Five Jobs That Will Go Extinct By 2025

Six months ago, the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released a study titled "Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy" which pointed out the ten million people whose jobs will be disrupted in the next decade. It clearly pointed out which jobs were at the highest risk of becoming obsolete and which jobs will stay. Those in the former category must transition towards the latter category, taking advantage of the decade head start.

With the advent of AI and ML, more human decision makers are seeing the value of making the transition in the feedback loop between man and machine. In doing so, the social dynamic of our species will be transformed drastically, and like the protests against Careem that plagued developing markets, these changes too will be met with equal disdain.

Automotive Ecosystem

As the human race evolves to realise that time is the precious gift of all, saving it in every way will become the basis of decision making. Trend reports from around the world point to a distaste towards owning a car, paying for repairs, paying for insurance, absorbing the depreciation, and paying for petrol in a world where the journey can cost less than AED 10 per day. The first job that will be affected is that of the driver as cars become autonomous and so will the car manufacturing industry. For the vast majority, car ownership will make very little sense. The changes will ripple across the ecosystem, weakening the basis behind jobs such as transit and intercity bus drivers, chauffeurs and taxi drivers, self-employed Careem drivers, package delivery drivers, and tractor trailer drivers. According to the report from the CEA, this equates to 3 million jobs in the United States alone.

Financial Ecosystem

Bank tellers are already losing out as more banks transition to be digital. FinTech companies around the world are tapping into big data to do the job of an analyst in seconds. Everyone with a job around qualifying loan applicants, assessing risks, calculating premiums, addressing pain points, and following up is on the way out.

Retail Ecosystem

The entire staff of Redbox will meet the same fate as Blockbuster. As cord-cutters like Amazon and Netflix take over, cost savings and time savings will overpower any desire to hang on to the way things were. The same fate will soon overtake malls around the world, as more channels for quick delivery knock away fears of online retail. The recent Amazon-Souq deal will change retail in the Middle East too unless marketers invest in a value chain and a series of sentiment building campaigns that create memorable brands.

Marketing Ecosystem

As voice-based search engulfs the world, agency side marketers that have made their bread & butter around visual ads will be disrupted tremendously. Most of the work that goes into campaign planning has already been automated by C2, with the majority of tasks in digital media buying & planning simplified by the programmatic ecosystem. It's the same case with the link builders of SEO.

Airline Ecosystem

As autopilot has become relied on more and more by human pilots, so have the improvements around its sensors, navigation, predictive analytics, and crisis management. In a recent study, pilots admitted to manually flying the plane for an average of seven minutes which means AI is doing 90% of the heavy lifting. The tasks for flight attendant and crew are also ripe for disruption, as manufacturers seek to add more seats and fewer aisles.