Jornalistas velho estilo estão realmente desaparecendo, mas outros, tecnologicamente aptos, estão ocupando os lugares daqueles velhos escrevinhadores de redação, ou reporteres investigativos. Hoje tudo aparece primeiro na internet, for free (mas obviamente alguém precisou colocar isso lá).
Advogados estão sendo substituídos por sistemas online de aconselhamento jurídico, e é bom que isso ocorra, pois advogados, além de exibirem tarifas muito altas, equivalentes às limusines de luxo com champagne e massagem, são nefastos produtores de déficits públicos, ou pelo menos atuam como redistribuidores de renda da maneira mais perversa.
Enfim: qualquer que seja a sua profissão, prepare-se para ficar desempregado nos próximos dez anos.
Estou esperando algo que substitua políticos, mas parece que a raça é dura, como as baratas, que estão conosco desde muito antes de Adão e Eva...
Não, isso não vai provocar desemprego, como acreditam almas cândidas, pois alguém vai produzir os robôs, consertá-los, até conversar com eles...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
How to cope when robots take your job
‘When your industry goes, you lose both your income and your identity’
FT, OCTOBER 6, 2016
by: Simon Kuper
The robots are coming to demolish your career. “No office job is safe,” says Sebastian Thrun, an expert on artificial intelligence at Stanford University. Lots of lawyers, accountants, even surgeons will be automated away. Having spent my career watching the long, slow carnage of my own industry, I have some insight into how that will feel, and how to cope.
When I entered journalism in 1995, it was a pretty cushy business. People bought newspapers — not necessarily for the articles but often just to find out the weather forecast, the football results, the stock prices or the TV schedule. Consequently, even mediocrities and alcoholics could have long, well-paid journalistic careers. I remember crabby FT subeditors of the 1990s who owned not just houses in London but second homes in France. When I started out, deadlines were about 6pm, after which — since rolling-news websites hadn’t been invented yet — everyone went to the pub. Expenses were good too: I’m told that at the FT, into the early 1990s, you could fly business class as long as you said you were working on the plane. So people would buy a copy of The Economist at the airport.
Companies are turning to artificial intelligence to fill jobs while hackers hope it will disguise their tracks
Unfortunately, the year I became a journalist, Microsoft produced its first web browser, Internet Explorer. Suddenly you could go online and find out almost anything for free without buying a paper. The number of journalists has been shrinking since, and most new jobs are for 25-year-olds willing to work for peanuts. My people are going extinct like dodos or factory workers. For now I’m hanging on, still on the island, grazing on one of the last patches of grass, but the waters are rising around me. One day my children will say: “My dad was a content provider. He worked for an app called FT, I think.”
When your industry goes, you lose both your income and your identity. Woody Allen has a nice comedy sketch about his father being made “technologically unemployed” — “They fired him. They replaced him with a tiny gadget … that does everything my father does, only it does it much better. The depressing thing is, my mother ran out and bought one.”
Techno-optimists predict that disappearing old jobs will be replaced by new jobs. For journalists, that’s certainly been true: in the US at last count, PRs outnumbered us 4.6 to 1. They are also better paid. The problem is that most journalists want to be journalists. We like this badly paid, poorly regarded and mostly meaningless profession. Years ago, a colleague told me about someone from the paper who had become a PR, or, in the jargon of journalism, “gone over to the dark side”. My colleague sniffed, “I just couldn’t look at myself in the mirror in the morning.” Needless to say, that colleague is now a PR himself.
But he seems happy. Having watched many former journalists stumble into new lives, I’ve assembled some tips on how to cope with technological destruction:
● Don’t make your job your identity. I remember one senior colleague whose great boast was that the chancellor of the exchequer sometimes stopped him for a chat. When the man retired, he made the devastating discovery that the chancellor wasn’t interested in him any more.
● Accept that your career isn’t building up to anything. In fact, it probably isn’t even a career.
● While your industry is still paying you, don’t get attached to money or status symbols. Expect that your job will be decimated. Don’t buy a big house. Food and stuff have never been cheaper, so if you stick to those you should be OK. I’ve been inspired by William Boyd’s fantastic novel Any Human Heart, in which the main character, once a successful writer, discovers in his sixties that dogfood is cheap, nutritious and even quite tasty, especially with “a pinch of curry powder judiciously stirred in”.
● Enjoy the fleeting moments: that shared chuckle with the chancellor, the business-class flight, those two or three truly satisfying pieces of work. Just don’t expect them to last. If you ever had a well-paid job in which you could express your talents, however briefly, you are one up on almost everybody else who ever lived.
● Don’t try to hang on in a dying industry as a freelancer. A major international newspaper recently offered a respected writer I know £10 for an article.
● Think of ways to monetise your skills in face-to-face situations in which nobody wants a computer. To quote the newly redundant England football manager Sam Allardyce: “I’m a keynote speaker.”
● If you still want to express yourself, get a blog.
● Don’t blame yourself. You are just a statistic, crushed beneath the wheels of history.
● Don’t complain. It’s boring.
● Expect to work in unsatisfying jobs until you are about 75. Hardly anyone else in history had a pension, so why should you?
Alternatively, you could just blame it all on immigrants.
simon.kuper@ft.com; Twitter @KuperSimon
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