A few thoughts on where I think the world is going …
With the new advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing etcetera, there are fewer and fewer jobs for us humans.
In my mind, that leaves two paths forward for individuals, our journey and our hobbies.
Today, many people have hobbies like painting, gardening, where the work is done just for the enjoyment of doing the work. There is no expectation to be good enough to sell, it is simply for the experience of doing it.
It is these hobbies that will become the focus of our lives. It is through these hobbies that we define our journey through life and discover who we are. It will be through the sharing of those journies that we move forward.
There will still be a need for work to be done.
I see this work focused on three different platforms. Connection, Delivery, Infrastructure.
The connection platforms will be those platforms that connect people together for different needs. Right now those platforms are companies such as Fivver and Upwork.
In the future there will little requirement for long-term employment, these will be replaced by robotics, AI. There will be a need for short term or “component” type projects where individuals get together to create a defined outcome. Think of the current way in which movies are produced. A group of people get together to create the movie and then pass it over to another set of people to deliver the movie.
That gets into the second platform, delivery. Currently, we have platforms such as Amazon fulfillment. In the future, these will be ubiquitous in that once you create, either physically or digitally, it is seamlessly passed over to the delivery platform. I relate what Amazon fulfillment is today to what software delivery was in the 1990s. You had to physically obtain disks that contained the software, bring them to your computer, load them in, install the program. Some software that I have installed had 30+ disks. Now you simply click on the app in an app store and it installs. Not only that, it constantly keeps it updated.
The last platform is infrastructure. There will always need to be a human element in how we define and implement infrastructure from roads to communication, to health care etcetera.
I believe the transition to the age where jobs become less important is to focus on hobbies and the sharing of those hobbies. Let’s build the platforms and understanding for people to learn, create, and share their hobbies. Then it is a simple matter of increasing the amount of time we spend on hobbies and decreasing the amount of time working.