Oh my goodness, I don’t know where to start on just how much you have misunderstood this topic.
Please bear with me, I have nothing against you as a person, but your opinion on the topic of the future of employment is quite alarmist to say the least. So please do no take what I write next personally.
Yes, I agree with you that creativity is quintessential to jobs of the future. I believe you can find empirical proof that will back up this hypothesis. Creativity is what allows humans to further the boundaries of human knowledge.According to me, and I think you will agree with me, Creativity is what allows you to see problems in a way that others could not and that change of perspective allows you to solve the problem.
Creativity therefore is not exclusive to the arts. You need it for problem solving in every field even outside the arts.
If you disagree on this premise I think we will never come to a conclusion on this debate.
Yes, automation is a real threat. I know that because I am working on it. My job out of college is for a company that builds robots which take away jobs from laborers in warehouses and completely automates the process of managing a warehouse. Yes, I have worked with 3-d printers, being a manufacturing engineer it’s going to be my bread and butter. So I hope that you get I have a background in the things that you have mentioned to be the slayers of future employment.
Well, here is the deal, THEY ARE NOT. We always need people. “The next Bill Gates won’t build an operating system” is phrase often used to help entrepreneurs understand that they need to build new products to succeed. Can you tell me what the next richest person on this planet is going to build? You can take guesses and so can I, but finally our guesses are just opinions. What we will agree on though is that such a person will arise sometime in future even if we don’t know how he shall do to get there. Also we will agree it might not be the same thing as what the richest people did in the past did. What we should not do is say that since we cannot imagine what such a person will do to become the richest person, that person won’t exist.
That is the sort of argument you are making here- Since I cannot imagine what people shall do for jobs in future, no jobs will exist. Actually what you are saying is a slightly modified version of this- Other than art no field will need human intervention to progress.
The next generation of people will not be doing the same jobs as this generation. So yes jobs will change but they won’t be extinct. Their nature is still up for debate, and only time will tell what kinds of jobs will be created in future. So just because our imagination limits us from visualizing these future jobs does not mean that there won’t be any. It just means that you are not able to imagine what kind of jobs will exist and nothing else. If you tell me tomorrow that you cannot imagine a black hole, that’s fine, most of us can’t but we do know that they exist. So it is important for you to understand that what you are going through right now is a lack of imagination, but that does not change reality.
Okay even I can’t imagine what jobs in future might be but that does not mean I am going to make a sweeping statement that none will exist. I am willing to accept my limitations.
Now the fundamental point you are trying to make is that in such a scenario one should take up subjects which cannot be done automated. Subjects like art are conventionally seen as a purely creative exercise, and so you think that they are less prone too being automated. But here is where you go wrong and I can’t wrap my head around how naive your thinking on this subject is- Creativity is not exclusive to the Arts. Creativity is ever-present in every field of life. Computer Scientists are creative when they come up with new theorems, I have to be creative when working on my projects and so do physicists who try to discover the nature of this universe. The thing is there are different kinds of creativity and just because engineers and scientists do not know how to create a painting that shows how depressed they are does not mean their work does not require creativity. So let me make something clear- Creativity is required in every field.
So Arts is in no way the only thing that is going to survive in the future. Every field will evolve to accommodate for the change of technology in that field. So even though fields may evolve there is still plenty of work to be done by humans.
Finally I would like to say that these arguments hold true only for probably the next 50 years. This is probably till the time we create sentient Artificial General Intelligence. Yes, after that it will be very difficult to guess the role humans play in society, or the structure of society might itself change. Till then though putting your child in art school purely from an employment perspective is a very bad bet.
Also if you think artistic endeavors are less prone to automation you are in for a rude shock. Currently there are weak AIs which have started to write original stories from scratch. A lot of websites today run scripts which auto generate generic news stories without needing human intervention. Many of these fields were seen as purely human driven until now. So when we have AGIs in future no field will remain untouched by it, not even the ARTS.
I can understand your stand on this issue because I too shared such a stand in the past. What made me change mine was just looking at the way people have already started to adjust to largely new concepts. For example my mom is an architect, very tech illiterate most of the time. What surprised me was that she was the first one in her studio to propose using Virtual Reality models instead of conventional desktop presentation for clients. Now think about it, I live in a India, my mom is 50 something and yet she adopted this new technology so quickly. What that should tell you is that the only people who will remain unemployed in future are the ones who refuse to adapt and gain new skill sets. We are used to living in a world where a skill set a person gained in 10 years allowed them to be employed till retirement. Well that is definitely going to change in the future and my generation may have to go through 2–3 skill set changes in their careers. So just because we live in a changing world does not mean it people will not change too, they will change. So when you say that these new technologies will make people obsolete, people will adapt and gain skill sets which make use of these technologies to make a living.
If you want references to my arguments-
- Rise of Robots by Martin Ford
- Wired for War by P.W.Singer
- The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson
- Race against the machines by Erik Brynjolfsson