Above, I’ve confessed my anxiety about the future my children and grandchildren are facing, a future fraught with few certainties, other than that machines will be doing not only all the heavy lifting but most of the heavy thinking.
Above, I have also summarized the collapse of the job market, and articulated the probabilities of vanishing occupations and shrinking opportunity.
Above, I’ve gone on at length about both the rosy and horrific outcomes that are possible.
And so, below, I’m going to lay out a four-step plan for my progeny – how to navigate what will undoubtedly be a bumpy stretch of years during which this transition will occur. Years that unhappily coincide with their working lives.
I’d love it if we were already there. I’d love it if we lived in that labor-free future, where human endeavor has ceased to be about “scrambling for resources” and has become a realm of personal exploration and self-discovery. I’d love it if my oldest could invest himself full-time in the culinary arts; if his immediate sister could forge a life of music and poetry; if her little brother could spend all his days making movies and music; and his own little sister could just live an artist’s life, full-time. And that my grandson could just invent and build things.
But we’re not there yet. Here are the steps I’m offering them in the meantime...
Leave endangered occupations for safer ones
Some professions are already draining away, due to automation and AI, and that’s not going to stop. The specific verticals are listed above (see “The Coming Decimation of the Job Market”) - the service industry, retail, transportation, manufacturing – are already dwindling. Anyone currently occupying a job in those industries is not likely to have that job for long.
Now is the time to make a change, a move into a safer industry. “Human touch” verticals – healthcare, social work, governance, etc. - are safest; careers that integrate AI but will not be soon subsumed by it are also a good bet: design, law, civil engineering. A time will come when these “safer” careers will likewise be trickling away, but making this change will buy time – years, certainly.
Learn as much as you can about AI and use it in your work
IBM executive Rob Thomas has famously said, recently, that “Managers who use AI will replace those who don’t.”
Put more generically, AI is already falling into place as the greatest productivity-boosting tool in all of time, space, and history; to not incorporate it into the work you’re doing has got to be the most foolish thing you can do, an act of self-sabotage of breathtaking scale.
Becoming AI-proficient, on the other hand, is going to enhance your value in whatever role you’re occupying, boosting your performance and improving your outcomes. If you work for someone else, you’ll stand out; if you work for yourself, you’ll get more done in less time.
Many organizations are already promoting this thinking, making resources available to employees who want to learn more about AI and how they can use it, and there is no shortage of this kind of content online for anyone who is curious.
Where should you start? The obvious point in the moment this is being written is generative AI – ChatGPT and its peers. From there, you can learn about the productivity tools that the big tech companies – Microsoft, Google, et al – are making available in the workplace.
Learn about workflow – the automation of business processes that is already doable with business software that is likely in place where you work. Be on the lookout for opportunities to apply it, and suggest those opportunities to your colleagues.
Train for a fallback occupation
Momentarily safe or not, occupations in the areas mentioned above may eventually grow thin, especially with the arrival of AGI – which could occur in as little as 10 years.
It may be wis e, then, to increase your skill set in the interim, learning about and studying up on another potential career – something in another “safe” career area that isn’t attritioning as quickly. For instance, if it’s 2042 and you’re a graphic designer, and the supporting AI gets so good that there are fewer and fewer paths forward, you might be studying on the side to transition into healthcare, where you’ll be wanted and needed no matter how good the AI gets.
It’s also predicted above that entrepreneurism will flourish in the automated world to come – that working for yourself, offering something in the marketplace that isn’t the product of a corporate machine, will be a haven for the industrious. There will always be a place, for instance, for handcraft – woodwork, stonework, glasswork, metalwork. Skilled practitioners of these crafts will always have a place. If you have artistic talent and like to work with your hands, this may be the thing for which to undertake training on the side, to prepare for a possible next transition.
Consider taking up a new AI-inspired career
The point is made above that the automation revolution isn’t like the industrial revolution that preceded it. The wiping-out of millions of agriculture jobs wasn’t a death blow to the job market, because there were factory jobs waiting for the displaced farm hands. The broader concept is that when progress makes a job obsolete, it delivers a new one to replace it.
That is less the case now than it has ever been before. As Andrew Yang points out above, the millions of truckers who are about to be unemployed cannot now all become AI developers.
But AI will create some new roles – not nearly as many as it will destroy, but a few. And they will be pretty terrific.
Augmented Reality Architect. VR is already a thing, and it’s going to become a bigger and bigger thing – not just for gaming, but for real-world remoting, construction and design, education, “time travel”, and an endless procession of other applications. Designing these virtual environments will be the creative opportunity of the century for some.
Smart City Analyst. We are about to automate all of our cities, infusing them with AI and robotics from top to bottom – making them safer, more efficient, and less toxic. This will take decades of effort, and will require human management, design, and implementation. This will be a domain include several broad, long-term career options.
Urban Farmer. Along with smart cities will come the trend of growing food within those cities, hyper-efficiently and with seamless integration into its ecosphere. This will be a whole new area of agriculture, a botanical revolution, where hundreds of times more food is generated in a space and at an energy cost than was possible a century ago. Experts in this domain will be in great demand.
3-D Fabricator. 3-D printing technology is already revolutioning manufacturing, and this trend will only grow deeper as the technology improves. Dexterity and creativity in this technology will create broad opportunity for those who want to become expert in it.
Edge Computing Specialists. “Edge” computing, or expertise in the Internet of Things – sensors, switches, and other devices connected to the Internet – is already a huge professional field, but will take on a new layer of complexity as automation becomes ubiquitous – all buildings, including residential ones (home automation is going to be huge), are going to be AI- and robot-enabled. This will require a knack for creative customization, and will be safe haven for the technologically inclined for decades.
Quantum Computing. Quantum computing, the next major step in digital technology, will change everything – including and especially AI. Becoming expert in it on the ground floor means years of job security.
Robot Operators, AI Trainers, Big Data Analysts. These are workaday roles that already exist, and aren’t particularly glamorous themselves – but the spread of AI and automation means that these jobs will be around for a very long time.
And those are my four suggestions, things my kids can consider as they ponder their working futures. There may be others I haven’t thought of – I hope so! - but I hope they represent a promising start...
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