Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Off the top of my head.


A list of jobs that won't be replaced by AI in no particular order


  • Ballerina
  • Coach of women's under 15 Lacrosse team
  • Film Director
  • Writer (Seriously. Good writer. When a machine writes the equivalent of In Watermelon Sugar I'll eat my words.)
  • Horse whisperer
  • Actor
  • Administering the Voight-Kampff test
  • Revolutionary (It's an unpaid position that can lead to Presidency *Vaclav Havel, Xanana Gusmão ∴ a legit career path)
  • Teaching special needs kids
  • Entrepreneur
  • Endurance athlete
  • Chinese medicine practitioner
  • Sex therapist (Seriously. No, don't go there)
  • Feldenkrais therapist
  • Cat herder- anyone that organises unpredictable humans for a living, especially the ones that think they are special or artistic. 
  • The medical person that has to give you the bad news.
  • Guitar teacher
  • Yoga instructor
  • Horse masseuse (I've met one so shhhhh)
  • Tantric breathwork practitioner. 
  • Therapists that have to listen to your shit and actually care. 
I could go on. Anything that requires intuition, creativity, innovation, compassion, imagination or a kick ass proprioceptive nervous system. The first thing those AI mofos are going to do is learn to write their own code and their own performance reviews. 

This is in response to TEDs The Digital Industrial Revolution which I loved but when they couldn't think of one job that wouldnt be affected by AI my eyes rolled so hard people on my morning train could hear it. Define affected. They went on to say that we couldn't imagine the future world we would be living in. Sigh...

The problem with asking geeks about the future is they think like geeks. HELLO... not everything will be solved by data science. They forget that artists GAVE them the questions that they seek the answers to. 
If Philip K Dick hadn't asked Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? then we would be living in a different world. Cyber punk has been kicking this shit around alternating between dystopia and it's unlikely opposite long before it became the obvious path we were heading down. We LITERALLY imagined the world we would be living in. That is how it works.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. Pablo Picasso

We need to keep asking better questions of ourselves and our relationship with technology. We need to keep dreaming into existance the world we want to live in. It's going to be amazing!

We really are ALL in this together.