HOW TO WORK IT IN THE COMPUTER AGE

The robots are coming to steal our jobs. But here are seven sectors where humans can expect a pay check in the future

IT’S grad season, a time when college students leave the beer bongs behind and head out into the cold, cruel world of full-time employment. Luckily for them, prospects are good. For now, at least. According to Michigan State’s annual “Recruiting Trends” survey, 83 percent of employers described the current market as “good” or “excellent” for job seekers from colleges and universities.

But what about years from now? The outlook may not be so rosy. Like some blue-collar workers, university-degree holders might have to brace themselves for a rude awakening.

We’ve all heard dire predictions of a future industrial revolution driven by robots and artificial intelligence that could lead to a collapsing job market for us humans. By one cynical estimate from a Carnegie Mellon professor, technology will eliminate 80 to 90 percent of US jobs in the next decade or so.

“It’s impossible to overstate the impact AI will have on us in the next 20 years,” says Ed Hess, a University of Virginia business administration professor and author of the newbook “Humility Is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age.” “I believe the risk is high enough that we need a plan B. We can’t wait to see what happens.”

Robots are undoubtedly getting more sophisticated and AI is growing more complex, allowing machines to perform work that had previously required a humantouch. Certain jobs, such as insurance underwriters, bank tellers — even sports umpires — are likely to disappear in the coming decades, according to a widely cited report from Oxford academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne.

Others predict it won’t be all doom and gloom for our children and grandchildren.

“I think people overstate these changes [to the job market],” says Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonprofit think tank. “I will guess it’s going to change more in the next 20 years than the last 20 years, but there was a report we did looking at occupational change by decade, and what you find is that earlier decades have much higher rates of change: the 1880s, 1950s, 1960s.”

The job market has always evolved as a result of technological and societal changes. It’s an eternal ebb and flow. Employment at newspapers, for example, was down 46.7 percent from 1998 to 2012, but jobs in tortilla manufacturing (driven by changing food tastes and a growing Hispanic population) were up 103.4 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Facebook is set to add some 3,000 workers to scour the site for hate speech and other offensive content — a gig that didn’t even exist a few years ago.

“We have evidence from history that these big shifts in our economy, whether they’re derived from industrialization or automation, don’t have to be a total economic collapse,” says Rakeen Mabud, a program director at Roosevelt Institute.

But changes are certainly coming, and our challenge is to figure out how to avoid becoming obsolete.

Education will be key. Those who will best be able to navigate the changing job market are people with technical training but also emotional intelligence and an ability to think creatively and learn new skills.

“The magic combination is some combo of engineering or science training with psychology and philosophy — and even some arts training,” Hess says. “No matter what I do, I’m going to have different jobs in my life. The number one job skill is iterative learning.”

Figuring out what people will want and need, based on lifestyle trends, helps point the way to constant employment. Here are seven sectors that are likely to offer a steady paycheck in the future.