Are Robots taking over the Earth?

I was recently an intense discussion with a Wall Streeter about job security. This gentleman graduated from the prestigious Wharton School of Business with both undergraduate and graduate degree's in finance and worked for years on Wall Street.

After having had the luxury of working overseas in finance he came back to the states only to be faced with stunning difficulty in obtaining employment from many of the big firms despite a highly successful track record on the Street and abroad. He quietly explained to me that many of the Wall Street firms were hiring younger and younger and paying less and less in an effort to maximize profits. He also tried to explain to me that the idea of job security was pretty much dead.

In a previous post, which I pulled from this blog, I talked about who had the best job security.

I thought about it long and hard and also had discussed this with another friend in finance.

Jobs that are the most secure are ones that can NOT be replaced by robots or outsourced to foreign nations such as India or China.

This leaves us several categories of jobs all of which can be summarized in as such that it needs human intelligence to execute or run.

•People who build or run businesses
•Specialists or people who are self employed such as doctors, accountants, and •lawyers
•Salesmen
•Artists
•Technical Artisans . . .
•etc, etc

There is a field where where a specialist and an artist intersect which is that of the technical artisan.

These are individuals who operate sophisticated pieces of software, which may or may not be coupled with other equipment.

The workers in these fields are safe so long as there is a high cost of entry.

For example, type setters started losing their jobs once word processors came out.
The demand for professional audio engineers started dwindling at a tremendous rate once affordable good quality portable recording software, such as ProTools, exploded into the marketplace.
Apple greatly undercut Avid's market share by offering a video editing platform (Final Cut Pro) at a huge fraction of the cost with comparable editing power.

We will see this happening soon with Apple's release of the Color application which is meant to mimic $100,000+ color correction systems such as the DaVinci 2k.

And if you think being a surgeon is a safe bet in terms of job security, you might be wrong. The U.S. military has developed a machine with ultra fine motor movements that can be remotely operated by a surgeon from over a thousand miles away. The military developed this technology so that it afforded them the ability to contract the best surgeons to operate on wounded soldiers in distant or remote locations. Of course one could speculate that surgeons might be outsourced. However this is mere speculation.

We also know that innovation destroys jobs. Advances in machinery, intelligent robots, better preventative health measures, etc, etc.

If you're looking to a job for high pay, that also may change in the future depending on the field you are pursuing.

For example, surgeons and doctors were doing very well financially until health insurance companies began to dictate what they would pay doctors. (Plastic surgeons still make rockstar levels of cash since they rarely have to deal with health insurance).

Rumor has it these highly paid self employed specialists may begin to unionize. Which I ultimately hope is not the case as we have seen ill-effect from this happening particularly in reference to some of the automobile manufacturers in Detroit.

My suggestion? Learn more about money and how it works. I don't mean study finance, or business, although I wish I had majored in business instead of minoring in it. Today I am shocked at how little many people know about money. I know people who have more than DOUBLED their salaries and crossed the 6 figure threshold only to complain about having less money than ever before.

And then we all know about the success stories of many individuals who started off with nothing, in many instances no college education, who have amassed empires. And then there are also some individuals who have amassed a great deal of wealth through wise investments, and choose to work a job part time.

Best of luck to you.