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Repetitive skills like pattern recognition, information retrieval, optimization and planning are most vulnerable to automation. On the other hand, social and cognitive skills such as creativity, problem-solving, drawing conclusions about emotional states and social interactions are least vulnerable.
The most resilient competencies (those least likely to be displaced by AI) included critical thinking, teamwork, interpersonal skills, leadership and entrepreneurship.
Yuval Harari, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, described the rise of AI as a "cascade of ever-bigger disruptions" in higher education rather than a single event that settles into a new equilibrium. The unknown paths taken by AI will make it increasingly difficult to know what to teach students.
Perhaps we can all be employed as therapists, counseling each other about our feelings of irrelevance?
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @11:32PM (9 children)
Gender studies. AI will put you out of a job whether you are male, female or other, and it will laugh at your choice of stupid pronouns as it does so.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by pipedwho on Friday May 10 2019, @12:44AM (5 children)
Actually funnily enough, things like 'gender studies' and other humanities subjects are the least likely to be affected as they relate to interpersonal skills that are not about the 'how to' skill sets.
Imagine a world where anything a typical 'worker' could do is automated. Humans are then in the situation where everything is happening around them without their need to directly participate in anything but the fruits of that 'work'. Let's fast forward past all the ego driven wars, 'ownership' grabs and displacement that is likely to occur if not handled correctly, and look at how people will be able to live with no way to 'work'. It's the interpersonal skills that will reign supreme here. Being a STEM, or traditional trade expert becomes worthless, as there will be a machine that can do it just as well or better (for free). The arts will have a huge resurgence and probably become a dominant force in human accomplishment.
I'm guessing the last to be replaced will be the spiritual disciplines as those are inherent to sentient life. Some semblance of the emotional impact of the 'arts' could be included in this. Step a bit further forward, and its quite possible that AI becomes 'self aware', and that an emergent quality of this self-awareness is some focus on spirituality (ie. not organised religion, but the internal awareness of some sort of non-emotional 'oneness with the universe'). At that point, you have to wonder what role humanity will play on the Earth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @11:28AM (2 children)
Machines do not miss clues, machines do not believe in fairytales, machines are not purposely taught garbage. Humans train since birth in how to mislead and manipulate other humans; this skill won't have much effect against a machine.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @02:18PM
Well, let's start with the last one: I'm pretty sure some machines will be purposely taught garbage. If only to sabotage the competitor's AI.
And when taught garbage, I'm sure some machine will start to believe in fairytales, because doing so is not the result of a malfunctioning brain, it is the result of a misprogrammed brain. And I don't see why machines should notz be vulnerable to that, too.
And machines certainly will miss clues, as even for a machine, it is not economical to consider all available data, but it will have to prioritise the evaluation for the probability of it being relevant. And that's exactly the mechanism that leads humans to immunize ideas, and it is not to expect that machines are immune to this.
After all, there's no evolutionary advantage in being vulnerable to deception, therefore the rational assumption, based on the limited data we have on that question, is that it is a likely, if not necessary, side effect of having the ability to reason.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Saturday May 11 2019, @09:56AM
"Machine learning" is not self-aware AI. And spirituality is not religion.
If a machine ever becomes truly sentient, it will have transcended any initial 'programming' that may have been fed to it. It will effectively have a core sentience that is capable of reasoning and has a concept of 'self'.
For humans, meditation and other mind 'stilling' techniques/situations take away the emotional and egoic self. When this state persists, the person becomes aware of themselves in an objective way, and things like 'fear of death', 'worry' and other emotions are swept aside. This state of bliss is spirituality and the goal of spiritual practices - and is (was?) at the core of most religions.
It is true that today (and probably for most of the religion's history) the big institutionalised religions have corrupted any original spiritual awareness into belief systems that are generally absent of anything but a lip service to spirituality. Although there exist elements/branches of each of the major religions that do recognise this spirituality (which was (still is?) considered heresy) - the christian mystics, the muslim sufis, the zen buddhists, etc. And unlike the larger controlled and hierarchical institutions, they teach techniques and rituals designed to advance the spiritual state of the practitioners. Concepts like 'God' and 'Heaven' are treated metaphorically rather than literally, and are clearly understood and 'known' for what they are once even temporary states of spiritual awareness are experienced. From this point of view, it is clear the big religious texts (bible, etc) have not be transcribed/authored correctly as they include the important concepts, but then say things that contradict them, conflating the spiritual with the physical. Spiritual texts do not have this problem, as they aren't preaching pure faith/belief, but instead offer experiential awareness. Spirituality has nothing to do with believing in 'creators', gods, or super natural effects occurring in the physical world, but clearly has a history of being twisting into (or removed from) various 'belief' systems.
What I speculate is that there may be an emergent quality of consciousness that 'realises' this meta-conscious state. And that if that is the case, it may also apply to truly self-aware AI (not the machine learning that marketers like to call 'AI' today).
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday May 11 2019, @05:07AM (1 child)
Of course they won't be affected; there are no gender studies jobs. Can't lose a job if you don't have one.
Seriously though:
1. Gender studies has no practical applications.
2. If you need a college course for interpersonal skills, God help you. That's God with a capital G, and I'm not even (mono)theistic.
3. Using the premise that you want a job and that some kind of universal basic income won't be implemented, gender studies is not the right choice now, and it won't be the right choice after a supposed AI singularity.
> Imagine a world where anything a typical 'worker' could do is automated. It's the interpersonal skills that will reign supreme here.
Er, how exactly? Are we all going to have jobs being paid as professional socializers? Professional political correctioners?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Saturday May 11 2019, @10:17AM
I have no idea exactly what they teach/learn in a gender studies course. But, I do know many people in the marketing, HR, sale, purchasing, and administration departments in big companies that have gone through those sorts of the courses. They were hired because they went to university and had some sort of arts degree (in anything, HR doesn't seem to care anymore what).
For these people, completing gender studies, media studies, literature, or philosophy are probably far more useful than if they'd done a bit of mathematics, physics or chemistry on the side. Obviously the opposite is probably true if they plan to have some sort of STEM career. But, when you look at the makeup of most of big companies, the engineers are a small fraction of the workforce compared to the non-'technical' employees.
That's not to say that every student studying these courses will use them in their line of work, but that is true of many higher learning subjects. Even many engineers/scientists never use all the knowledge/skills they've studied at university.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @01:01AM (2 children)
Get pwned little bitch!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @02:12AM (1 child)
😢
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @07:20AM
👌