Recently, Microsoft released a report that has gone viral in social media. It includes a list of 40 jobs that AI will make obsolete. Geographer is on the list.
As a professional geographer, I think Microsoft has it wrong. Breakthroughs in AI have made a meaningful career in geography more exciting, essential, and impactful than ever before.
The study by Microsoft evaluated tasks that were effectively performed or supported by Co-Pilot, stratified by career. The study scored how well the AI completed or assisted tasks, and labelled careers with a high degree of successful task completion as likely to suffer job loss. We don’t know for certain, but it’s likely the AI assistant succeeded at tasks like name identification and navigation. Without putting too fine a point on it, there’s a lot more that goes into being a geographer than memorizing country names and capitals.