Jobseekers of the future: approach AI with scepticism and dexterity

{"text":[[{"start":8.44,"text":"Speaking at the FT Weekend Festival in September, Yuval Noah Harari, the historian and philosopher, said: “It’s the first time in history that nobody has any clue about the most basic features of human society in five to 10 years . . . What jobs will people have?”"}],[{"start":27.82,"text":"There have always, as Harari said, been unforeseen wars and revolutions. We can add that there have also often been uncertainties about what work would look like. But the speed of adoption of artificial intelligence is creating a frenzy of feared disruption. “It’s very clear that AI is going to change every job,” Doug McMillon, chief executive of US retailer Walmart, told the Wall Street Journal in September. “Maybe there’s a job in the world that won’t change, but I haven’t thought of it.” "}],[{"start":63.71,"text":"McMillon said this meant Walmart’s headcount would remain flat over the next three years, even as the retailer grew, but others have talked of extensive job losses. Jim Farley, chief executive at US carmaker Ford, has said that AI will replace “literally half of all white-collar workers in the US”."}],[{"start":87.61,"text":"In the face of this predicted jobs apocalypse, what skills should people acquire to secure their future?"}],[{"start":94.69,"text":"First, not everyone believes the future is going to be this dramatic. Writing in The Atlantic in August, Charlie Warzel asked what would happen if AI continued to “hallucinate” — that is, make things up: “What if it’s just good enough, useful to many without being revolutionary?” Is it possible, he said, that in creating these dramatic scenarios of what AI might achieve, we are part of a “mass delusion”?"}],[{"start":124.39,"text":"Second, people have predicted the end of swaths of jobs before, without it then happening. I have done so. In 2004, I wrote about the panic that had overtaken North America and Europe that their work would be offshored to low-cost countries such as India. Manufacturing had departed to Asia and now white-collar work would too. “If tax returns can be completed in Delhi, software written in Bangalore and X-rays read in Mumbai, where will it end?” I wrote. Yet here we are, more than 20 years later, and accountants, software developers and radiologists in Stockholm, London and San Francisco seem to be doing fine."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

What should people learn if their talents don’t extend to skilled trades or caring?

"}],[{"start":173.84,"text":"But that doesn’t mean that work won’t change or that we shouldn’t be prepared. People invest money and time in their education and training, and they need to think about what is likely to secure their future, whatever shape it takes.  "}],[{"start":189.77,"text":"So what should they do? I wrote in 2004 that skilled manual trades would be safe from offshoring — and they should be safe from AI too. We will need plumbers, bricklayers, electricians and roofers. We are a long way from robots being able to do these jobs. Google DeepMind recently unveiled robots that could sort laundry and rubbish, but said they lacked the dexterity, reliability and safety to be released into human environments."}],[{"start":221.51000000000002,"text":"Anna Thomas, co-director of UK-based think-tank the Institute for the Future of Work, tells me she would add caring to my list of occupations that will remain important."}],[{"start":232.35000000000002,"text":"What should people learn if their talents don’t extend to skilled trades or caring? At a conference in Athens in September, Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s chief executive, said that, in addition to mathematics, science and humanities, people would need to learn how to learn. “How do you optimise your own learning rate on a new subject? Because one thing we know for sure is you’re going to have to continually learn throughout your career.” The biggest opportunities, he said, “will be connecting two different subjects together and finding something that is analogous between the two or combining them in some way”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":276.18,"text":"Thomas adds that an important skill will be understanding what AI can and cannot do, and maintaining a critical awareness of both its opportunities and limitations. "}],[{"start":288.93,"text":"We can add another valuable preparation for the future of work. As people increasingly rely on tools such as ChatGPT to summarise and explain the world to them, their ability to navigate complex information on their own will inevitably decline. There is evidence that Google and Wikipedia were having this effect even before AI tools became widely available."}],[{"start":316.41,"text":"A study published in 2024, based on research from 2015, revealed that only 5 per cent of a group of US college students studying English could fully make sense of the opening paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House. Dickens’ description of a 19th-century London winter’s day — “As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill” — flummoxed most of the students."}],[{"start":357.76000000000005,"text":"Those few who could navigate Dickens’ allusions and similes will have an advantage in understanding speech, dense documentation, life itself. So this is another recommendation to prepare for the future: read books."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":382.7300000000001,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1762154918_8653.mp3"}