One of the fears that people express about robots and artificial intelligence is that of jobs. What jobs will people do when machines take over? First of all, there are two ways in which physical and cognitive machines change the way we work. Firstly, in the way they replace entire professions, such as truck and taxi drivers, which are replaced by autonomous cars; and secondly, in the way they change professions by taking routine tasks off our hands, such as reading x-rays or filling out a tax return by a tax consultant.

A study by Oxford University, which caused a shock a few years ago because the authors of the study spoke of 47 percent of all occupational groups that will be affected by computerization, turned out on closer inspection to be less radical than initially thought. The authors wrote about some tasks within these occupational groups that will be taken over by computerization. The professions will not disappear, their tasks will change.

So is our concern unfounded or should we panic even more when it comes to jobs for us? People tend to under-use and over-estimate the largest and most flexible resource on the planet. And that is “human potential”. For centuries we have been moving away from physically arduous routine activities to those that increasingly require the use of our brains. We are discovering ever new, more fulfilling and exploiting human potential activities that we did not know humans could be capable of.

Criteria For Professions Safe From Robots

Which occupations are now – regardless of the future capabilities of machines – safe from robots?

• Professions that can make robots, but probably never will;
• jobs we don’t want robots to do;
• professions that have vastly changing requirements;
• Professions that require high levels of social intelligence;
• Professions that need to be done locally;
• occupations that require creativity or abstract thinking;

This makes it surprisingly clear which professions, some of which are very popular and respected today, do not fall under this category. And these include the following skills:

• Programming – Systems will program themselves;
• Develop AI systems – graphical user interfaces will allow easy creation of AI systems;
• Plan, organize, decide
• Curriculum design – Students design their own curriculum using an AI;
• Writing and reviewing resumes – reputation becomes social;
• Translation and localization – happens in a timely manner;
• Legal research and jurisdiction – is automated;
• Validation – follow your instincts, the machine checks it for you;
• Monotonous tasks – if they are repetitive, a machine can do it.

On the other hand, skills that include simple and advanced technological, social and emotional knowledge will become increasingly important.

Guidelines For Choosing A Profession

The physicist Max Tegmark therefore proposes a career choice and advice for today’s children who will be affected by AI evolution. Which professions are less likely to be affected by automation? Criteria for this could be:

• Does this require cooperation with people and the use of social intelligence?
• Does it require creativity and clever solutions?
• Does it require working in an unpredictable environment?

The study of humanities subjects in combination with technical and natural science subjects, while at the same time acquiring or retaining interdisciplinary interest and turning away from too much specialization seems to be a formula with a promising future from today’s perspective.

Meaning Of Work

But first we have to solve other problems. As early as 1759, the French philosopher Voltaire wrote about the purpose of work: “Work keeps away three great evils: boredom, vice and misery.” Many people find meaning in work, and they define themselves by it. In the Roman Empire, the saying “panem et circenses” (bread and circuses) was not the least known, which was intended to keep people busy and keep them away from stupid ideas (such as the thought of overthrowing the emperor).

Some cultures are designed around such work activities. As soon as they disappear, the sense that the ancestors and the community considered worth living in breaks away, and a collapse occurs in these cultures. We see this with Indian tribes, with the rural population in some US states, or in countries where boredom and drug abuse fill the gap. Not all societies respond to the lack of “work” in this way. Island populations in the South Pacific, for example, can cope very well with this.

Even if there will be new professions and jobs, not everyone can switch from one profession to another so easily. Even if the employees want to retrain, they are very expensive and time consuming. And some professions are closely interwoven with the social and family environment, the end of which can lead to the dissolution of these structures. I myself come from a social democratic background, my grandmother was a an hourly worker, involved in the trade union and as a party member. In my whole family there were workers for whom such drastic retraining and such changes in the working environment would have meant a great upheaval in their lives. These concerns must be addressed, opportunities must be identified and people must be supported.

Whatever the outcome, the discussions about robot taxes or the unconditional basic income (UBI) will intensify in the coming years. With the corona crisis we see the importance of UBI but also that of robots that help us to remain contactless and thus with a reduced risk of infection. And this is one of the great lessons of this pandemic, which shows us the future of work and with intelligent machines.

This article is an excerpt from my book When Monkeys Teach Monkeys: How Artificial Intelligence Really Makes Us Human. Published in February 2020 by Plassen-Verlag.

This article was also published in German.