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.

“Resistance is futile” — The Borg

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.

Which kind of jobs will vanish in the years to come?

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.

Which professions will still be relevant in 2035?

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.

What should we do to prepare for that future?

Keep calm and
change society.

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.

To quantify human and machine work there are currently a lot of interesting developments on their way like IOTA or Profit-Sharing with LivingPackets. Those systems mostly relay on a forgery safe iteration of blockchain technology in different flavours or the tangle-technology.

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.

And what kind of work could see a renaissance if we do so?

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.

Carpenters: I absolutely love, how Dorian Bracht creates amazing joints. If you have some spare time, switch over to his Youtube, take a deep breath and calm down while you watching him doing his work. Would it be affordable, I would buy only handcrafted furniture. But as a carpenter needs to pay a living from his work, most handmade carpentry is way too expensive for an average household. This could change, if people get a basic income: the need to earn much money would be replaced by earning a little money besides the basic income and work for personal fulfilment instead. I would appreciate that kind of change and instantly order a dining table.

Farming: The last years saw the advent of urban farms. Quite a good idea as it brings oxygen into the cities, feeds people with biologically grown vegetables and fruits that have not to be carried around the whole country and it connects people in their neighborhood. Another example is a friend of mine, that grows bilogical hemp in the heart of bavaria to produce oil, flour, tea and a lot of other needful things and tries to establish hemp again as a agricultural jack-of-all-trades. But besides the governmental regulations it is hard work to earn money with farming in germany and the products have a price tag that makes them too expensive for the everyday customer. But if there would be a safety net for farmers within the basic income, more and more of them could make the switch from producing their goods like corn, potatoes, pigs and cows in an industrial way and get “back to the roots” and produce organic products for their nearest neighbors.

Handcrafts, tailors and pottery: It seems to me that writing with a fountain pen is a kind of luxury already. And Stefan Fink is dedicated in creating precious and unique pens out of natural wood. He was lucky enough to find a niche, where people are willing and able to pay a premium for a premium product. And the same applies to some tailors or potters: despite the fact, that much people love to work with pottery or dream of designing their own fashion, most of them cannot make a living of it. I do know even one person creating soap in her spare time. Soap. As a hobby. Crazy. Imagine, what a coloful world this could be, if all those people would have the time to only make pottery, shoes or soap (fine by me).

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).

And now?

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.

The view of Hans Rosling on data demonstrates, that we are on a way to improve the quality of living for nearly every person on earth. So basically, I’m optimistic about the advances we will make (humanistic and technological) in the next 20 years and I am thankful for the leap that humanity made in the last century. And for my more skeptic days I prepare for a sudden Zombie Apocalypse thanks to this Article.

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.

Some of the numbers and details are from an article in Wirtschaftswoche (german)
Other numbers and bits and pieces come from the statistics portal statista

Originally published at www.profit-sharing-network.com on July 25, 2018.