Who said anything about her becoming a programmer?

An interior decorator, or a gardener, or a nurse aide, or a yoga instructor, or a nail technician: they all add more to human welfare than this task.

If she wants to become an architect, or a water system engineer, more power to her!

Not disagreeing with your point in general, but:

Not everyone can become an architect or water systems engineer at 50, after having worked a "general assistant" type office job for many years.

I think that (and its consequences) might be the biggest short term societal risk of automation in an aging society.

How would you solve this problem?

If there are resources available, some entrepreneur will figure out a way to make use of them.

Why can't you become these things at 50? Considering you can become them at 23, having worked perhaps in fast food for a few years prior?

Good question! Wait until you are 50, maybe you can answer it then ;-)

I (and most of my social circle) am over 50, and I can answer that question: there's no solid reason you can't train for and be successful in a different career later in life. I've seen it happen too often to think otherwise.

Whether or not you want to is an entirely different question, of course.

Not there yet, but slowly getting there. Of course you can train for a different career after you are 50, but you will also have a good idea what kind of career is not a good fit for you (anymore). So just because certain careers are now looking for people, doesn't mean that these are a good fit for you.

Yes indeed!

Our youth is when the majority of what we do is try things out to see what fits and what doesn't. In our older years, most of that experimentation is behind us and we have a pretty solid idea of what fits us and what doesn't.

The trick is that the amount of experimentation should never be reduced to zero.

I'd imagine the over-X disinclination to retrain is mostly a discomfort with being uncomfortable.

By X, in a single career, you've generally got a pretty good handle on things (and life).

In contrast to 20/30, when everything is constantly new and you are constantly uncomfortable.

Thus, big difference in how well the uncomfortable muscle is exercised. 20/30 -> novel situation you suck at -> business as usual. Over X -> " -> WTF.

And, as you say, the key to retaining that capability is... make sure you continue exercising that muscle!

I appreciate that question!

Something something about age and responsibilities and tiredness and not having trained for that, but... it's worth it to think about it, anyway — at least as risk-mitigation for yourself, going forward.

Maybe we'll all end up as plumbers?

Whatever you list here, she'll be competing for an entry-level position with much younger people, who have more time, more energy, lower expenses and no obligations.

The older one is, the more time one spent in one line of work before being forced to find something else to do, the harder it hits. So sure, maybe you can switch to landscaping in your 50s, but that also means you and your family suddenly being kicked down one or two economic classes.

I figure experience is valuable to potential employers in two ways: (1) what you can do & (2) what you know.

Usually, switching industries past a certain point of tenure wipes out (2), as so much of the expert knowledge is specific.

In this case, she obviously wasn't only a spreadsheet-reconciler: this lady knows thousands of things about banking that I don't. And probably that new, entry-level people at her company have no idea about.

Ergo, the company would get the most benefit from assigning her new responsibilities where that information is valuable. Specifically, something in middle management where her intuition of "... that doesn't sound quite right, tell me more about..." would help prevent bad decisions.

In this scenario, she had plenty of other high-value work to perform if she never had to do this again.

Which is the other side of the coin of the ubiquity of this problem -- modern businesses are so optimized on the people side that roles are collapsed down to 1-2 people, and therefore those people inevitably catch "oh, and also do this" could-be-automated work.

If the average human were allowed to achieve its most base preferences, we'd all be a half ton in weight, floating around in chairs, stupefied at some screen, just as depicted in Wall-e.

I actually don't think this is true at all. While there will always be a percentage of people who would prefer that, my observations are that most people don't. They tend to have interests that drive them to put time and effort into doing things, instead.

If I ever luck into wealth, I have a mad scientist social experiment I want to run.

Advertise a job, with midling-but-not-exceptional pay, and try the following with a few hundred people.

   - They report at exactly 9:00 am
   - They bring nothing with them
   - They enter a featureless room
   - They sit at a featureless desk
   - They sit there for 8 hours
   - They have 30 minutes for lunch
   - They have access to a featureless bathroom
   - They leave at the end of the day
   - They get paid weekly

The question is: how long would people willingly stay in that "job"?

My hypothesis is that it's a bimodal distribution. Some set of people would be perfectly fine with it, indefinitely. Some people would go batshit insane and quit quickly.

I wouldn't even consider such a job. For me, the worst possible job is one where I have nothing to do. I've had those, and they are a nightmare. I'd much rather be seriously overworked!

After a week or two, they'd probably call Sherlock Holmes.