You Ask, I Answer: Long-Term Career Planning?

In today's episode, Heidi asks, Ted.com published a list of the top ten careers to stay employed through 2030, including socially distanced office designer and virtual events planner. What do you make of their predictions? Well, in looking at these, and I'll put a version up here, a lot of these are very uh short-term uh thinking, very short-term, and they're very uh pandemic-centric. The pandemic isn't going away anytime soon, um, but it is gonna be with us uh for only a couple of years, probably two years or so. That's the time it will take to uh develop a vaccine and get it broadly distributed um around the world.

And yes, some countries definitely will lag behind others, um will be more vulnerable than others. Places like Europe uh will do well, uh Asia, China, Japan, Korea will do well. Uh places like uh the United States will not do well, uh already seeing you know massive anti-vaccine movements and such, and so it will take longer for the United States to recover. Um but it still won't be the full decade. Um what should we be thinking about in terms of these careers?

Things like you know, chief purpose planner or clean hygiene consultant or virtual events planner or subscription management specialist. Uh they are they're they're too tactical and not thinking about the technologies that are available to us now and what's in development and where that's going to go. So for example, uh we know the things that are not going to change, right? People will still need places to live, people will still need food to eat. People will still need uh you know things to do, uh, kids will still need educating.

Uh these are these are things that are not going to change a whole lot. Um, what will change is the tactics that we use to uh deliver those services. And a lot of it is going to be around artificial intelligence, not because it's trendy, but because frankly it's a cost saver. Um, we know that in business, in in you know, B2B business, and all business really, um, companies want things to be uh the same as consumers, better, faster, and cheaper. And machines and automation and AI are the pathway to delivering things that are better, faster, and cheaper, because you can have machines do stuff better and faster and at a substantially lower cost than humans.

In that sense, there will be a lot of uh evolution of AI models and how they're deployed to uh having people uh be able to customize them, to tune them, to run them, um, to be able to offer a lot more customization, to be able to offer a lot more specialization. And so it would not be, for example, uh, I think out of uh the realm of possibility to have you know friendly user interfaces on top of uh AI models that allow you to accomplish tasks that you're trying to get machines to do. So for example, uh in brokering a real estate transaction, uh do we need a real estate agent uh in the mix? For some parts, maybe for some parts no. Uh some parts, you know, it's some of the paperwork and some of the very repetitive processes, permits and titles and all that stuff.

Machines can absolutely do that. Um a big part of that will be cleaning up and getting uh local government technology, you know, sometime into this century. Uh a lot of local governments tend to lag very far behind uh the commercial sector. So there's actually a uh a decent cottage industry to be had for government automation. Um then when we look at other things that people are going to be doing, you know, driving cars, probably not a whole lot in the next ten years.

Um if you look at the way that uh autonomous vehicles function now, today in 2020, they are almost ready for prime time now. Uh they still need some more testing, they still need some uh to deal with like adversarial attacks on their on their models, but for the most part they're functional uh now uh within ten years, assuming that again, government and regulation permit it, you will have many more of those. Uh you will have a thriving career in law uh dealing with the ways that machines are changing uh technology. So, for example, when we look at systems like Ava and GPT 3, they can uh reinterpret and create new works out of existing works, derivative works, that are not necessarily traceable back to the original. So, how does that impact law?

How does that impact copyright? How does that impact uh creators' rights? Uh when a machine and a model creates something new, who owns that? Do you as the model owner? Do you as the service provider?

Does the end user own it? Uh these are all uh questions that law will need to address in order to deal with you know the implications. Um there will be uh large questions about who owns user data. There already are, uh but in the next ten years we we should expect to see at least some answers. And as we see with things like GDPR and privacy legislation, it will be a patchwork quilt around the world uh of who gets to own what.

But there will be uh many careers grown on that. Uh I think an AI concierge of sorts, uh, someone who is sort of can function in that low-code environment uh to help businesses and and even maybe even wealthy individuals customize their models and uh their technology will be a cottage industry. Uh if you are the sort of company or uh environment that uses things like virtual assistants, true virtual assistants, like you know, the little things on your desk here that you just yell at for groceries. Uh those are have very limited customization right now, and there is uh no transparency as to how the customizations work. Uh having people be able to customize it to your particular use cases, even if it's just something as simple as you know, for example, with transcription software, uploading a list of known words that you say that are kind of unique to your use case.

That's a level of customization that a lot of smart assistants do not offer currently. And uh that's something that obviously a lot of people would find a lot of uh value in. Uh being able to get technology to people is is still a thing. Um Elon Musk's uh interlink satellite network is trying to address the fact that in large swaths of uh remote areas and rural areas around the world, there simply is no internet. Um and having low earth orbit satellites to allow uh access while you're in those areas may not be fast enough for a zoom call or play video games, but it would be enough to get you connectivity and continue uh networking the rest of the planet over the next ten years.

That's going to be a priority, and so there will be careers around that, and there will be careers around uh all those new consumers and businesses that are suddenly have connectivity. Um there will be places in Asia and Africa and the in the United States, North America, South America, every continent on the planet that will suddenly have access to the internet and will want to participate. Um and I think there will be a str uh substantial number of careers around the implications of different AI models and how we deal with them. Everything from detecting bias in data sets, um, and uh dealing with AI ethics uh and how machines make decisions and what the right decisions are. There will be plenty of consulting to be had around risk mitigation uh for companies.

If you publish a n a model, um what are the risks of it? Have you mitigated against them? Have you been audited to demonstrate that you have protected against those risks? If we pursue the the avenue that I would like to see companies take, which is that machines, not humans, but machines are guilty until proven innocent of things like bias or discrimination, then again there'll be a very large cottage industry of people who can help uh make models more interpretable and then to validate that the model is actually doing what we said it would do, that it is not discriminating against protected classes of any kind. So those are just a few samples of the of things you should think about.

You know, virtual events planners, sure, for the next couple of years, uh that will be a thing. Uh but human nature is such that people like to get together. Um, and so I think that career will be a cottage industry. It's not gonna be a zero, but it will not be something that will sustain you all the way through the next decade in the same way that something like risk management around AI certainly could. So really good question, lots to think about.

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