This post is a response to the question “Do you personally feel like your future dream job is threatened by artificial intelligence?” by @sarah.lindley
My dream job is to work in the aerospace engineering industry, ideally designing new aircraft. I have a general saying when it comes to why I picked engineering: “You can’t have your job taken by robots if you are the one who is designing the robots.” This may not necessarily compare apples to apples with artificial intelligence (AI) but the saying gets the idea across. You cannot have your job outsourced, made obsolete, or outdated if you are the one creating the robot or AI that outsources, obsoletes, or outdates other jobs. Part of picking a dream job is thinking about how viable and stable it is in the long run. Will this career still be thriving 10 years from now? 20 years? 30 years? Engineering doesn’t appear to be outsourced by AI any time soon.
I believe that artificial intelligence is overall beneficial to society. It automates monotonous tasks so that us humans do not have to waste our lives working mindless things. For example, NASA used to have massive rooms of engineers working on computations and drafting for the space program in the twentieth century. Since then, they have been replaced by powerful machines and AI computing power. The word “replacing” in this case is not necessarily a bad thing. Nowadays engineers who would have been working on those computations and drafting can now be working on tasks that require true critical thinking and problem solving that an artificial intelligent machine cannot do. Although AI has eliminated many jobs, it has led to more higher and critical thinking jobs which has sped up our technological progress exponentially.
I worry about people whose dream jobs may be replaced by artificial intelligence. They may have to resort to a different career in the future if artificial intelligence swamps their industries.