Social Skills Are last line of defense for human job seekers

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I guess I am fortunate then, I am in a job that requires very little in the way of social skills...I work in a body shop and I have very little interaction with customers, usually having to escort them out of our "authorized personnel only" areas...Having to deal with customers while trying to do my job would slow me down greatly as the job is very technical and specialized

You could develop a really valuable and rare skill, so that employers would be willing to put up with your lack of social skills.

Not all of us are savants, most of us don't have any "special" abilities

Most people are completely disposable as far as being a worker goes, social skills seem to be the biggest intangible and people will generally only hire people they like.

The problem with that is the whole experience trap and the fact that on-the-job training is essentially a thing of the past, a special marketable minute skill that no one else can do well I don't know where to begin. Like I said, it seems most of us are totally disposable as workers including NTs which probably goes in part to explain the 80% unemployment on the spectrum.

'Social interaction is “an unconscious process” for people, Deming said in an interview.'

It is? Perhaps it is for most people, but for some of us it's a real struggle that requires conscious effort.

'...it’s only a matter of time before robots catch up to humans in this area too, argues Pedro Domingos at the University of Washington in Seattle. He says machines are already making impressive headway on at least mimicking social skills.'

...and that's all they will ever be able to do: mimic certain behaviours. I don't believe it is 'only a matter of time' before robots catch up to us, if only because whilst we are now reasonably proficient when it comes to making dummies that walk and talk, actually 'programming' a machine in such a way that it actually becomes conscious (i.e. is actually sentient and self-aware) is nothing more than a fantasy due to the very nature of consciousness itself; i.e. the inherent inability to reduce it to mere calculation, to ones and zeros. The mind is not like this, it is not reducible to a computer programme. People are far greater than the sum of their 'parts'. This is an example of reductionism gone mad.

'In Domingos’s labor market of the future, having a person do something a robot can do for less -- tend bar, wait tables -- will be a luxury. Jobs like that “will remain, but they’re going to be comparatively very highly paid jobs and there are going to be fewer,” he said. Even technical workers such as computer scientists will be out of work eventually, as machines become more nimble at understanding natural language, said Domingos, who is the author of "The Master Algorithm," a book on machine learning published last month.'

Of course, I should have seen it coming. He's not biased, oh no, he just has a book to promote! 'Machine learning' - machines don't 'learn' anything, because they can't. They're machines after all. The claims made within the article are nonsensical, unfounded and irrational. Machines will never 'take over' the world, because they will never have minds. I really do think that people should stop confusing Asimov-type science fiction with what is actually possible.

It's funny because the example was of a robot replacing a waiter (which makes sense.) But waiters are supposed to have great social skills.

They are supposed to have consummate social skills, and maintain dignity amid a peon's existence at the same time.

Only as a last resort would I become a waiter.

I think the reality is that jobs requiring creativity are the last line of defense.

I don't have to worry much about automation, as my job requires me to continuously make subtle decisions quite frequently. They have yet to make a program that can determine where to prune a limb for proper fruit production; nor, as far as I know, tell the difference between a young corn plant and grass.