Which jobs will survive and which will disappear in 50 years?

I used to think creative jobs (arts, writing), programming and science will be last to automate, but this year completely destroyed my confidence in that.

Stable diffusion, DallE, Midjourney produce absolutely beautiful paintings, drawings, renders, photos of sculptures. We have AIs that write movie scripts, book plots. We are starting to get AIs that are okay at making music. We have transformer models that generate textured 3D models.

On the programming side we have Copilot, which can't yet replace a programmer, but it's definitely a first confident step.

On the science side we have AI tools that fold proteins, predict material properties of novel materials, the wet lab work is getting automated too.

I find it hard to name an area of human work that can't be automated. And not even work, any human activity.

It looks like all the problems that can be solved in software, will be solved first. Robotics will be lagging, but not very far behind. Once we perfect artificial muscles, it's game over. The rest is software and scaling everything up.

Perhaps contrary to popular believe, I think the jobs that have survived thousands of years will likely survive another 50, even when all automatization included:

- teachers

- writers & artists

- doctors

- farmers

- builders

- scientists

- what people say is the oldest profession in the world

It is the relatively new jobs (< 100 yrs old) that face more uncertainty: they perhaps have proven themselves worthy in the last decades (and they are booming right now), but might not be resilient enough for world that is coming. It is not only about automation, but adaptability to quick / disruptive changes.

- programmers

- traders

- journalists

- marketers

However, I wouldn't call this a "prediction". I think very few jobs will actually disappear completely.

will survive:

doctor

bricklayer

programmer

Reasons all the same: difficult to automate with AI due to non-repeating nature of work. However repeating parts will be automated, hence GP likely to be a bot, also things like co-pilot will replace most web-devs. also houses can be mass built in container-like pods and stacked. so this is very nuanced. check-mate cheeky comment section.

will not survive:

retail worker non-luxury goods

delivery driver in cities with regular grid-like streets aka most of the US

truck drivers between cities

Twitter content moderator

Reasons all the same: easy to automate with AI due to repeating nature of work.

I think the common theme is that if you want something nice like seeing a human doctor, some personlised service, or a nice brick house you are going to see a human. But this will cost tremenduously. So rich people will interact with humans for most services/products while poor people will be interacting with bots. It's already happening (auto-bot callcentre helplines). Overall very distopian.

Sysadmins, but they will have yet another name.

Why? Tech exists and it needs low level constant work to keep secure and reliable.

Idealists think this can be automated. I would wish them to be right, but I know it's not realistic.

I wonder if I infosec would still be a thing? I see a lot of improvements in security which if they catch on in that time will make things a lot more secure.

I think what people miss on this thread is a lot of jobs will still be around just paying less with less people doing them.

50 years is too far ahead for me to predict anything. Although in IT, I think networking folks would be the last to go, not because you can't automate stuff but because short of a utopia, politics means different networks will exist and by definition networking connects stuff so computers can't fix themselves if they can't connect outside of a failed segment and technical burdens mean networking changes will be last to happen (basically no one uses ipv6 in private lans now for example).

I think the global south's prosperity will mean a lot more software jobs, just not in the west.

In the short term, I see retail getting decimated. Customer service is horrid and people who work those jobs complain endlessly. If AI is capable it would be much better to deal with than people. I have this idea of a completley unmanned (except one maintenance person) restaurant for example. I manned retail will always be there but there is huge room for unmanned retail. Not now but maybe in 10 years robots that clean up a mess, fold cloths and deliver meals to a table will be a reality (although my idea would have the meals delivered to tables without needing a robot).

The police,politicians and lawyers will be plenty even 1000 years from now in my opinion.

It depends on the resources peak (Oil Peak, Gas Peak, Lithium Peak, Minerals Peak...).

Our modern societies maintain themselves via energy consumption, if the energy production problem is solved, then the societies will evolve to more automation and removal of the low specialization jobs. But if we cant produce enough energy to cover the demand, then our societies will go back to previous levels of development and knowledge jobs will achieve the employment levels of the XV century.

50 years is too far away into the future to make any meaningful predictions. I would be very skeptical of anyone who is confident about their answer.

Almost all "jobs" will still exist, but will be different. "AI" and automation will make these jobs more efficient, but not replace them.

AI in the creative domain (art, music, writing, programming) will not replace the activity of crating and inventing. People still need to drive these tool, have a skill in controlling them, curate the output. Designers will still have a job to do.

People will still work in retail, maybe fewer on the checkout (thats already happening). People will still deliver parcel to your front door, the "last mile", just more efficiently with more automation in the rest of the process.

That not to say there wont me fewer people doing these jobs, in some cases dramatically fewer. But they will still all exist.

The question should be "what do our lives look like in 50 years time?". Are we still working 8 hour days 5 days a week? Do we still travel on "holiday" 1-2 times a year for a couple of weeks? This is where I think we will see the biggest change, the ways work slots into our lives, not the jobs that exist.

Unless there is a major disruption, in 50 years we will have hit hard the limits of earth natural resources (in terms of metals/minerals/oil) and the consequences of climate change so it's very difficult to predict how the world will be. My guess is that once the system reaches some kind of new equilibrium, jobs will be mostly low-tech and very similar to 1 century ago : farmers (with permaculture), bakers, people who repair stuffs, blacksmiths (but with far less volume of production compared to the industrial world we live in today and mostly simple/repairable/low-techs stuffs : hammers, bikes, shovels, plows...).

Survive: Lawmakers, lobbyists, lawyers, judges; even journalists, although they might not be called that anymore - influencing public opinion will always be valuable enough to be done for some kind of money. Also surgeons, simply because trust in robots will never (and should never) be high enough to let them cut humans unsupervised as a matter of routine.

Not survive: people making advertising jingles, or drawing shop signage. That sort of low-effort, barely-creative work will be taken by stats-driven programs ("ai").

Plumbers, HVAC technicians, Electricians - not only will they survive, they will never be outsourced to cheaper countries. And since Gen Z seems to have little interest in working with their hands, I suspect there will be an acute labor shortage in the trades that continues to drive their already high incomes, higher. As an added bonus, there is no need to all flock to the same handful of overpriced cities.

To disappear: ICE car mechanics. Sure, we will need a few to service museum pieces, but it won't be a big occupation like it is now.

Well, we really didn’t have computers much at all in 1955. That was 67 years ago - what jobs have disappeared since then? Lots of new ones appeared, though, as new “things” appeared and needed to be wrangled. And given the world started from zero, we’re not going to have as much change in tech +50 unless the discontinuity appears.

Lawyers. Lawyers, prosecutors, judges etc will survive forever.

I think this will depend hugely on the "where" part of the question. For instance I think self driving technology has near zero chance of being successful in places like Europe in the next 50 years. Streets are not built in grids and are super narrow with a lot of "complex" rules like multi lane roundabouts. Europe also has a lot of common sense driving with unspoken rules. Take a narrow road with two way traffic. It's common that both cars would drive at each other and both drivers see a gap where they know that one of the two cars will sideline to let the other car past it. Sometimes a car is already tucked aside and gives the oncoming car a light signal to indicate that they give them priority. Sometimes this is more formal, where you have narrow bridge crossings where there is an official traffic sign that tells who has priority in case of two cars coming at each other and so on. Then there are so many other things like height restrictions due to low bridges and so much more. Observing the "progress" that self driving cars made in the Valley it is clear that it would be a catastrophe anywhere else in their current state.

Having said this, I think we will see a lot more "service" jobs in the future. The wealth gap is widening and there will be more people with a lot of disposable income and many people who will want to make a small cut from those people by providing all sorts of services:

- intimacy (non sexual), this is already a thing in Tokyo where you can pay someone to cuddle with you or hug you

- friends to hire (e.g. someone to go to the theatre, etc.), again already a thing in Japan

- someone to stand in a queue for you in places where you can't make a reservation, Apple stores, etc. (already seen in some places)

- getting paid for a surrogacy pregnancy, for couples who want children but the women is too "busy" for being pregnant

- etc.

There is no end to the creativity of those "service" jobs. Initially it will be weird but in 200 years people will think it's a normal job, just like we think it is normal for someone to file the dead skin of your feet today, cut your nails or wax someone's harry back.

The most secure job will be Doctors and other medical professionals. People are getting older and every human being will require medical treatment in their lives and still we will all die from some medical condition. Healthcare is 100% immune to all other external factors such as how well the economy is doing or what not. People are always ill and the population will still grow to approx. 12 billion before it will start to decline and until then there will be an ever growing pressure on the medical sector. Any technology in that sector will see huge growth if they are not completely sh*t.