What will our kids work in 2035?

Above you see my son, aged 2 years working on his career as building contractor and dredger operator. Since I made this image, some years passed by and he currently develops … ummmm … quite different interests.

I’m proud of him as he is one smart bastard and I’m sure he’ll find a place in our society to develop his full potential (but this could take a little longer).

For my part, I have been working as a consultant designer in various teams for more than 20 years and currently have the great honour of working with very talented colleagues, cat lovers and one crocodile on extremely exciting projects in the areas of gaming, crypto and logistics today.

In 2018 we have — contrary to the beliefs of the “Oh my god, robots will take our jobs” pessimists — one of the lowest unemployment rates in our history. I do not see any signs of a Skynet-Robocalypse or a HAL900-esque psychopathic computer intelligence today (fingers crossed). But many jobs can now be performed faster and more precisely by machines and at some workplaces people are therefore obsolete.

So I ask myself, which transformation will hit the job market in the coming years.

There are some sectors where automation, robotics and artificial intelligence will take over a lot of tasks of the current human workforce. And it is not only the low qualified, hazardous and bad paid jobs that will get lost. Even branches with higher income jobs will be affected. Here some random examples:

Miners and production workers (-83%): Good news for the poor people and children (!!!) that have to work under dangerous and hazardous conditions mining all kinds of raw materials. Robots and boring machines could soon replace them even in poorer regions of the world. The bigger task will be to give those people another income stream to improve their living standards.

Postman (-60%): Delivery drones and new decentralised logistic models (like LivingPackets) could soon transform the current logistics companies and make deliveries faster, more efficient and even avoid a lot of the CO2 emissions.

Banking and Insurance (-40%): Personally I don’t like people that make their profits with their clients fear and greed. I’m more into people that create something that helps people and society making profit. It’s kinda “Don’t do evil” thing. But (un)fortunately a lot of the jobs of insurance company representatives and bankers will get lost in the near future as algorithms can predict risks and potential profits faster and more accurate and tailor perfect solutions for customers. Unfortunately those system will interfere sometimes with privacy but there will be solutions to handle those risks.

Notary and Lawyer (-35%): In bigger legal firms a lot of young lawyers read and research amounts of papers to handle curt cases and negotiate contracts — often for 12 to 16 hours a day. As attorneys at law spend most of their day with reading, comparing and analysing large amounts of text there is a good chance that deep learning will soon revolutionise the way large law firms work today by collecting relevant data of thousands of cases per second and process them for human supervision. And as a notaries main field of activity is to act as an independent source of trust between two parties technologies like the Ethereum blockchain could soon make the currently expensive and tedious process of selling and buying a house a breeze, that only takes some seconds and does not longer need a source of trust since the blockchain works trustless and forgery safe.

And there are professions where humans cannot be replaced and the demand for those jobs is still strong. Sadly a lot of those jobs have a high value for society but are not paid equally. Here some random examples:

Gastronomy sector (-20%): New kitchen appliances will be invented that will perform many individual tasks better than humans and new kinds of food will soon come to market, (like tasty meat without the meat) but a single violin does not yet make an orchestra. It is still a long way for robots to evaluate and imitate the taste, smell and feeling of meals and drinks as well as experienced cooks, bartenders, somellière and barristians can. And “personal service” — whether polite or impertinent — also requires people. Therefore, culinary delights will remain an exclusive domain of people (and I am not talking about pre-cooked meals) for a long time to come.

Teachers (-3%): More and more technology will enter the classrooms and the daily lives of our children. But the more technology surrounds us and our youngest ones, the more important it will be to teach our children the soft skills, that enables them to live a good life in our connected world. I hope to see lessons ins meditation or self-awareness in our schools and I hope even more that our society will yield emphatic teachers to help the children in developing a stable and happy mindset.

Professions in the IT-Industry (rising demand): The Internet of Things, Crypto-Technology, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence research, Big Data, robotics: in all of those fields will be a rising demand for specialists to improve, invent, design, develop or maintain technology, IT systems and the future of our lives. Thank god, I’m one of those nerds.

We need mechanisms to quantify the value of every human and machinery interaction or work, be it an industrial robot, a deep-learning based system, voluntary work, benefits for the environment (like growing your own veggies) or paid employment. And we need a safety net to guarantee (hopefully) all people a decent living environment.

Amongst others like Richard David Precht or Götz Werner I find the idea of a universal basic income system quite appealing. And a financial transaction tax could help financing it. This is — basically — a tax on robot labour as most of the high-speed transactions on global stock exchanges are done by algorithms. If only a small percentage in the range of 0.03 to 0.5% (depending on country and population) of every transaction would be a tax, that would be enough to pay a basic income to every inhabitant of a country. And a simplified tax system would “en passant” render the mythical formulas useless that are nowadays needed to pay taxes.

The fear, that people simply would stop working, if the don’t need to earn their money seems to be overrated: My colleagues do great work every day and do not earn a fortune for it. They find joy in creating useful and entertaining experiences which is more valuable for them than the money the get on their paycheck. Online portals like etsy.com show that a lot of people enjoy creating goods and art and statistics show that 27% of the germans do voluntary work besides their 9 to 5 without any payment.

I personally know a lot of people, finding satisfaction in their work. They create art, furniture, clothing, hempseed oil, soap and all kinds of handmade goods. Some of them earn a good salary and some of them don’t. If the urge to earn money would be taken from them, they would be free to create and work by their own rules.

Artists: Another friend of mine works as an art teacher by day (a future proof profession) and as an artist by night. He spent more than ten years to develop his own art style to perfection and he “is feeling uncomfortable, when he doesn’t paint for a day”. He is another proof for the longing of human beings to create and do. And those ten years could have been only five, if he was given the freedom to only create art (even if that would be the loss of a quite funny person for some art classes).

If the current potitcal and social momentum expands and young entrepreneurs from all over the world enfold new ideas of how we live and work together, I believe there is a fair chance for a big change for the better.

All enclosed links reflect only my personal interest and show my respect for the people that create, write and do. Those are no affiliate links.
Thank you for reading.

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