POINT OF VIEW: “AI and the professions of yesterday and tomorrow”

As the start of the school year begins, paleoanthropologist Pascal Picq is looking into the possible impacts of artificial intelligence on the professions of tomorrow. And we share the “Moravec paradox”: “computers are more efficient in high-level cognitive tasks but very bad at performing tasks that are easy for us”.

At the end of summer 2025, young people are preparing to return to school. The youngest first, then will come the students who, having emerged from the horrors of Parcours Sup and the heatwaves, are embarking on their future professions. What will these professions be?

At the beginning of August, Microsoft has published a study on the jobs and tasks that will be most likely to be replaced by generative artificial intelligence (GAI). Let us point out that the tasks monopolized by IAGs do not mean the disappearance of professions, which are transforming. This is not the first of its kind, except that things have become clearer since the digital tsunami generated by OpenIA with ChatGPT in November 2022, followed by more and more waves. A submersion on the shores of digital space with earthquakes starting from both shores of the Pacific Ocean. In fact, AGIs propagate in what I call Darwinian digital space as adaptive radiation; and we’re only at the beginning.

The professions and tasks most invested by IAGs concern data processing of all kinds: interpreters/translators, historians, flight attendants/passenger reception, sales services, authors/editors, customer service, CNC programmers, telephone operators, agents ticketing/travel, radio/TV presenters, back-office employees, telemarketers, janitors, journalists, mathematicians, technical editors, proofreaders/editors, higher education teachers (business/economics), public relations, market research analysts, analysts/consultants…

The least threatened trades and tasks are caregivers, water treatment operators, massage therapists, maintenance workers, drivers/handlers (carts, tractors), roofers, masons/concrete, oil/wood workers, hospital prescriptions, dental surgeons, etc. So many profiles with a strong physical, care, or equipment management component. By generalizing, professions that are done remotely or on fixed positions are threatened or affected, while, on the other hand, professions with human contact and physical or driving activities are preserved.

When this study came out, I was writing my next book using several AGIs. But here I am interrupted by a water leak on my boiler. Fortunately, my heating engineer was not on vacation. He arrives promptly and identifies the defective pipe. Nothing serious. He carries out the welding; we turn the water pressure back on and there, two other joints start to leak. You have to replace them, pick up the necessary parts, go back to the workshop, come back with another welding machine… And no AGI can do that.

Moravec’s paradox

The next digital wave that is already fast approaching is two- or four-legged robots; and things are moving quickly on the Chinese side. But as amazing and fascinating as they are, it’s not tomorrow that robots will do what my heating engineer did. A first reason is that not all of these interventions are filmed, digitized, modeled… Modelable like the digital twins of production lines or machines. Each of them is unique and requires adaptability and decision-making based on experience and know-how. As for manipulations… A second reason is more general: it is the Moravec paradox.

Hans Moravec is one of the great pioneers of robotics and AI with Marvin Minsky and Rodney Brooks. The paradox formulated without the 1980s is stated as follows: computers perform better in high-level cognitive tasks but are very bad at performing tasks that are easy for us. In other words, they are more effective for us to outplay chess or the game of go than for walking quietly in a forest. I could have gone astray by saying “… than to repair a boiler”; which would be as pejorative as it is false in view of all these manual professions requiring training, experience and skills and so little valued in our education system and our so-called postmodern societies.

From an evolutionary point of view, the more an adaptation has appeared in the past during our evolution – and which seems easy or natural to us to execute like walking upright after learning – the more difficult it will be for robots while static machines animated by software and AI, increasingly sophisticated, surpass us in the most recent functions invented by humans and difficult to learn after long studies. (There are some counterexamples, such as morphological, facial and vocal recognitions dating back to our ape past but, as always, a few rare exceptions which confirm Moravec’s empirical paradox).

Moravec states his paradox in his book “ Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988) “The Child’s Mind: The Future of Robots and Human Intelligence”. In other words, the robotics of tomorrow, and already in progress, are inspired by our ontogeny – the time of our first years to walk, to speak…-to hope to catch up with our phylogenesis – our evolutionary history.

Let’s go back to the start of the school year and the studies of our children, young and old. What is happening is impacting half a century of educational policy having disregarded manual professions and, by extension, all forms of learning, even for engineering professions if not some recent advances. From the “99% of a generation at the baccalaureate” to intellectual professions based on conceptual and theoretical approaches, a whole section of higher education graduates find themselves impacted by IAGs.

Rethink the education system

So if there is reason to worry about the impacts of AGI and future robots on the professions of tomorrow, we would be much wiser –intelligent therefore – to rethink an education system which is deteriorating in international rankings. Focused on the reproduction of elites – more or less comfortable with AGI, it no longer meets needs, to the changes and aspirations of young people for the society of tomorrow. The feared impact of AGI at least has the merit of provoking –we hope– awareness and, even more, that the pejorative and stupid hierarchy between manual and intellectual professions has become prehistoric.

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For two million years, humans have coevolved with their technical and cultural spaces. Today, it is a new stage that we approach with the same brain as our Cro-Magnon ancestors; and there robots and AGIs have a wonderful way to go to catch up with us. Because when hallucinated techno gurus predict that AGIs will soon overtake us – the singularity -, it will be in the most complex cognitive functions, but not for everything that makes us human. Furthermore, even the most formidable AGIs to come will never be human simply because they are not homologous, that is to say coming from the same common ancestor as between us and chimpanzees. They are analogous, adorned with all human artifices, but never human.Beware of illusions which already mislead too many sapiens caught up in artificial anthropomorphism.

And with my heating engineer, there is also human contact, which did me the greatest good before returning to my screen and requesting IAGs, certainly very friendly, even empathetic, but which remain artificial. Human warmth which is therefore not limited to the quality of my heating engineer.”

(*) Paleoanthropologist. Among his published works: “Artificial intelligence and the Chimpanzees of the Future”, (Odile Jacob 2019); “AI, the Philosopher and the Anthropologist”, (Odile Jacob 2024).