The key to jobs in the future is not college but compassion – Livia Gershon Aeon Essays

Just as the behemoth machines of the industrial revolution made physical strength less necessary for humans, the information revolution frees us to complement, rather than compete with, the technical competence of computers. But, as the education scholar Inge Bates at the University of Sheffield found in 2007, in ethnographic studies of direct-care trainees, the most significant skills required involve coping with filth, violence and death. Waking to a crying baby or bathing an Alzheimer's patient can be both gruelling and transcendentally life-affirming In her 2007 study, Bates also found that class background seemed relevant to the care girls' ability to do their jobs. For men and women, paid and unpaid, waking at 3am to care for a crying baby or bathing a distressed Alzheimer's patient can be gruelling and transcendentally life-affirming all at once.