Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver interviewed kids about what they wanted to be when they grew up. But the jobs they list – pilot, doctor, artist – may look very different as the world becomes increasingly automated.
Time reported that Oliver addressed the fact that jobs are not just moving overseas—they’re also being lost to something in the U.S.: automation. “Our manufacturing sector now produces twice as much, but with one-third fewer workers,” said Oliver. As such, the jobs of the future are not the jobs of the past, and children must prepare for a market of automation and robots.
Oliver wants to see the Trump Administration focus less on job loss to other countries and more on retraining employees who lose their jobs to automation. Up to 50 percent of human jobs are at high risk of being automated, says a study from Oxford University. That means that humans should prepare for what author Farai Chideya calls “episodic careers,” moving from one career to another over the course of a lifetime.
Fortunately for Oliver, robots won’t replace all jobs: “A robot could never be a late night host,” he joked. What jobs do you think will be automated next?