Warning - this answer is little dreamier than what was probably asked. I very strongly believe that we'd be able to automate most of the jobs in a not-so-distant future. Here are examples of some jobs which would be no longer required (at least in some parts of the world) in a period of fifty years:Taxi/Truck Drivers - Google's self driving cars are so going to kill this segment.Factory Workers - As we make progress with mass 3D printing and robotics, we'd be able to eliminate most of the jobs in manufacturing sector as well. Retail Sales - With services like Amazon Drone, much of the retail sector (including grocery retail sector) would also get on internet. Whatever can't be fully automated in the short run due to lack of technology would be consumed by heavily automated mega physical stores of large retail corporations. As sales would get automated, production and distribution system would also become incrementally much more efficient and would kill many jobs.Note that the these three points alone are talking about automating most of the manufacturing, transportation and sales. Let's also talk about services:Doctors (for the diagnosis part of the health care) - A doctor follows a fixed procedure while preparing diagnosis. He takes some physical symptoms, some history, gets some tests done and based on all this, his knowledge (obtained from med school) and his experience comes up with a diagnosis. This part can be automated to a large degree. In fact a pool of 'experience' consisting of all medical issues ever of all the humans could produce a diagnosis system better than most doctors. I don't see a reason why we won't be able to build such a system in fifty years.Teachers - Before you go all impatient, hear me out first. The most 'human' aspect of teaching is answering questions of the students. A machine can't understand the subject and answer a complicated question, you say. But those complicated questions are asked year after year in all the millions of the classrooms of the whole world. If we could pool this knowledge, we'd be able to develop a system that could answer student questions precisely based on the past data. Even if student asks a fresh question, we could fall back to real teachers (online of course) but since this would happen for under, say 0.1% questions, we would only require 0.1% of current teaching jobs.Book Publishers - The cost of publishing and distributing a physical book is too high. That's one of the reasons why conventionally, authors published ten 300 page books instead of three hundred articles each with ten pages. Now when we have internet, we'd just have large platforms for sharing knowledge where people would write content shorter than a book (Quora is one of the many ways of envisioning that platform). While the authors might still have business, publishing and distributing would be automated & centralized.Bank Cashiers- With more advancements in automated banking solutions, there'd be no jobs for people dealing with physical currency in physical bank offices.Foreign Currency Agents - As electronic money penetrates deeper even within developing countries, we'd just never need to exchange currency before going on a trip. I personally believe (rather hope) that we'd be able to get rid of physical currencies completely in the near future.These are just some of the different types of jobs from the top of my head which won't be required in the future. Like I said in the beginning, I truly believe that we'd be able to automate enough that a heavy majority of our whole population (up to 90%) would be out of job. That's not necessarily a bad thing for the economy (hello communism) but I'd leave that for some other day.
