NY Times: What Is the Ideal Retirement Age for Your Health?

[Twoin18]

@shawbridge

He said to me maybe five years ago when thinking about the penetration of AI, “Dad, what you do as a consultant made sense when you were choosing a career, but in the future, you will need to own the machine.”

My daughter is a Nurse Practitioner doing primary care and also is working on credentialing in psychiatric care as she has been creating groups to deal with issues like teen adolescent anxiety. Her work could be displaced in part by AI. Parts of it less so. She thinks it is very important to touch people when diagnosing – not just tests and conversation – and thought, correctly, that during her phase of Pandemic-era telehealth that she and other providers were missing things by only talking to the person.

Do you not think the same applies to the consulting work you do? Just like doctors are more likely to be assisted rather than replaced by telehealth (today I go to the doctor less often than I did 30 years ago because I can Google my symptoms), advisors to senior management seem unlikely to be fully replaced by machines, otherwise you might wonder why the management team themselves are needed.

AI feels more like a tool that will displace drudgery, just like previous generations of computers replaced secretarial staff and (living) “computers”. That should add value to high end consulting providers.

But it doesn’t seem likely that mass unemployment will result, any more than we have a massive pool of unemployed secretaries today, despite that being a common thought 20 years ago (or unemployed farmers that was a worry 90 years ago in the dust bowl). People will move onto other occupations, we just don’t know exactly what.

20 years ago I spent 18 months on a litigation project reading boxes of printed discovery material. Now that never happens because it is all indexed by keyword and no one reviews every page. Money still gets spent on litigation and lawyers are still employed (and charge a lot more per hour than back then).

[GKUnion]

I spoke with my son yesterday about his LEO retirement plan. If he were to retire at 50 his agency would pay him a monthly stipend, similar to what his Social Security would be, until he reaches the age to take SS. It’s like UBI when you get right down to it.

[shawbridge]

I don’t think he was saying that someone like me would be unemployed but that the allocation of wealth will swing much more heavily to the owners of the companies that create the software.

I do think that a lot of jobs that process and massage information have gone and more will go. Bookkeeping and accounting seem pretty vulnerable, for example. Folks who do compliance in pharma or clinical trials can probably be replaced. Will those folks be unemployed or will they find other things to do? If there are fewer overall employees, companies will need to hire fewer folks who train employees and fewer HR folks to manage them. Pre-AI, the automation of various things has meant that my consulting firm has reduced the number of support staff while increasing output.

[shawbridge]

Most probably.

[ScouterMomof3]

I won’t argue with that. I think most physical jobs have wear and tear, and some have very significant wear and tear, like construction, police, firefighting, some nursing, etc. A lot of safety measures hope to help reduce workplace injuries but it’s not easy.
Maybe a personal trainer, etc. would have a job with a lot of activity but not cause harm. I just want to acknowledge that some jobs beat people up pretty bad.