8 of the 20 are healthcare jobs.
3 are in the aviation industry.
A couple legal as well.
They tried to automate (not AI yet) my job - account manager - was a train wreck and we’ve hired back and then some at our clients request….our clients being car dealers.
As it turns out, it’s a people/relationship world.
Sure if I didn’t exist, we’d still build cars and dealers would still sell them - but the last few years were chaotic due to poor relationships - so there’s certain things that still need a human interaction to optimize. People like looking across the table (not through a camera) at the person they are dealing with.
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#5 “Commercial Pilots” and #7 “Airline Pilots, Copilots and Flight Engineers” seemingly have substantial overlap. Also, flight engineers are no longer present on today’s commercial airplanes, due to improvements in computing and automation. AI cannot eliminate any more jobs if they have already been eliminated.
#12 “Chief Executive Officers” is not exactly a plentiful job, nor one that one can plan for as an entry level job seeker graduating from school.
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There was a later reference to “leadership and oversight” positions, which makes a little more sense to me as a category of note. Basically as long as there are human employees doing anything, there are going to be other humans leading them. `
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I would have thought that “plumber” should also be on the list. I really do not think that AI is likely to either unplug my plugged toilet or figure out why my shower is no longer capable of delivering warm or hot water. I suppose that it fails on the “high paying” criteria, however…
I agree with having “veterinarian” on the list. When I got by anesthetist and ER doctor and general surgeon I thought “what do they think that a veterinarian actually does”, and then I saw it on the list and thought “okay”. On the other hand, I am not sure that it pays all that much better than being a plumber (particularly if adjusted for the number of years of education required to get there).
Thinking for a few minutes, I think that there are a lot of other jobs missing from the list. Machine learning or AI expert might be one. If AI is going to take over, someone needs to know how to keep AI doing the right thing. It also seems like various types of research would be tough to automate. One issue with research is that something usually goes wrong and the researcher needs to figure out why and how to do better next time. I think that there might be just too many ways that something can go wrong for AI to handle most of them.
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However, if AI (or anything else) reduces the number of human employees, the number of leaders and overseers needed becomes smaller.
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Depends on what you consider “high paying”. Pay level of experienced plumbers can be significantly higher than for entry level plumbers.
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Maybe, maybe not.
Large companies operate with ratios– which change over time. Remember when middle and senior managers had their own administrative assistant? Now it can be 1:5, 1:7 or even 1:12. When every employee can file their own expense report by downloading an app, you don’t need a human to do it. BUT then in some organizations the pendulum swung back. Turns out that having a vice president who makes $300K per year spending time filling out forms was not a good use of time- whether expense reports, travel arrangements, booking a conference room for a meeting, etc. So the 1:12 ratio is a dumb idea for some organizations- back to hiring MORE admins, not fewer.
Etc. It’s not that fewer employees require fewer managers. It’s the complexity of the work, the fungibility of the skill set, the competencies required. AI may reduce the number being managed without impacting the number of folks required to keep all the balls in the air.
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As an educator, I’m kind of surprised teachers and professors aren’t on the list. I know some corporate investors in education have fever dreams of AI-generated curricula, evaluation, and instruction, but for most people who are actually working in education (and for most students), that sounds like a hellscape. Teaching is still relationships. Research is still about trial, error, and epiphany. The humanities (where my discipline is situated) are still about, well, human ideas, creativity, and judgment. You can’t AI teaching.
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Right, if there is a net disemployment effect, that would likely affect supervisory positions on a net basis as well. However, it is currently an open question whether there will in fact be a net disemployment effect, or if it will just change the mix of jobs.
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I agree about teaching, but maybe that was also a pay issue when it came to inclusion on this list.
ETA: Here is their executive summary of the methodology:
The index measures three critical human skills: adaptability, stress tolerance and self-control. Only positions scoring 74 or higher in all three categories and offering median salaries of at least $74,000 made the cut.
Good teachers very much need adaptability, stress tolerance, and self-control! But median salaries might have been an issue. I believe at least nationally, K-12 medians would not have been high enough.
Then I think college professors should have met the median requirement, but it would amuse me if they actually didn’t score as needing as much adaptability, stress tolerance, and/or self-control . . . .
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I mean, here’s what AI can do. I forget, but think I saw this article on the CC. It’s pretty much most every role in a business - can be given a bot or AI to do tasks. On the other hand, it might create thirty party contract jobs which typically pay less.
How A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8 Billion Company - The New York Times
Yeah, we need all of those qualities in spades.
I’m honestly not sure about the median salary for college professors, especially as a majority of faculty is contingent,and there are significant variations in starting salaries even for tenure-track professors depending on discipline and competition in the private sector (i.e., an assistant professor in business might make more than a full professor in the humanities in some universities).
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I hardly can imagine all types of doctors disappear. Physician Assistants are great, and nurce practitioners too, but many prefer doctors or need doctors for more complex circumstances. This is area where human factor is critical.
It seems the trades and first responders are in the blind spot of the people who create these lists.
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In this case, I think it may be because their median salaries don’t exceed the cutoff.
It should be noted how many critical professions (and those that can’t be done by AI) do not exceed the $74k threshold set by Forbes. So education, first responders, many of the trades, etc. are not listed, but perhaps our society should reconsider the value that they place on these professions? Although platitudes about the importance of these professions is always nice, I suspect that those who work in these fields would be even more appreciative of their remuneration reflecting their importance to our society.
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Agree in theory-but that’s not how compensation works. The labor markets/talent markets are MARKETS. The price of milk doesn’t depend on how important milk is to someone’s diet. There are 50 inputs (supply, demand, government subsidies, costs of feeding cows, etc.) which determine the price.
Oh, @blossom, do you have to be so practical? 
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