50% of occupations today will no longer exist in 2025: Report

Business Standard ^ | November 7, 2014 | Press Trust of India

[Age of Reason]

The future of dentistry:

http://www.academia.edu/1416467/A_REVIEW_ON_NANO_DENTISTRY-THE_FUTURE_OF_DENTISTRY

[cherry]

once a large segment of the country lose their jobs, they won’t be able to buy new stuff...then you’ll see people that fix TV’s and radios and small appliances return....

[Age of Reason]

I had to fix my washing machine the other day. I didn’t know how to go about it.

Instead of calling appliance repair, I googled how to fix it, easily found the right part along with an online video showing how to install the part.

Appliance repairman is another job that will be going extinct.

[Age of Reason]

That’s just Apple’s Siri with a different form factor. Yes, it will reduce the need for people to look things up, or whatever else it does

Or whatever else it does??? Faster than you think, things like that will be doing more than look things up.

I have a family full of technology workers. I remember telling one of them back in the early 1980s that we will soon see a computer beat the top chess masters, and he just couldn't believe it possible.

Well it happened about ten years later--and that was twenty years ago already.

It's not so much that he didn't understand the growth of computer power, but rather he didn't understand the human mind, so he didn't see how a bunch of yes/no switches could replicate much human mental functioning.

And I think many here don't understand it either.

but, that doesn’t mean that people won’t find other ways to make a useful contribution.

Like what?

[Age of Reason]

Get a load of the fools admiring their new toy in the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkOCeAtKHIc

It must be like when children find unexploded cluster bomblets—they think they found an amusing new toy, but what they really found is destruction.

[Billthedrill]

Well, I dunno. I've spent 35 years in the IT biz that I never even considered when I was in undergraduate school because it didn't exist yet. Turns out there's lots of room for human beings. The problem is that you can't really automate the maintenance of server systems and networks very well because they were designed by human beings and are not the precise monolithic flawless engines marching toward a machine future that they seem to be on first glance, but flawed, helpless, pitiable creatures whose last recourse is to throw a "Some Sort Of Error" message on the screen and wait for some smelly, hairy meat engine like me to come read some logs and bail them out.

Sure, a lot of jobs will be taken over by machines. Look at it from the perspective of a 15th-century Eastern European serf - everything he knew, everything he could do in all the world, has been taken over by machines since about 1800. Understand that that was maybe 75% of humanity out of a job if you want to look at it that way. We've been through this before. There aren't very many serfs around these days, either, but they didn't starve, they adapted.

[citizen352]

John Stossel was telling us that technology is good last night on his show. Technology changes have offered people more occupations than were available in the past. This argument comes up from time to time when technology of the future and its impact on employment is discussed. There was always some chance to obtain routine work in the past. Stossel and the others tell us not worry about the future for our kids and grandkids. Anyone who has an occupation will have to have a specific skill set. In the future less-skilled people will be displaced from the workforce for some period of time and maybe they will be able to retrain themselves. Overall less jobs will be available for people.