Hands-on jobs to grow fastest, because AI can’t replace them –
World Economic Forum finds huge demand for brainbox skills, news for how it changes your role
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/10/ai_jobs_wef/
Hands-on jobs to grow fastest, because AI can’t replace them –
World Economic Forum finds huge demand for brainbox skills, news for how it changes your role
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/10/ai_jobs_wef/
10 Comments
From the article
>The org (WEF) this week dropped its annual Future of Jobs [report](https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_Report_2025.pdf) [PDF], which is based on a survey of over 1,000 employers who collectively represent 14 million-plus workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies.
Also from the article
>The report also has good news for those in roles that are hard for computers to replace, in the form of a prediction that fastest growth in job volumes will come to frontline roles such as farmworkers, delivery drivers, construction workers, sales people, and food processing workers. Care economy jobs, including nursing professionals, social workers, and personal care aides, are also expected to grow significantly. So will roles in the education industry.
But AI can replace them. The race for humanoid robots is on!
WTF are brainbox skills? I can’t find a reasonable answer online; is that just another way of saying soft skills?
I can tell you that is somewhat short sighted. At my highly technical job, the biggest corporate thing that is pushed to us is the development of flow diagram like reaction mechanism for equipment issues. This is so that any dummy can fix the equipment without the knowledge/eduction or experience working on the equipment. That’s basically creating documentation to feed the AI so that is can replace all the decision making engineers. The only engineering that makes sense to get into is programming.
Lol, people are still guessing wildly at this point.
10 years ago: truckers are going to be out of a job in ten years because of self-driving trucks!
Now: Desk jobs are gonna go extinct because of AI – we’ll need more truckers!
Hands on jobs are going to run out soon too.
Imagine an AI powered headset with cameras and an earpiece. You could have someone relatively unskilled, but with an infinitely patient AI in their ear. “Grab that 2×4, carry it up those stairs, place it there, hammer 8 inches from the top.” Or whatever. Lots of manual labor could be directly by AI.
The irony is we thought our brains made us special, but in a way, it might be our bodies that are the one thing that can’t be as easily replicated. So your body might be needed to go to some random house to some random basement and crawl behind the hot water heater, but it will be an AI that tells you exactly what to do to fix it.
But AI CAN replace them…President Elon is working on it.
https://www.electronicdesign.com/blogs/nonlinearities/article/55246627/electronic-design-soits-time-for-a-20800-year-fcc-license-to-teleoperate-a-robot
Of course, it’s so he can give everyone time off vs throwing cash onto an even bigger heap..
Uh huh. Digital paper pushers are going away. Then nearly all hands on jobs get wiped out by humanoid robots except trades, which get a bit easier but hold on for a while longer.
Meanwhile the STEM labor shortage absolutely explodes to be worse than ever.
We need AI/robots that are capable of ‘getting themselves to the starting line,’ to better understand the context of what they’re doing
I used to work at a beef processing plant. While I was there I was thinking that having a robot do that work was so far away. Each piece of meat is different and it takes tactile feeling to cut the meat in the most efficient way. At this point that job can only be done by humans.