload and store dishes from the dishwasher nor unload and store clothes from dryer. What makes you think robotics will be solved in a century, let alone ten years?
What's hard for me doesn't tell you anything about what's hard for a differently shaped body, and robots don't need to look like us — two left hands is easy, extra joints is easy.
Most robots don't look like us, one way or another. Famously Spot, but there are as many sizes and shapes as there is commercial demand for them. Humanoid ones are popular right now, but I grew up hearing about how that was "actually a bad shape for a robot" (was the past just sour grapes, or are the current humanoid ones CEOs watching too much SciFi?)
> We don't even have a commercial robot to unload and store dishes from the dishwasher nor unload and store clothes from dryer.
Both dishwashers and clothes driers are special purpose robots designed to solve problems without having to first solve human-level sensation or dexterity.
> What makes you think robotics will be solved in a century, let alone ten years?
Have you seen demo videos from the last 12 months? The videos are sped up, indicating they're compute-bound; the accuracy of joint positioning, the strength, etc. is already superhuman whenever we want it to be.
Quality of vision, that's the hard part. Cars can only lose their steering wheels[0] when that's solved in terms of quality, not before; a Moore-like exponential on reducing electrical power requirements for a fixed level of compute, would take 10 years to reduce power draw by a factor of 100, which seems about right given cars can afford to (regardless of what current hardware actually uses) burn a few kilowatts on an autopilot.
[0] Until the Waymo etc. is available everywhere rather than geofenced to a few specific locations, this is still not sufficiently solved despite, yes, having no steering wheel: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2023/01/05/waymos-new...
There are whole host of companies offering various apps where you film yourself doing a sport or activity and an AI will give you advice on what you are doing wrong and how to improve. They might not be great now, but in a few years they will probably be as good as most average coaches/trainers.
I bet, in some distant future, a robot might replace my coach. But it's very likely that by then I'll turn into a power cell for a huge electrical grid for robot survival.
Nurses/MAs for the same reason, but also the fact that I think people in pain/sickness will still want human compassion. Even if AI and Robots may be able to do the job some day, people want to be helped by other people.
Anything in front of a screen is vulnerable
The only profession where I’m 100% confident it’ll survive is the oldest profession
psychologist was one of the first ever applications of AI - remember eliza.
but child care, nurses and physio are, imo, safe.
Yes. I spent a few days in the hospital last October for some jaw surgery. When I was flat on my back recovering from the total anesthesia and unable to move, I observed what the nurses were doing and thought about how much of it could be replaced by AI. Essentially none, unless humanoid robots get really, really good. They might eventually, but that seems now to be a long way off.
Many of the answers in this thread talk about skills where AI seems unlikely to have any direct sort of impact at all (like plumbing). In my opinion, that could easily end up being technically correct but exactly wrong in spirit (assuming the ultimate goal is to have a good job). It's somewhat likely that AI-augmented or AI-enabled professions become so ludicrously profitable that any other profession becomes barely livable.
Instead of trying to avoid AI it might make more sense to ride the wave. Dive right into some industry that's undergoing upheaval, work for AI-powered startups, learn about the technology, and meet the future head-on.
I don't want to sound too "gung ho", I'm a software engineer who feels like my profession will be radically different in less than 10 years and I'm genuinely worried about staying relevant. But I think "staying relevant" is probably a better strategy than trying to get out of way.
It doesn't matter how much money you make. When your sewer backs up, someone has to fix it, and that person is gonna charge what the market will bear. If the professions become ludicrously profitable, the trades are going to increase their rates accordingly.
hard work, on site -- i'm sitting pretty at home typing this -- and no real upwards growth, but there's big money in NoVA data centers and the tradesmen's pay reflects that.
It's widely known that robots have bad vision and hand eye coordination, thus a common recommendation is to learn trade skills such as plumbing. I suspect that means there will be an over-supply of plumbers.
Everyone needs food, too — much more critical to fix when it goes wrong than is sewage — but farming doesn't make you rich.
Countering that, in a way, barring major sociocultural shifts, the elite require serfs, so whatever it is that serfs can be made to do which is somehow necessary for perpetuating the power/financial structures which prop up the elites will be "spared" somehow.
Your question seems to assume that there are some kind of practical human capabilities that cannot be automated. This is false.
A side effect of this is that labor wages have increased dramatically, thereby decreasing the possibilities of having unique stuff done.
The unfolding of reality is not one linear equation.
Anything that is physical and not 100% replicable.
Anything that is interpersonal relationship.
Also quickly grabbing arbitrarily shaped objects from a pile.
"So, I’d like to take a small detour and to give an analogy that will hopefully clarify why more accurate prediction of the next word leads to more understanding, real understanding. Let’s consider an example. Say you read a detective novel. It’s like complicated plot, a storyline, different characters, lots of events, mysteries like clues, it’s unclear. Then, let’s say that at the last page of the book, the detective has gathered all the clues, gathered all the people and saying, “okay, I’m going to reveal the identity of whoever committed the crime and that person’s name is”. Predict that word. Predict that word, exactly. My goodness. Right? Yeah, right. Now, there are many different words. But predicting those words better and better and better, the understanding of the text keeps on increasing. GPT-4 predicts the next word better."
Ditto for any kind of writing or communication skills that are counter-cultural in nature. It seems pretty clear that the AIs corporations are creating are pretty aligned with whatever values the powers-that-be have. I don't expect AI to invent the equivalent of punk rock.
In person charisma is also easily done via robots by just giving them an animated avatar, that robot will outperform 99% of humans easily since humans have a hard time faking emotions while a robot doesn't, they can fake being excited or sad or understanding every time and always be there for you unlike real humans. The only reason that is hard for humans isn't that it is hard to do the action, but that it is hard to control our emotions.
Fake emotions aren't very charismatic, you feel the fakeness from a mile away, a robot showing emotions without that hint of fakeness is way better. Of course you would need to build a model around that, which people hasn't done, but the rules for charismatic social interactions such as serving food are really simple so I see no reason why that would be hard to do.
Maybe you are underestimating robots here, based on the sci fi robots that are very inflexible and bad at showing emotions? We know that AI can show extremely expressive faces when they draw images etc, there is no reason to believe they wouldn't be able to do that since they already can do it.
By charisma I mean in the sense of higher-level sociopolitical organization, like being a manager at a company or giving a public speech – useful skills in the job market that will continue to be useful. Not serving french fries. A smiling robot isn't going to inspire or convince a human being of anything.
Regardless, the idea that a robot smiling is somehow "more charismatic" than a human being is absurd. People read too much sci-fi.
That wasn't the point, the point is whether you can feel that they are fake or not, doesn't matter if they actually are. Fake feeling emotions are much harder to convey for a robot since they require more nuance.
> A smiling robot isn't going to inspire or convince a human being of anything.
They already have, smiling robots with basically no intelligence are already making billions for corporations in phone games.
> Regardless, the idea that a robot smiling is somehow "more charismatic" than a human being is absurd. People read too much sci-fi.
Why is that absurd? The idea that robots can't be charismatic is probably the most common trope of sci-fi, in reality we see robots mastering soft skills way easier than hard skills, there is no reason to believe charisma will come after understanding at this point, if you believe that you have your head in the sand.
Speculating about superhuman AI androids that are more charismatic than humans is entirely beyond the point and nothing more than a sci-fi fantasy right now.
Unfortunately, AI discussions as of late seem to be filled with this kind of absurd speculation that is no more than magical thinking. It belongs on a science fiction forum.
Right, and managers are extremely unsafe with the tools we already have. LLMs are more charismatic writers than most managers, and we know from Uber that we can automate away the management layer easily as long as we can have other signals to govern workers. With remote jobs being popular today face to face communication isn't needed, you just need to write well, so that isn't a problem either.
Managers doesn't need as much subject matter expertise as workers, so managers will get automated away easier than workers.
> Speculating about superhuman AI androids that are more charismatic than humans is entirely beyond the point and nothing more than a sci-fi fantasy right now.
I didn't say android, I say an avatar, I meant on a screen. And no you don't need a superhuman AI to express emotions better than humans, we already have AI that are better than humans at expressing emotions, both in text as LLMs or in images from the image generators.
Ultimately though, that's just muscle under skin — with sufficient effort it's obviously replicable, and thus a question of when.
Worshipping gods is an old human sport, and it wouldn't need *much* encouragement for humans to see an AI system as a sort of "village god" –– the kinds of entities which were worshipped all over the world before One Big God religions became common. A "Tesla Kami" which talks from your Tesla, and also talks for The Teslas, and also talks for Tesla, Inc. for example could be highly charismatic and not even slightly humanoid in appearance.
If you think I'm joking, consider the Knight Rider TV series with a talking car. Cars can have charisma even if they don't talk, but add a voice-and-mind and we're off to the races, so to speak.
Charisma is a funny thing.
I believe emotional intelligence will become a close second. As long as we don't have perfected humanoid robots like in TV series Westworld, people will likely prefer genuine human contact in certain situations (psychologist, therapist, service sector, nursing...)
I can get great furniture at Ikea, but some people build furniture because they love it.
*Shakes AI Magic 8 Ball* “Outlook not so good”.
The people with money are more concerned with dreaming about bunkers managed robots than solving any real actionable problems.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60165391
Even before AI there was the issue of being replaced by cheaper labor. AI just happens to be computational cheap labor. Just be better at what you do to avoid being replaced.
Git gud! Great advice!
Probably one of the most important jobs now is figuring out what the hell the upcoming jobs/activities should auta be.
No industry is safe from this malpractice as long as above is true.
But also teaching. AI might be better at teaching actual subjects, physics, maths, and so on, but a good part of school is socialization beyond the family, and that pretty much requires human teachers/coaches/guides/role-models.
Pornography is doomed, but we're a long way from realistic physical sex robots, AI powered or otherwise.
AI will do the same, if allowed, eventually, to mental jobs
for every artist getting a residency at MoMA there are dozens more doing logos, UI, concept design, etc., and those people are getting slammed right now.
but yeah, the one-off person getting a grant from somewhere to do art might be able to hit median US income -- AI-proof!
Or maybe I just think that because I still consider myself one. Who knows.
AI is assistance not an replacement to a lot extent
You mean stuff like poison? I think robots can do that, probably more effective than guns it could take over a food processing plant and change the recipe, just that guns is scarier.
"AI" still can't drive a car.
I think AI can possibly replace lawyers, but the powerful people in society will do all they can to prevent it.
But, don't you think AI is already making lawyers dramatically more efficient? So much of what lawyers do is reading - reading possibly relevant case law, reading corporate communication.
I met someone recently who has a law degree from a small no-name law school. He got mediocre grades. His job is sit in a room with 10 other lawyers, reading through every single document in a giant room full of filing cabinets. It's part of a corporate merger. It's going to take years to go through but they need lawyers to read through every single page looking for certain potential issues.
That's the sort of thing I feel like will be eliminated.
but a lot of law is review, of contracts, of statues, etc. and legal discovery companies are already a thing and were snagging a lot of marketshare before GPT exploded.
"read each clause, identify weasel words, parties, and summarize each line or paragraph. then create a link to any relevant case law or statue for sanity checking" -- is already a thing. very little law actually happens via dramatic courtroom antics or powerful closing oration; most is summarizing things as mentioned above.
just like how excel didn't eliminate accountants, but now instead of 10 you need 3, this will cut the already tight legal market down further.
I've come to believe the sacrifice is the thing -- that's why getting on a plane beats the best video conference and always will. The same thing will be true with AI.
Genuine communication will only become more important and those who can communicate well and not sound like LLM drivel (even if it gets really good) will stand out.
So driving for Uber and mowing lawns.
People then assumed that through automation (not even intelligent automation) we would work less and do more interesting things. Boy were they wrong, and I wholeheartedly assume that we'll be wrong again about the next 20 years.
standup comedy