We talk a lot about jobs that are threatened because of advances in technology that will lead to automation, or related needs that will disappear. As such, it is likely that tasks that are now performed by executive assistants or blue-collar workers will be automated; and that one day we will not need the mailman to deliver letters anymore, employees at the counters of banks or railway stations, or people to take care of lions in the menageries of circuses or zoos (because there will no longer be menageries).
While it is essential to prepare for a professional reconversion that adds value for those who now perform these tasks, the disappearance of these tasks, in and of itself, is not a threat to our societies.
In contrast, we barely talk about other jobs that are also threatened, but that warrants protection and also an increase in salary because they are essential and the survival of our civilization depends on these jobs.
In increasing order of threat: careers related to (1) childcare, (2) environment, and (3) freedoms:
1. Careers in childcare (whether in the medical or educational fields) do not seem threatened at the moment; and yet they are, in many countries, and even in France. Because they demand more and more means, and these careers are essentially funded by taxes, which happen to be more and more difficult to raise. And though technical progress will help complete these tasks, it will never replace the need for a human presence to heal or teach. We must protect these careers; and in particular strengthen the means for perinatal health, nurseries and preschools. This must include funds for those who are different, and who are wrongly called “disabled.”
2. Careers in environmental defence: Even if we talk more than ever about the need to protect nature, the people who are in charge of doing so are few, and will be fewer and fewer: when almost all of humanity will live in cities, when our rural territories and villages will be abandoned and when there will be nobody that want to live the peasant life or live far away from big city centres, what will we do to turn the beautiful speeches about the environment into action? It is therefore essential to cherish rural areas and the careers that support it.
3. Careers that defend freedoms (lawyer, magistrate, journalist, literature teachers, history and philosophy) are even more threatened than the other two. Legal professions are threatened by the automation of jurisprudence. Those of the press by the writing of articles by artificial intelligence. The teachings of the humanities because they will be seen as less directly operational, though they are essential to put all action in the ethical realm and because it will become more and more essential to know how to think about freedom, suffering, death and more broadly, the human condition and its place in nature. One could add artists, (comedians, musicians, visual artists), that artificial intelligence could pretend to replace.
When a society wants to make power disappear, it begins by the proletarianization of those who represent the power; and for that, it starts, cynically, by having women fill the careers that can be exploited more easily. It is what is currently happening in these three categories. Moreover, it starts to discredit it: this has already begun today for those who defend freedoms. One day, it could also start happening for the other two categories.
If we are not careful, our societies will perish. Our societies will save themselves if they know how to defend, value, promote, what constitutes, since the dawn of time, the essential.
j@attali.com