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 just don't know how we'll deal with this, although I did propose a couple scenarios in Beware of Light. As automation advances, remaining jobs will demand more and more of their applicants, and even if everyone becomes super-intelligent via genetic engineering or a neural uplink to a computer, less and less work hours will be needed to fulfill our material needs.
For all of human history, everyone who could do so had to work as much as they could so that we would survive and advance as a species. Now this is going away, and it's terrifying.