As we all know, the robots are coming. With the singularity all but a certainty (and not in any way pseudoscientific), sooner or later artificial intelligence will develop to become a runaway technological splurge that disrupts and supplants all of what we know today as human civilisation.
Heck, even our most basic human proclivities will be sated by robotic intervention.
The good news, however, is that not everyone will become obsolete. Psychologists, for example (in other words, me and my kind), will be fine. No matter what happens in the future, psychologists are destined to live long and prosper, scuttling away like the cockroaches of academia, offering our uninterrupted insights to ever-eager (perhaps even increasingly hungry) audiences, oblivious to the very collapse of cognitive order and human collective sanity.
While you might be well and truly doomed, we, on the other hand, will be fine.
So, as I say, good news.
I found this out by checking this website called “Will Robots Take My Job?“
And, apparently, robots will not be taking my job:
The people at “Will Robots Take My Job” have established a database drawn from the work of engineers at Oxford University, who statistically modelled the impact of automation on over 700 occupations based on their reliance on social and creative intelligence:
In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne published a report titled “The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?”. The authors examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation, by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier.
According to their estimates, about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk. Although the report is specific to the US job market, it is easy to see how this might apply all over the world.
We extracted the jobs and the probability of automation from the report and have made it easy to search for your job.
Perhaps paradoxically, the website itself is very user-friendly. Its overall pastel-and-cream UI is just so pleasant, you will virtually enjoy the experience of researching your own obsolescence.
By way of controlling-for-baseline, I ran a check of a few other cognate professions, just to see what kind of margin-of-error the Will-Robots-Take-My-Job people were working with.
| Job | Probability that a Robot will Take this Job |
| Psychologists | 0% (yay!) |
| Anthropologists | 1% (ooh!) |
| Sociologists | 6% (ha!) |
| Physicists | 10% (woah!) |
| Managers | 25% (“Automation risk level: Start worrying”) |
Overall, seems legit to me. I mean, look at the exactitude of those numbers. Very specific. And the findings are just so convincing. After all, what psychologists do is certainly hard to automate.
As the authors note, automation works best for tasks that follow
well-defined procedures that can easily be performed by sophisticated algorithms.
In other words, psychology is so ill-defined, so unsophisticated, so anti-algorithmic, that it defies the power of even the best imaginable logic-machines to successfully imitate, in any way, shape, or form. Their efforts to do so will forever result in 100% failure.
I mean, even anthropologists can’t say that!
Hmmm. Maybe, for psychologists, it’s not such good news after all…
Replication crisis, anyone?
Brian Hughes is an academic psychologist and university professor in Galway, Ireland, specialising in stress, health, and the application of psychology to social issues. He writes widely on the psychology of empiricism and of empirically disputable claims, especially as they pertain to science, health, medicine, and politics.