MY PHYSICAL therapist once asked me if artificial intelligence (AI) would take away his job.
I couldn’t give an expert opinion, but I argued no, for the simple reason that physical therapy requires personalized interaction, something AI and even robotics cannot yet replicate.
This is also true for any job that involves face to face contact as well as customization. Until the tech industry cracks artificial general intelligence, AI can only perform workflows and extremely sophisticated coding. That means the loss of many technical and office jobs.
The opposite are those tasks that require actual human interaction. Think nurses, bartenders, gym coaches and yes, physical therapists.
As a general rule, any job that is cerebral, analytical is more likely to get compressed by artificial intelligence. The average doctor, engineer, architect and office worker are more vulnerable than the average nurse or bartender because the services they offer can be replicated by AI.
We are still early in the AI transition and a lot of things can happen along the way, but if these assumptions prove correct, the future job market will put a premium on human interaction. Consider for example Influencers and YouTubers. These jobs did not exist decades ago. It was only with the rise of social media and YouTube that they actually became viable. These jobs rose at the expense of older forms of media, but also because, the technology allowed them to exist.
The same is true with the AI transition, because it will make certain occupations very cheap. In fact, there is a term for it now: AI slop, which is not necessarily slop strictly speaking, but is a very cheap, and easily mass-produced product.
We can’t really escape this trend, but if it continues, it’s likely that future job markets will be more focused on providing human premiums, that is to say future jobs will either try to differentiate themselves from AI (provide the human premium), or they cannot be replicated by AI by their very nature.
All this is just speculation as of now, but if AI and robotics is as transformative as many believe, then be prepared for a job market that is unrecognizable in the future./PN
