Top 10 Jobs That Might Not Survive the Coming Robot 'Jobocalpyse,' Is Yours on the List?

[LongTomH]

22. I really should have added this paragraph:

Way’s book evaluates robotic job replacement industry by industry, from education and defense to farming, and this vertical analysis is a useful organization; however Moore’s Leak muddies nearly every analysis in the book. There is one additional problem with this form of futurecasting, and it comes from an oversimplification of just what humans do. Way states that the farm of the future, with robots in the employ of the farmer, looks like a “centralized security office.” The farmer becomes a manager who simply watches robots do all the farmwork. I think part of the problem here is misunderstanding just what farmers do. Yes, they drive tractors and harvesters, and those have been recently automated. But the farmers I know also diagnose messy hay baler failures, problem-solve the intermittent breaker on their milk house vacuum pump, shovel a whole lot of hay into the barn and a whole lot of something else out, hand-feed the heifer, deal with deliveries, argue with hunters, overhaul the tractor transmission, et cetera.

Illah Nourbakhsh definitely has a 'difference of opinion' with Way. Illah Nourbakhsh is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University as well as an author. He's taken a lot of time to consider all the implications of robots: ethics, technological unemployment and the accompanying inequality issues.