When I was discharged from military service in a combat unit, I tried to decide what I would do when I grew up. It was 1979, the world was not digital, and the professions that were popular at the time were office workers, drivers, doctors, lawyers, engineers in various fields and more.
The personal computer, then the Internet and finally the mobile phone and cloud services changed everything and created completely new professions. Digital marketing, ultrasound technician or software engineer professions have become among the most common professions today, employed by millions of people around the world. The digital revolution has completely "wiped out" typists, telegram senders, workers in certain factories, and more.
Changed our lives. The digital revolution (illustrative), photo: GettyImages
It is clear to all of us that we are now facing a revolution of similar magnitude or even more significant in the labor market. The AI revolution. This will not happen overnight, and over the next few years we will slowly see how professions disappear and others take their place. It is projected that by 2030, about two billion jobs will disappear. When I started lecturing and talking about the subject about 8 years ago, these predictions seemed a bit far-fetched and exaggerated. But after the disruption of artificial intelligence over the past year, the numbers suddenly make sense.
Contrary to the opinion of many, I don't think there will be fewer professions or fewer jobs, at least not in the next 20-30 years. On the other hand, the professions will change and we will see workers retraining to other professions at a higher rate, as well as young people entering the workforce to new, more technological professions.
Artificial intelligence in the workplace, photo: Getty Images
So why do I think there will be enough new professions and jobs for everyone? Mankind still faces so many challenges that we have not yet come to deal with them in a meaningful way. For example: addressing exponentially growing cybercrime, global warming, new diseases (and thanks to COVID-19), and perhaps trying to answer the most basic questions of all: Who are we anyway? And why are we here?
So which professions will survive the AI revolution? What professions can never be replaced, even if we assume that at some point artificial intelligence will be able to do everything a human being does? This is the place to put things in proportion and put here a sentence from the Talmud that is interesting if artificial intelligence came to it: "The prophecy was given to the fools."
When we try to predict the future, there is certainly a chance, perhaps even high, that we will make a mistake. On the other hand, science fiction has been predicting the future for years and doing so with great success. A flight to the moon? Check. A mobile device that you can chat through and see someone on the other side of the world? Check. A personal assistant who answers questions and performs? Check.
Artificial intelligence beds for athletes at the Paris 2024 Olympics // Photo: Reuters
Want examples? There is a fairly broad consensus that professions such as drivers, assembly line workers, and travel agents will disappear. But on the other hand we will see new professions being created around thevirtual world: stores and suppliers, event organizers, avatar designers and others. The evolving world ofE-sport (online competitions) will create new occupations for hundreds of thousands of people. The challenges of artificial intelligence will change the practice of lawyers who will help writethe ethics lawswith which we can live together with intelligence with robots and algorithms smarter than us.
Efforts to solve globalwarmingwill require new manpower and professions for hundreds of thousands of people. The profession of abody modification artist will become as common in the future as we see tattoo artists or ear piercing artists today. Safe conduct in the digital space in order to overcome the threats to the digital space (cybercrime, etc.) will require a defense force in the digital spacethat is likely to employ millions of people around the world.
Will we soon receive lawyer services from artificial intelligence?, Photo: iStockphoto
I assume that some of you have raised the fascinating question: Where does this put us, humans, when artificial intelligence is replacing us and Eli is even surpassing us in its ability? Will we disappear? Shall we give up? Destroyed? In the meantime, we can talk for a moment about the other side of this equation. While "robots," or any form of artificial intelligence, are getting smarter by the day, humans are getting better too. It may seem strange to some of you and perhaps even macabre to improve our ability as human beings on both the mental and physical sides, but science fiction predicted this long ago, and the buds of that direction are already happening.
I'll end where I started from, science fiction, a field that is almost always considered the province of the weird and the delusional, regardless of how successful science fiction has been in predicting the future, it's likely that in the next fifty years we'll see some science fiction predictions become everyday professions that some of us will work in. It would be irresponsible for us to think that fifty years from now we will be engaged in the same jobs that we are engaged in today.
Some of the ideas in this article came after reading Thomas Frey's fascinating post on the 162 professions of the future
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