Read the first part of our Future of Work series here
Neil Margerison, Psychiatrist
What does the job involve? Psychiatry is a medical specialty to do with the assessment and management of mental health conditions. Common conditions include anxiety disorders, depression, and dementia. Less common, but usually more serious, are severe depressive illness, bipolar disorder, psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia and some eating disorders. All of these conditions can be complicated by life circumstances; and by alcohol and drug misuse. GPs refer patients to us, and the job is to diagnose, then to treat, which is done mainly through medication, and talking therapies – usually interventional therapies like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) where you teach people to recognise and challenge abnormal or unhelpful patterns of thinking, such as catastrophic thinking. Some people need to be kept safe in hospital while they have treatment.
How has Covid affected life? Yes. Almost anything you can do in an outpatient clinic you can do over video platforms, which is better than the telephone. It’s not quite the same as having a thoughtful interaction though.
How long did you do it? 30 years, I’ve retired now but am still involved in medicine.
What training did you get? Five years of medical student training, then a year (now 2 years) of general house jobs, medicine and surgery. Then 5-6 years of specialist training.
How much does it pay? £24,907 — £87,754.
What took longest to learn? You have to be able to tolerate people’s distress, especially with chronic disorders, and to maintain positivity in the face of severe illness. You have to be sufficiently curious and interested in people’s own experience: for example where people are living with psychotic phenomena. It’s no good saying: “You’re hearing voices, that’s bonkers.” There’s no objective test, no blood test for these illnesses. That is difficult. And there is an associated mortality. Occasional suicides stay with me now, even many years on. Some of the more severe psychotic illnesses can affect the whole of someone’s life. And they usually start in young adult life. That means that making a diagnosis can be a big deal, so it’s important to take time and care with this.
What is the most boring bit? The bit you most useful to automate: Transcription of case notes, writing up long detailed assessments, computerised analysis of large volumes of data, and the rote stuff: automatic prescriptions, and reminders for blood tests, or other checks via mobile apps.
Could a robot do your job? Permanent symptom monitoring apps could be really useful. We see people infrequently. To have patients logging how they are constantly would help them understand themselves and manage their own expectations, to be able to quantify that they are only feeling 85pc, and so might not deliver for their employer.
There are also conversational apps which can help — because the simple thing that makes a difference to a lot of people is truly being listened to. We humans can certainly invest apps with human qualities and feel they are listening. Part of the art of the job is recognising patterns [to identify behaviours].
Today computers are very good at pattern recognition. And thinking about risk is notoriously difficult in people with psychiatric conditions. We have the authority to deprive people of their liberty — that’s a really big deal.
Analysis
Therapists are among the safest from automation of any job. The combination of high skill, intense training, and deep empathy/social skills is hard to imagine being replaced. Out of 702 jobs, Carl Frey suggests therapists and various mental health workers are in the top 20 at least risk of robot replacement. That does not mean, as Neil Margerison notes, that diagnostic tools and monitoring apps will not come to play a vital role in treatment.
Would machines actually do it better? AI analysis may help with diagnosis, particularly given recent advances in computers’ ability to process language (NLP).
Bottom Line: Mental health therapists of all kinds look safe. Indeed, in an ageing society, social careworkers, adept at dementia care, will be increasingly prized, and job opportunities are likely to grow, not diminish.
ONS jobs at risk estimate: 18pc
Stuart Pullum, Legal Clerk
What does your job involve? I assist barristers at 3 Verulam Buildings, a chambers where there is about one clerk to every six barristers. I coordinate the QCs — accept work for them, distribute work, manage their diaries to make sure they’re in the right court at the right time and agree their fees. Sometimes I’ve even dressed people for court.
How has Covid affected life? I work from the shed now. It’s been very difficult having the community broken. A chambers’ success is community based.
How long have you been doing it? 32 years.
What training did you get? You learn on the job. I listened and watched a lot. Today there are qualifications. But any aspiring clerk needs to observe everything, without that they will struggle.
How much does it pay? £15k-£80k+. The rewards when you start are comparatively low, but If you get to the upper end of the profession the salaries are generous.
What took longest to learn? The most important part is being emotionally and commercially aware. Some barristers work well when relaxed, and there those who thrive on being pressured. You have to recognise they all operate differently, and know that you need to help them do whatever it takes to get the best out of themselves and those around them.
What is the most boring bit? Data inputting. There is a lot of manual work placing time entries on bills. We have adopted new software that allows some of this to be automated, but we are still trialling it. Undoubtedly the more automated systems become, the fewer staff may be required. Production of hard documents is another thing set to change. As a 16-year old clerk, I was pushing trolley loads of papers to court.
That still happens, but more and more barristers (and, importantly, judges) are now happy to work with electronic documents. Covid has definitely driven this further. This year one of my QCs dealt with a trial in the British Virgin Islands courts, which ran remotely by video link, which he handled from his study at home in Surrey.
He prepared for trial and the cross examinations with many thousands of pieces of paper digitised and stored on his computer or in the cloud. Last year that would paper would have been printed into 19 or 20 lever arch files, and put in wheeled suitcase to take on the plane. It’s a huge difference.
Do you think your job will be the same when you retire? I think it will be much more digitally run, but there will always be a need to understand the mood and personality of the clients and QCs. Technology is streamlining processes, but it is also helping growth globally, as we have come to rely on video calls and shared files; our overseas clients seem much closer than they were before.
Analysis
There are professions with different roles subject to very different tolls from automation. The law is one. While QCs are predicted to be fine; their clerks — assembling “bundles” of documents for them — will not. As Frey and Osborne write: “legal writing will soon be automated… persuading will not.”
Computers can now mine vast troves of documents and precedents and distil essential arguments — all work that once was performed by junior staff. This creates a problem that we will see again and again in high skill professions: if entry level jobs are eliminated, how will starters gain skills and experience to progress to roles that can’t be automated. The ladder is kicked away.
Would machines actually do it better? Clearly AI can trawl through more documents than humans.
Bottom Line: Gloomy
Implications for this job group: All admin and secretarial roles are technologically threatened — you only have to note the palpable advances made by smartphone voice assistants to understand that. Receptionists are the most at risk in this group. But there is a human, social element to many roles which may keep at least incumbents safe.
ONS jobs at risk estimate: 62pc
Charles Cumming, Writer
What does your job involve? I write spy thrillers. I am a procrastinator but try to write at least 1,000 words a day. Of course then I delete 900. It’s hard to seize full control of characters and the suspense of the plot; there are perhaps one in seven great days. When I’m starting a new book, I feel my way into it, sketching out a general idea of what’s going to happen and where it will take place.
Then I plot it out, make research visits, and read around the politics and espionage of the subject. That leads to more and more ideas, at which stage there can be a lot of plates spinning: I have to remember my characters and be true to them. And I sit with those components for the year or two the book takes to write.
How has Covid affected life? Writing is solitary anyway. But contemporary writers do now have to make the decision to ignore Covid or incorporate it. For my latest, I’m incorporating.
How long have you been doing it? 25 years.
What training did you get? None. Just reading other books, and a sense of self-confidence that I could write decent sentences.
How much does it pay? They say there are 50 writers in the UK who make a living solely from writing books. Everyone else has to have another job — screenwriting or teaching or whatever. I’ve had years where I’ve made 30k and one Hollywood year where I made 350k. Income is so variable it’s hard to plan, to know how much you’re going to have at any point. On top of that, to be a white middle-aged man has added another layer of jeopardy. It’s harder to sell books than it was five years ago as publishers try to balance their lists.
What took longest to learn? Understanding that it’s a business, that you’re only as good as your last book and will be jettisoned if your books are not making money. I certainly began with an artistic hat on, but I realised the books will be read as entertainments, as stories and escapism. To imagine they are anything else is a pipedream. As long as people appreciate them, though, I’m happy.
What is the most boring bit? Correcting proofs.
Will you always do this? If you gave me a vineyard with no frosts, I would certainly consider a sabbatical. I am not one of those writers who must write.
Do you think your job will be the same when you retire? There is already screenplay software that will fill in a lot of structure, and similar for fiction. But the idea of AI being able to distinguish between characters and tie it all together feels some distance off.
Analysis
Computers writing — or at least manipulating words — has become one of 2020’s hottest technological topics. In May, the American lab OpenAI announced GPT-3, software which produces almost eerily good text and for the first time made it hard to tell the difference between human- and computer-generated prose.
GPT (which stands for Generative PreTrained Transformer) is itself an extension of Natural Language Processing (NLP) which uses a brain-like computing process known as deep learning to extract information in documents and which itself has come on in leaps and bounds in the last couple of years. The big question is, do computers “understand” what they are “reading” and “writing”?
The answer is no, at least for the moment. But does that matter, given that their appearance of understanding is increasingly perfect? NLP and GPT-3 are also vivid demonstrations of how technology lurches ahead, struggling for years then suddenly smashing through barriers which have held it up.
Would machines actually do it better? The dramatic improvement of AI’s handling of language suggest it’s not impossible.
Bottom Line: We could well see a GPT-3 bestseller within years.
Implications for this job group: Group 3 includes many creative types, and whatever instinct might tell you, they are far from immune to automation. The ONS for example, thinks artists (35pc at risk) are more vulnerable than paramedics (28pc). Most vulnerable of all in this group? Sports players — half of whom are predicted to lose their jobs.
ONS jobs at risk estimate: 35pc
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