I keep reading about the disappearance of well-paying jobs and then the optimistic statement that they will be replaced. Not really seeing that happening but maybe I am just not looking in the right places. Automation and dying industries are changing the job landscape. Coal is another dead industry and the Mid-East countries are looking at alternatives to employ their workers as their oil revenues are in jeopardy over the long-term.
CBC did an analysis of just one industry so thought I would trigger discussion with this question.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/geop...ring-1.4162521
"This round of layoffs, this downturn, geophysicists have been more affected than anyone else," said Marian Hanna, a former president of the Canadian Society for Exploration Geophysicists (CSEG).
Even amid thousands of other lost oilpatch jobs, the plight of geophysicists is now an example of how abruptly an entire profession can find itself on the outside looking in.
It might also serve as a warning to other seemingly bulletproof career choices that could be blindsided by the forces of automation and artificial intelligence. A recent study by the Brookfield Institute suggests nearly half of the jobs in Canada, or some 7.7 million positions, could potentially be automated...
For geophysicists, the last few years have been hard and messy with jobs kept and lost, retraining and people leaving the field entirely.
Encouragingly, perhaps, at least for those who take an especially dim view of job prospects in the coming world of automation, as some doors have closed others have opened. Newly minted brain researcher Aitken, for one, never thought her skills would transfer to medicine, right until they did.
"I thought I'd be a geophysicist all my life, but if I was a student now, I'd go into biomedical engineering," she said. "That's the place to be