Jobs of the Future

Last month, I had the privilege of attending the iNACOL Online and Blended Learning Symposium and spent a lot of time tweeting.  Today, I want to dive into one of my tweets from the last day of the conference:

Students are going to face a world we can't even imagine.  They need to be resilient. #inacol15

I worry about my own children and their resilience to the ever-changing technology.  They're three and five.  They don't know a time without a SmartPhone, a time without instant access to whatever TV show floats their boat on a particular day (currently Jake and the Neverland Pirates).  Nor do they realize that once upon a time car windows didn't roll down with a button, but with a crank (and thank goodness for the ability to lock the windows).

Technology has taken a 90 degree shift from where it was in the early 1900's.  Economist, Andrew McAfee, graphs the most significant changes in human history and shows it turning at almost 90 degrees with the invention of the steam engine and other inventions from the industrial revolution in his TED Talk from June 2012.

Those of us in our thirties today have seen computers go from green-screen number munchers to the colorful games like Candy Crush and Cookie Jam today.  We've seen computers move from being solitary objects that aided word processing to being able to interact with people who are literally a world apart and on the fly.  We have seen textbooks become digitized and to some extent replaced.  We've also seen music personalized and watched both the invention and extinction of Napster and MySpace.  So, why does this matter?

It matters, because as McAfee also points out, the philosopher Voltaire stated that work saves us from three great evils:  boredom, vice, and need.  The robots are coming; in fact, they're here and they're replacing some of the jobs that human beings used to do.  This includes such things as driving, stocking shelves, and order fulfillment.  So McAfee also suggests that we double-down on infrastructure, and encourage entrepreneurship.  Robots aren't that good at repairing bridges yet and the jobs of the future really don't look like those of the past.

What will the jobs of the future look like?  Hopefully, they'll look like a cure for the world's diseases, an elimination of poverty, and more intuitiveness about the human species.