What will be a big gig in the year 2034 that doesn’t exist today?

Question

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?

Accepted Answer

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.org/courses/97-introduction-to-complexity

For anyone interested in positive psychology, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are great places to start.

Answer

Saving the planet

Abadesi · Answer

I often think about the jobs that the proliferation of AI will create e.g. will we need more ethicists and stuff like that?

Also will we need more folks working in education to ensure digital tech skills are reaching all parts of the population?

Answer

Things that people are already valuing: tech free time, high quality human interactions, meaningful activities, low tolerance for bs., mental health, physical health, planet health.

With all that said, there's a lot of opportunities!

Jack Cooper · Answer

@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.

Jack Cooper · Answer

@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.

Jack Cooper · Answer

@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.

Answer

@jack_cooper thanks for the great prompt!

RE UBI: I'm a huge fan.  I think it's an essential lily-pad on the path towards a moneyless society, and will serve as an equalizing economic force.  We're actually implementing "privatized universal basic income" over at Karma, whereby half of all income is redistributed to the members of the community.  The recipients are chosen by the donors, so the idea is that we can incentivize (that's what economics is all about, after all - motivating sustainable economic behavior with healthy incentives) thoughtful (and not merely exploitative or clickbaity) intellectual engagement and productivity in service of what Wenger so concisely articulated: "It is crucial that we free up human attention now because too many important problems are going unsolved."  I'm thinking that UBI and its various public/private manifestations can be architected such that it motivates social value and accelerates its own emergence, and thus, egalitarianism at large.  Maybe by dangling it in front of healthy social behaviors that align with tenets of self-actualization and positive psychology: creative expression, optimism, self-education, collaboration, compassion, etc.

What will be a big gig in the year 2034 that doesn’t exist today?

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