All "Smart" jobs will be gone. Intellectuals, thinkers, engineers, scientists, doctors, historians.... will soon be replaced by autmomation, robots, artificial intelligence.... Machines are increasingly more competent than humans. What is happening is that "smart" people built their fame and fortune on their ability to store and process large amounts of data in their brains during many long decades of learning, education and training. But AI servers are now doing it all better than humans.
But there are a few jobs that, at least for now, seem to have immunity against smart robots. Plumbers are one example. No robot is going to bend under your sink and show you his crack, or plunge into cesspools to drain them, or repair a faucet.... But we will still need plumbers to build the robots. There's a critical physical fine touch that these jobs require that seems to escape machines. But who knows? Maybe second and third generation robots will replace all of us, including plumbers, as we become condemned to sit in our living rooms with literally nothing to do and nothing to think about. We'll be like astronauts who lose their muscle mass as a result of the lack of gravity; sitting down and not using our neurons and muscles will make us wilt down.
The French Jesuit and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin predicted that our evolutionary trajectory will eventually turn us exclusively into a mass of nervous tissue, a solitary brain. But AI may be turning this prediction upside down: We will no longer need our brains since machines will do the thinking for us. Could we just turn into an isolated mass of muscle tissue? But for what purpose? It is the juxtaposition and cooperation between brain and brawn that has made us the very successful species that we are. What happens if we need neither? Should we even exist? What would be the point?
It's often said that the journey is more important that the destination. Life itself is nothing but a journey in which an organism "lives" by processing energy to accomplish the "destination", the sole purpose of existence: reproduce and transmit our genes. If machines can do all the journeying for us, should we really worry about any destination at all?
Think about it. We all know we are going to die some day. Why don't we just give up early on? Because until we get there and die, we can do a few interesting things like the basics (eating, gossiping, having sex, waging wars...) as well as the "sophisticated" (art, music, science....). If robots take away those "interesting" things from us, we'll be faced head-on with the absurdity of life. There will be no room left for indulging in the illusion of our exaggerated value. We'll be without the theater of life that makes life tick.
AI may be forcing us to confront the fundamental axiom of our biological existence: It is a pointless, aimless, no-destination exercise that humans have almost exclusively camouflageed under the illusory concept of "culture".
Someone once said something along the lines of "Life is like a desert that we must traverse, and woman is the camel that carries us through" (chauvinistic male-oriented, because would a woman see life as a desert and the male like a jackass to ride?). I would reframe that saying as follows: Life is like a journey through the desert, and CULTURE is the camel that fools us, drugs us into the illusion that life is worthwhile. Culture here is in the broadest sense of the term: religion, art, sports.... all human manifestations of "culture" are like a drug that masks the realization of pointlesssness palatable and the journey bearable.
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The Godfather of AI reveals which jobs are safest — and where 'everybody' will get replaced
Alice Tecotzky
Mon, June 16, 2025
The Godfather of AI reveals which jobs are safest — and where 'everybody' will get replaced
The "Godfather of AI" said certain industries are going to be wiped out sooner than others.
Geoffrey Hinton said that "mundane intellectual labor" is at the most risk.
He said mass job displacement is the biggest immediate threat to happiness, and it's already here.
Now is a great time to become a plumber, at least according to the so-called Godfather of AI.
Geoffrey Hinton, who previously worked at Google and earned his nickname for his work on neural networks, laid out the risks of mass joblessness during an interview on the 'Diary of a CEO' podcast that aired June 16. He said that, eventually, the technology will "get to be better than us at everything," but some fields are safer than others in the interim.
"I'd say it's going to be a long time before it's as good at physical manipulation," Hinton said. "So a good bet would be to be a plumber."
Gen Zers, who are trapped in a brutal job market, are gravitating more and more toward blue-collar work, as BI previously reported.
"For mundane intellectual labor, AI is just going to replace everybody," Hinton said. He flagged paralegals as at risk, and said he'd be "terrified" if he worked in a call center. You would, he said, have to be "very skilled" to have an AI-proof job.
Hinton sees the risk of mass job displacement as the biggest immediate threat to human unhappiness. Even if there's a universal basic income, as Hinton advocates, he thinks people would lack a sense of purpose without a job.
According to Hinton, mass displacement is more likely than not, and is already upon us in some ways. He said AI is starting to be used for jobs previously popular with recent college graduates.
Some argue that the fear that AI will displace entry-level work is overblown. Hinton agreed with the idea that some roles will be replaced by humans working with an AI assistant rather than just the technology, but he said that means one person will do what used to be the work of 10 people. For many industries, he said, that will mean mass firings.
A few areas, like healthcare, will be able to absorb the change, since there's almost endless demand.
"But most jobs, I think, are not like that," Hinton said.
Read the original article on Business Insider
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