Being a sci-fi author, I think about the future a lot. Specifically about automation, and what the future job market will be like. Here are my current thoughts.

First of all, let's not talk about what the world will look like when we invent an AI that can do everything that a human can do. It deserves a separate discussion.

But let's imagine a world where most work is automated. Maybe New York has five hundred plumbers in an office, and when you need a plumber, they send a robot to your house, and then the plumber plugs into the robot for two minutes, looks through the cameras, picks a program, you pay, and the robot does the work.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about futureproofing my career. It's a weird world we find ourselves in, and the pace of automation is such that more and more people will lose jobs as we go on. In the US, it's reasonable to expect 20% unemployment rate in fifteen years, and the rest of the world will follow.

To protect myself and my loved ones from what's coming, I began steering my skill set toward IT and mathematics, as I don't think those jobs are going anywhere soon. I think I'll have work for a couple more decades at least.

But while a person can make sure they have something meaningful to do for a while by going into IT or trades, there is no futureproofing our society. We must rebuild it so that everyone won't be miserable and desperate when unemployment hits thirty, fifty, eighty percent worldwide as this wave of automation destroys millions of jobs replacing them with thousands.

I think one of the biggest challenges of modern life is how different our life has become from the conditions we evolved in as a species. In my experience, we are wired to be dissatisfied unless we fulfill biological goals (get food, create a safe environment for children, secure a position within the community, etc.) And yet we also cannot be happy unless we fulfill the values we are taught through upbringing.

How to reconcile the vegetarian with the hunter, I wonder?

Some people believe that the reality we experience is a simulation run by some super-advanced machine. Okay, it might be. But I wonder how these people can function while holding this belief?

Because, in my opinion, if you believe that reality is simulated, then there is very little reason to believe that anybody but you is conscious in this simulation. You could conceivably be a creature of some sort playing a single-player game, and everything and everyone else could be an NPC.

Consider this next time you look into a loved one’s eyes: to be rational, some people must believe that when they look at their child, there is nothing there.

I saw a thought-provoking post on Twitter about a week ago. It got something like 700 000 likes, and it's about one of my favorite topics: forcing people in a weaker position into doing the right thing.

The tweet's author has a younger sister. The sister is fourteen, and she wants to date a seventeen-year-old guy (the exact age difference is somewhere between three and a half years and four years). The author is polling the Internet to find out how many people think this kind of relationship is okay or not. She already knows the answer, I suspect; it's just that her and her mother's protests aren't working on her younger sister and she wants to use public opinion to reinforce the point. Of course, the overwhelming majority of people say that such a relationship will bring only pain to the younger girl, and, satisfied, the author walks away to presumably force her sister to stay away from that trainwreck.

She is asking the wrong question.