Yep, totally agree with what you are saying. It is fundamentally uncertain. I do believe there are more jobs than we realize which aren't capable of being automated - things where there is a lot of diversity in the tasks required to do the job. Consider a real estate broker - no single task is rocket science, but there are perhaps 100 individual things a broker needs to be able to do. It's not going to be automated away. These 'highly diverse task' jobs are very common.
you could totally automate a real estate broker... a drone or android could easily show you a place, and maybe there's another person at a call-center who's showing 15 homes/hour, but that displaces 20 brokers/agents....
Or you could just realize that real estate is a broken industry and why does there even need to be a broker at all... List your home yourself, have software that does the rest...
I mean, lawyers, doctors, software programming, can easily be placed in the next 20 years. All fast-food, grocery, freight(depending on self-driving cars, or perhaps better train systems that have direct to store delivery)..
I look forward to the day when only 5% of the population is employable, because we'll have to figure out someway to live post-scarcity or just let people starve, but if 5% work, 5% then are consumers too...and that leaves out a lot of power, control, and economic potentiality.
Have you gone through the entire process and bought a house? It's complicated. There is a lot more to it than showing houses. If it were anything like as easy as you suggest, it would be done already - it's a giant market with money sloshing around.
I don't buy that doctors, lawyers, software engineers or real estate brokers will be automated away in 20 years. As a society there has been 15 solid years put into automating driving a car - a skill so simple we allow 16 year olds with no formal training and half of who have an iq less than 100 to do it. Doctors, lawyers, software engineers and real estate brokers have jobs which are very complex compared to driving a car.
Most real estate is not complicated. It looks complicated to people who haven't done it. In most states there's a standard form and the process is simple. If things get complicated, then you need a real estate attorney.
Fair enough, maybe that's why it seems simple? You do enough of them it starts seeming easy? To me it seemed like there was a lot of moving parts throughout the process.
