Is this the end of the age of the nerd?

YOU had better smile, practice your small talk and work on your handshake. Jobs in the future are going to be all about the human touch.

STRICT EMBARGO to November 9, 2014 Sunday TV Guide magazines cover. Sunday TV Guides first use. The Big Bang Theory actors Kaley Cuoco and Jim Parsons. Picture: Supplied

SMILE. Practice your small talk. Work on your handshake. Because jobs as we imagine them are over.

In the future we will all be working in services. The trend is extremely clear in a graph put out by the RBA this week.

Source: RBA, ABS.

Nearly four million people already work in household services, which include health, education, hospitality and art & recreation.

Then there are over two million in business services. That makes six million service workers in total — three times more than work in construction and manufacturing combined. The shift was started by outsourcing to China. It will be accelerated by computerisation.

Blue collar or white collar are going to become silly labels. Instead there will be higher paid service jobs, (e.g. doctors, lawyers) and lower paid ones, (e.g. in fast food service.) We might start referring to business card jobs vs. name badge jobs.

The skills to succeed in the job market will be different. The surly professional, the brilliant but awkward nerd, the angry expert — all these people will struggle to excel in the new paradigm.

Of course in the manufacturing sector there are already people that face clients, e.g. salespeople. In the services sector there are people that do the back-end work, like actuaries.

But more and more of us will be interacting more with customers. Providing actual service. Roles without a soft, people-skills side risk being replaced.

These days, if a job is routine, a computer or a robot can do it. Accounting jobs have already been taken by automated computer programs, and supermarket check-out staff have been replaced by self-service.

Workers in my industry are keenly aware that computer programs are now able to produce perfectly excellent journalism on business and sports.

As computers get smarter and smarter, they can do jobs where the routine is more and more complex. For example, the best chess players in the world stopped playing against computers about six years ago because they just can’t win any more.

Luckily, good quality human interaction is a routine computers just can’t mimic. So the best paid workers will be ones that have that human touch.

Research shows this is already happening. In a working paper released this year, a Harvard researcher found just being smart is not good enough any more. (Interestingly he points out that this has helped women more than men.)

He found that “Since 1980, employment and wage growth has been particularly strong in occupations with high cognitive and social skill requirements. In contrast, employment has fallen in occupations with high math but low social skill requirements.”

So charm beats pure brainpower in the end. Is this the end of the era of the nerd?

If so, it wouldn’t be too surprising. Human history is mainly about charisma, not IQ. Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte once drove change. Now we have Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

Nerd jobs will be scarce and our odd current era in which the intelligent but unlovable become pop culture heroes (could any other point in history have spawned the Big Bang Theory?) could be over.

Will artificial intelligence ever be able to take over jobs that require human charm?

It may seem unlikely. But the nerds are trying their best to program them to do so. Computers are being put to work “talking” to patients undergoing rehabilitation. One woman who experienced the robots reported, “I much prefer the robot to my husband.”

Perhaps the day will come when robots are not only smarter than us but more charismatic too. The final revenge of the nerds would be if they put everyone out of work.

And let’s face it, Sheldon would rather put everyone out of work than be less successful than Penny.

Jason Murphy is an economist. He publishes the blog Thomas The Think Engine. Follow him on Twitter @jasemurphy.

Originally published as Is this the end of the age of the nerd?