Professor Yuval Noah Harari has given his opinion on which jobs could be taken over by AI, but why, despite certain basic fundamentals, priests are completely safe.
Professor Harari told Steven Bartlett on his podcast The Diary of a CEO that he thought lawyers, doctors, and accountants were the most likely to be replaced by AI.
The reason he thought this was because at the heart of their roles was a simple process of taking information in and then sending it back out.
In the case of a doctor, this was a patient’s symptoms followed by a diagnosis and prescription for example.
However, when it came to talking about priests Professor Harari said that whilst a priest’s job involved repeating information – something that could be done by AI – he said there was a fundamental reason why they couldn’t be replaced.
Professor Harari explained: “One of the easiest jobs to automate is the priesthood of at least certain religions because you just need to repeat the same texts and gestures again and again in specific situations.
“Like if you have a wedding ceremony then the priest just needs to repeat the same words and there you are you are married. Now we don’t think about priests as being in danger of being replaced by robots because what we want from a priest is not just the mechanical repetition of certain words and gestures.
“We think that only another frail flesh and blood human who knows what is pain and love and who can suffer; only they can connect us to the divine.
“So most people would not be interested in having their wedding conducted by a robot even though technically it’s very easy to do it.”
On the medical profession, Professor Harari said that whilst doctors could be replaced nurses could not because their jobs required a mix of social and motor skills. He said: If your job requires a combination of skills from several different fields it’s not impossible but it’s much more difficult to automate.
“If you think about a nurse that needs to replace a bandage to a crying child this is much much harder to automate than just a doctor to write a prescription because this is not just data.”
Professor Harari also touched on the future impact of AI on the jobs market, explaining that the impact would be so great that humans would be forced to reinvent themselves multiple times over a lifetime.
He said their jobs will go through cycles where their job will become redundant, forcing them to look for a new role before that becomes redundant again.
He said: “Even for people who just deal with information there will be new jobs, the problem will be the retraining and not just retraining in terms of acquiring new skills but psychological retraining.
“How do you reinvent yourself in a new profession and do it not once but again and again and again because as the ai revolution unfolds…there will be jobs disappearing but new jobs emerging.
“But the new jobs will rapidly change and vanish and then there will be a new wave of new jobs and people will have to reinvent themselves four, five, six times to stay relevant and this will create immense psychological stress.”