Elon Musk is a regular in debates about the future of society. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, this time, has spoken about what the race of the future will be. “Artificial Intelligence will make jobs a bit useless,” he said Thursday at the World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Shanghai with Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba. Thus, according to Musk, this technology has the prospect of ending most of the jobs that make up the world’s productive fabric.
The entry of new machines into the production chain in each of these revolutions has caused the destruction of many jobs, but also the appearance of others that were not there before the appearance of these machines.
For example, before it was necessary the presence of an employee to put the nut of a wheel. Now that nut is put in by a machine, but it must be controlled by a worker. This is what has happened in the last two centuries, since the first industrial revolution. For this reason, it is not excessively worrying, but it will be necessary to adapt to the new needs that are created.
In this labor framework, without a doubt, those who will have the least vulnerability to this irruption of technology will be those who are trained to program Artificial Intelligence software, as Elon Musk assured in the statements collected by CNBC. The technology mogul recommends young people to study engineering, although he warned that at some point “Artificial Intelligence will simply write its own software.”
So if machines are going to program themselves, what is there to study? In this productive fabric, in which Artificial Intelligence will monopolize production and, probably, distribution, consumers will be more dependent on human interaction. Someone will have to get customers to consume these products and services. So “if you’re working on something that involves people or engineering, it’s probably a good focus for your future,” Musk concluded.