Jobs without college

Bill Gates never got a college degree. Neither did Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. Most American high school grads won’t get a degree from a four-year college or university. What will they do?

I was on a FB thread yesterday that supported vocational training and listed about a dozen jobs that don’t require a college degree. Among them were plumbing, carpentry and truck driving. And that’s true today. But the interesting question is whether those jobs will still be around in 40 years or replaced by automation or robots.

Long haul trucking looks to be the first on that list. There are already autonomous vehicles on the road. In 10 years, it is very likely that most long haul trucking will be done by autonomous vehicles—they don’t get tired or sick, they don’t have families and they don’t take weekends or holidays or amphetamines.

A lot of new housing is pre-fab, with walls and roof fabricated at a central location by robots and then trucked out and assembled on site. The assembly may still require some human input, but many carpentry and brick-laying jobs have already been destroyed this way.

Of course, self-checkout is replacing clerks in grocery stores already. Agriculture is increasingly robotic. Drones are likely to replace truck drivers for local deliveries of food and other goods.

Of course, the disruption and job loss isn’t solely in blue-collar jobs. Watson can already read X-rays, MRIs and CTs more accurately than MD radiologists. AI and machine learning are able to compete with physicians for routine diagnoses. Robotic surgeries are becoming routine in some conditions.

In 10-20 years, a lot of the jobs that are still being done by humans will be done by machines. Yes, it will be important to be adaptive. But if that’s supposed to be the job skill of the future, then what we need is more adaptive training, not simply more vocational training.

Also yesterday came across this online article about robotic lab technicians. Industry has been using robots, combined with miniaturization of assays and microfluidics, for years to automate drug discovery. Crystallographers use robots to test thousands of crystallization conditions to accelerate structural biology. All of these replaced manual labor done by people. https://www.iflscience.com/technology/robot-chemist-can-complete-experiments-1000-times-quicker-than-humans/?fbclid=IwAR0vZhtf5gK2sahI9CulFWeIXyc2WEHIgZAbolboYrgwbLeRblKmLidzD3k