Billionaire says most valuable skill will help you beat AI's jobs wipeout following Bill Gates' fears
A billionaire investor has relayed the advice he has for his children in the face of a feared jobs wipeout that the scourge of artificial intelligence may bring down upon us.
It's not exactly easy finding a new job nowadays as anyone who has tried to apply for something in recent years will know you're competing with potentially hundreds of people for one position.
As if this soul-crushing game wasn't already in dire need of more chairs for when the music stops, there are plenty of predictions that the creeping development of AI will take even more and almost nobody will be safe.
According to Bill Gates, the only four jobs that are safe from the coming calamity are coders, athletes, biologists and energy workers, though Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg thinks that's a little much.
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Various studies have been done on the sectors and jobs most at risk from losing jobs to AI, and companies are being warned that their embracement of AI is 'eroding the entry point of their own leadership ladder'.
Investor Jeremy Grantham is predicting that AI is a bubble that is going to burst, which will mean very bad things for everyone and not just the pillocks who piled all of their money into it.
Speaking to The Diary of a CEO podcast, he laid out the skills he's encouraged his own children to get in the even that 'our civilisation will start to unravel'.
That outcome doesn't sound altogether great, does it?
As for what Grantham said for skills people should learn, he said: "Be an engineer. Do something really useful that will come in handy if things start to unravel.
Our second son is practicing growing various crops and has a small farm. He's trying to get to know how you would deal with chickens, how you would deal with pigs, how you would deal with mushrooms."
Grantham seems to suggest that in the kingdom of AI the person who has some physically applicable skills who can do things computers can't will be on a better footing.
He paints a rather grim picture of what the future might look like, saying: "I think there's quite a good chance that the the level of complexity of our civilisation will start to to unravel."
Speaking of 'extreme inequality', he said history indicates it typically gets resolved one of three ways, 'total civil collapse and state failure', 'mass mobilisation warfare' or 'total revolution'.
Oh joy of joys.
Perhaps fortunately for our future, in many workplaces AI has been about as welcome as a parasitic infection and some companies have started to reverse course in certain areas because they realised they were getting rid of valuable human skills.
Ford recently attempted to rehire some of their expert 'greybeard' engineers, experienced workers who know how things work and were brought back after it was realised that all those years of experience might be worth a lot more than the technology it was assumed could replace them.
Topics: Technology, Artificial Intelligence
Joe Harker