Jobs of the future

The demand for jobs is changing along with technological changes

România Internațional, 02.12.2022, 12:05

In a constantly changing world, the range of jobs is also being redefined
along with everyday realities. And with the increasingly alert advance of
technology, changes are also more frequent. Many repetitive jobs will disappear
and will be taken over by robots. At the same time, new ones will appear, which
will focus on creativity.

Specialists in robotics and artificial intelligence – creators of artificial intelligence software, creators and designers of virtual spaces, developers of IT software and applications, digital marketing analysts or jobs such as nurses or physiotherapists who use smart devices themselves, financial advisors, medical managers will be in high demand.



Even though it may sound sci-fi, in the offer of jobs available in a future much closer than we imagine we could find chatbot creator, digitally literate manager for smart stores, memory surgeon, specialist in bringing back to life and reuniting species extinct, alternative energy developer, space clinician, commercial space pilot, lawyer specializing in robot law or genetics ethics. But also for worker at unconventional energy plants (solar/wind/algae farms), deep-sea miner in search of rare minerals in the ocean, organizational remodeler (Corporate Disrupter), virtual teacher, family technologist (a person who knows very well existing assistive technologies and makes the right decisions in the context of an aging family), eSports event manager, renewable plastics engineer and designer, extreme survival instructor.

These professions of the future are just some of those
presented in the latest edition, the 5th, of the Future Professions Guide,
produced by the Initiative for Competitiveness (INACO). The personnel crisis
has led to the automation of an increasing numbere of fields – army,
agriculture, medicine, hospitality or police, according to INACO. There are
more and more police robots, waiter robots, agricultural robots, tele-surgery endoscopic capsule robots, and intelligent military robots already present on
some battlefields.

Artificial power is now being added to human strength, we
will increasingly use these intelligent devices with a very high capacity to
analyze, Andreea Paul, the president of INACO, explained on Radio Romania:

Today we are invited to learn how to make
friends with new smart devices, which are becoming tinier and more intelligent
by the day, no job can be done without becoming digitally literate. In law, for
instance, with the AI software that knows the laws of all the countries in the
world or in the medical field where there are nanorobots that, once inserted
into the human body, go and solve the health problem inside the body without
the need for a intrusive intervention that requires a long recovery of the
patient. Remote surgery, where the doctor is in the UK and the patient is in
South Africa. And these are realities. Or, in English forensics, when in 2017 an
AI-powered robot identified for the first time a criminal based on signals sent
by people who were able to give clues about the criminal. These things are real
and they are developing very quickly.

There will be technological depression, just as there is
depression in traditional life, new forms of illness appear, new therapists
appear, psychologists specialized in technological detoxification, says Andreea
Paul. In agriculture, for example, the digital farmer is already a necessity,
who can coordinate agricultural drones that can gather information in real time
about the quality of the plants, about the diseases that can appear in the
area, about water or nutrient deficits. The same agricultural drones can return
with the necessary amount of nutrients or treatment for affected areas, which
are in danger of qualitative deterioration. Andreea Paul says, though, that the
disappearance of some jobs should not worry us because history has shown us
that with every industrial revolution the number of new professions appearing
is significantly higher than those disappearing.

What do these devices, which we call smart, actually do? These smart machines, whether robot or software, take over repetitive human work that can be algorithmized. It remains for us to be creative, to create these robots, to design these robots, to repair them, to transform them into a form that is more and more acceptable to humans. Opposition is human, frustration, refusal to interact with these devices is also a natural reaction, and not everyone is a technological champion. Usually, those who feel the pulse of things and the solutions they offer on a global scale – digital platforms do that, for example – move forward and based on their results, technology followers come. And there are some who will remain in what is called the social class of unemployable people, which Yuval Harari has been talking about since 2013 and for which the guaranteed minimum income is being prepared. This talk is held globally, not just at EU level. Another interesting discussion arises in parallel – whether robots should be taxed. And probably our children’s generation will do so. Or, the job of lawyering for robot rights will emerge, as they become actors in the labor market. (MI)