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What will be a big gig in the year 2034 that doesn’t exist today?
After Microsoft and Adidas paid Ninja a dump-truck full of money, my first thought was that I should never have listened to my parents when they told me as an 8-year-old that if I kept playing video games I’d amount to nothing 😀
So, what do y’all think will be a big gig in 2034 - 15 years from now - that doesn’t exist today?
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EH
I'd like to think that the construct of "jobs" will have gone extinct by then, but I'm a naively optimistic idealist. I do think that as we trend towards full automation, both manufacturing and distribution jobs will be structurally disintegrated. Services will probably also be rendered obsolete, aside from highly personal / human / creative services that rest on the long-tail of AI. So a more realistic prediction might suggest that the majority of "jobs" will lie in fields like AI, big data, statistics, advanced mathematics, etc. The types of "new jobs" that emerge will depend largely on whether we continue a trajectory of capitalism focused on profits, or whether we begin a shift towards socialism and co-op models that focus on psychosocial and environmental value.
Profit path = more advanced big data and exploitative mechanisms, psy-ops tooling for political power preservation, etc (think robocop / cambridge analytica on steroids). Psychosocial path = more innovation rooted in positive psychology, complex systems, and facilitating self-actualization (think Her / pragmatic utopia). The overlap between the two seems to be psychology and complex systems thinking, so maybe "complex systems psychology" would be a solid candidate? This would essentially be the next evolution of behavioral economics, where we observe and engineer the emergence of system-level phenomena by motivating individual agents to behave in ways that are psychologically positive (or aligned with a profit/power motif of someone atop a hierarchy) for the individual parts and the whole.
For anyone interested in complex systems, Santa Fe Institute is in the middle of Week 2 of their free online course. Highly recommended: https://www.complexityexplorer.o...
For anyone interested in positive psychology, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are great places to start.
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@eve_hammond thanks for the well-crafted response! What is your opinion on the notion of Universal Basic Income? Albert Wenger at USV has wrote a great deal on UBI.
@abadesi very interesting points about ethics and education. I tend to agree with both. My argument to the proponents of UBI is that, yes, indeed many displaced workers will have more free-time and autonomy to pursue their passions and interests; however, many may not even know what those interests and passions are? Not even travel agent who lost their job in the late 90’s immediately started writing poetry or woodworking. There needs to be a structured transition, and to your point, professionals to lead and guide it.
@morethan1 I couldn’t agree more on high quality interactions, which is largely the reason we launched Brain Pick. More meaningful conversations, more personal connections.