Thomas Frey is a well-regarded and very thoughtful Futurist and has made some very provocative predictions for the coming five- to fifteen-year time horizon. His site, the FuturistSpeaker.com is one of my most visited blog sources of information. While I do not agree with Mr. Frey about everything, and while he and The Global Futurist Blog may be at odds about certain potentialities for both the near term and the longer term, I am largely in alignment with his opinion (expressed in a blog posting of about a month ago) regarding which careers will be disappearing and which careers will be coming into demand and prominence. I would strong advise that you read what follows carefully, and start adjusting your plans rapidly. When Douglas E. Castle and Thomas Frey are in full agreement, I believe that increases the viability of the information...
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When I brought up the idea of 2 billion jobs disappearing (roughly 50% of all the jobs on the planet) it wasn’t intended as a doom and gloom outlook. Rather, it was intended as a wakeup call, letting the world know how quickly things are about to change, and letting academia know that much of the battle ahead will be taking place at their doorstep.
Here is a brief overview of five industries – where the jobs will be going away and the jobs that will likely replace at least some of them – over the coming decades.
1.) Power Industry
Until now, the utility companies existed as a safe career path where little more than storm-related outages and an occasional rate increase would cause industry officials to raise their eyebrows.
Yet the public has become increasingly vocal about their concerns over long-term health and environmental issues relating to the current structure and disseminating methods of of the power industry, causing a number of ingenious minds to look for a better way of doing things.
Recently I was introduced to two solutions that seem predestined to start the proverbial row of dominoes to start falling. There are likely many more waiting in the wings, but these two capitalize on existing variances found in nature and are unusually elegant in the way they solve the problem of generating clean power at a low cost.
Both companies have asked me to keep quiet about their technology until they are a bit farther along, but I will at least explain the overarching ramifications.
I should emphasize that both technologies are intended to work inside the current utility company structure, so the changes will happen within the industry itself.
To begin with, these technologies will shift utilities around the world from national grids to micro grids that can be scaled from a single home to entire cities. The dirty power era will finally be over and the power lines that dangle menacingly over our neighborhoods, will begin to come down. All of them.
While the industry will go through a long-term shrinking trend, the immediate shift will cause many new jobs to be created.
Jobs Going Away
- Power generation plants will begin to close down.
- Coal plants will begin to close down.
- Many railroad and transportation workers will no longer be needed.
- Even wind farms, natural gas, and bio-fuel generators will begin to close down.
- Ethanol plants will be phased out or repurposed.
- Utility company engineers, gone.
- Line repairmen, gone.
- Manufacturing power generation units the size of ac units will go into full production.
- Installation crews will begin to work around the clock.
- The entire national grid will need to be taken down (a 20 year project). Much of it will be recycled and the recycling process alone will employ many thousands of people.
- Micro-grid operations will open in every community requiring a new breed of engineers, managers, and regulators.
- Many more.
Over the next 10 years we will see the first wave of autonomous vehicles hit the roads, with some of the first inroads made by vehicles that deliver packages, groceries, and fast-mail envelopes.
The first wave of driverless vehicles will be luxury vehicles that allow you to kick back, listen to music, have a cup of coffee, stop wherever you need to along the way, stay productive in transit with connections to the Internet, make phone calls, and even watch a movie or two, for substantially less than the cost of today’s limos.
Driverless technology will initially require a driver, but it will quickly creep into everyday use much as airbags did. First as an expensive option for luxury cars, but eventually it will become a safety feature stipulated by the government.
The greatest benefits of this kind of automation won’t be realized until the driver’s hands are off the wheel. With over 2 million people involved in car accidents every year in the U.S., it won’t take long for legislators to be convinced that driverless cars are a substantially safer and more effective option.
The privilege of driving is about to be redefined.
Jobs Going Away
- Taxi and limo drivers, gone.
- Bus drivers, gone.
- Truck drivers, gone.
- Gas stations, parking lots, traffic cops, traffic courts, gone.
- Fewer doctors and nurses will be needed to treat injuries.
- Pizza (and other food) delivery drivers, gone.
- Mail delivery drivers, gone.
- FedEx and UPS delivery jobs, gone.
- As people shift from owning their own vehicles to a transportation-on-demand system, the total number of vehicles manufactured will also begin to decline.
- Delivery dispatchers
- Traffic monitoring systems, although automated, will require a management team.
- Automated traffic designers, architects, and engineers
- Driverless “ride experience” people.
- Driverless operating system engineers.
- Emergency crews for when things go wrong.
The OpenCourseware Movement took hold in 2001 when MIT started recording all their courses and making them available for free online. They currently have over 2080 courses available that have been downloaded 131 million times.
In 2004 the Khan Academy was started with a clear and concise way of teaching science and math. Today they offer over 2,400 courses that have been downloaded 116 million times.
Now, the 8,000 pound gorilla in the OpenCourseware space is Apple’s iTunes U. This platform offers over 500,000 courses from 1,000 universities that have been downloaded over 700 million times. Recently they also started moving into the K-12 space.
All of these courses are free for anyone to take. So how do colleges, that charge steep tuitions, compete with “free”?
As the OpenCourseware Movement has shown us, courses are becoming a commodity. Teachers only need to teach once, record it, and then move on to another topic or something else.
In the middle of all this we are transitioning from a teaching model to a learning model. Why do we need to wait for a teacher to take the stage in the front of the room when we can learn whatever is of interest to us at any moment?
Teaching requires experts. Learning only requires coaches.
With all of the assets in place, we are moving quickly into the new frontier of a teacherless education system.
Jobs Going Away
- Teachers.
- Trainers.
- Professors.
- Coaches.
- Course designers.
- Learning camps.
4.) 3D Printers
Unlike a machine shop that starts with a large piece of metal and carves away everything but the final piece, 3D printing is an object creation technology where the shape of the objects are formed through a process of building up layers of material until all of the details are in place.
The first commercial 3D printer was invented by Charles Hull in 1984, based on a technique called stereolithography.
Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands of items and thus undermines economies of scale. It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did during the Henry Ford era.
3D Printed Dress
3D Printed Shoes
Jobs Going Away
- If we can print our own clothes and they fit perfectly, clothing manufacturers and clothing retailers will quickly go away.
- Similarly, if we can print our own shoes, shoe manufacturers and shoe retailers will cease to be relevant.
- If we can print construction material, the lumber, rock, drywall, shingle, concrete, and various other construction industries will go away.
- 3D printer design, engineering, and manufacturing
- 3D printer repairmen will be in big demand
- Product designers, stylists, and engineers for 3D printers
- 3D printer ‘Ink’ sellers
5.) Bots
We are moving quickly past the robotic vacuum cleaner stage to far more complex machines.
The BigDog robot, shown above, is among the most impressive and potentially useful for troops in the immediate future–it’s being developed to act as an autonomous drone assistant that’ll carry gear for soldiers across rough battlefield terrain.
Nearly every physical task can conceivably be done by a robot at some point in the future.
Jobs Going Away
- Fishing bots will replace fishermen.
- Mining bots will replace miners.
- Ag bots will replace farmers.
- Inspection bots will replace human inspectors.
- Warrior drones will replace soldiers.
- Robots can pick up building material coming out of the 3D printer and begin building a house with it.
- Robot designers, engineers, repairmen.
- Robot dispatchers.
- Robot therapists.
- Robot trainers.
- Robot fashion designers.
In these five industries alone there will be hundreds of millions of jobs disappearing. But many other sectors will also be affected.
Certainly there’s a downside to all this. The more technology we rely on, the more breaking points we’ll have in our lives.
Driverless drones can deliver people. These people can deliver bombs or illicit drugs as easily as pizza.
Robots that can build building can also destroy buildings.
All of this technology could make us fat, dumb, and lazy, and the problems we thought we were solving become far more complicated.
We are not well-equipped culturally and emotionally to have this much technology entering into our lives. There will be backlashes, “destroy the robots” or “damn the driverless car” campaigns with proposed legislation attempting to limit its influence.
At the same time, most of the jobs getting displaced are the low-level, low-skilled labor positions. Our challenge will be to upgrade our workforce to match the labor demand of the coming era. Although it won’t be an easy road ahead it will be one filled with amazing technology and huge potentials as the industries shift.
By Futurist Thomas Frey
Author of “Communicating with the Future” - the book that changes everything.
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I believe that some of these extinctions and geneses will occur at very different times, and I hesitate to speculate on which ones will occur in order. But I do think that all of these changes in the fundamental structure of the employment market and the nature of the workforce are going to be life-changing for all of us.
Further, I believe that the vanishing jobs are going to leave a vacuum in their wake, for some time before those qualified to step into the newly-created positions will be able to counterbalance this unemployment by techno-extinction. Career counselors, students, Human Resource professionals, management recruiters and all individuals involved in business planning (as well as those involved in career advice) must incorporate these coming changes into their projected resource needs and staffing requirements.
Not only will some careers disappear only to be overtaken by brand new ones, but entire industries and business will face extinction if they cannot anticipate, adjust and evolve proactively.
Douglas E. Castle for The Global Futurist Blog
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