Society's most important job
Q: What is society's most important job today?
The word "important" can be a bit ambiguous. Does it mean the most good for society? Is that in the long term (50 years) or short term (5 years) or extremely short term (5 mins)? Or is it morally good? Is it the job you get most happiness out of? Or the job that makes you feel most fulfilled?
I imagine the first couple of occupations that come to mind are:
- Doctor
- Politician
- Teacher
- Scientist
- Engineer
- Religious/Community Leader
- Entrepreneur
- Parent?
To answer this question is really difficult, however I think there's a shortcut. Answer an easier question of which the answer I strongly believe will be the same. So, what's the easier question?
Q: If you could fully automate one job right now in society, what would it be?
Anyone who knows anything about recursion could probably guess the answer to this fairly quickly (or in the ball-park). I believe the answer to this question is "automation researcher".
More than doctors. More than teachers. Definitely more than politicians.
The reason for this is because we're limited by how well we can automate certain parts of our society, a proverbial glass ceiling of which if we could only break through we'd have access to the blue skies and unlimited opportunity.
If we could automate automation research we could recursively start making dents in that ceiling with each dent being larger exponentially growing until we break through. Researching automation would allow us to develop new drugs (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7614146/pdf/EMS159591.pdf) or understand mathematical truths (https://www.deepmind.com/publications/advancing-mathematics-by-guiding-human-intuition-with-ai)
This is why automation researchers should be the job you should automate if you had to pick one. It impacts every other job, because every other job is converging towards being automated. It is also, I believe, the answer to what the most important job is today in society.
This also probably also answers the question:
Q: What should I work on?
A: Work on automating.