There is no shortage of hype around AI coming for jobs, and while the U.S. labor market has begun to sputter, hard evidence of AI-related job losses is scarce.
Geoffrey Hinton’s message on a recent podcast about artificial intelligence was simple: “Train to be a plumber.”
Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist often called “the Godfather of AI,” said in June what people have now been saying for years: Jobs that include manual labor and expertise are the least vulnerable to modern technology than some other career paths, many of which have generally been considered more respected and more lucrative.
“I think plumbers are less at risk,” Hinton said. “Someone like a legal assistant, a paralegal, they’re not going to be needed for very long.”
As a self-employed general contractor-handyman-plumber, I feel pretty secure about the future of my work prospects. If anything, an AI that could reliably deliver correct information would be immensely useful in my line of work, given how I run into technical questions on a daily basis.