Changing Jobs

February 6, 2012 at 6:45 pm | Posted in Economoney, Media, Online services, Technology, Writing | 9 Comments

Thomas Frey is a Futurist. In studying trends, he has projected that half of all current jobs (2 billion) will disappear by 2030, well within the working lives of people now in school. To explain related statements he made at a TED talk in Istanbul, he wrote this article.

One trend, for example, is localized energy production. He doesn’t give examples of the technology but another TED talk by Justin Hall-Tipping does. This means that all the jobs related to power generation plants, running and maintaining electrical grids, shipping coal, even bio-fuel & wind farms, all gone. And with them all those overhead wires. In its place there will be the manufacture of local power units and storage, the dis-assembly of the current grid, and so forth.

Driverless cars is another trend. Impossible? There are now self-parking cars on the mainstream market.

Exit numerous teachers and professors with OpenCourseWare. Over 900 million downloads of free courses from MIT, Khan and Apple have already happened. Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and other name-brand schools have hundreds of courses available. Credit is often an option.

3D printing of clothes. Custom-made clothes that fit perfectly, produced in your home? He also talks about robots replacing manual labour.

Certainly a thought-provoking read. What actually plays out will of course be another surprise, but it gives you an idea of changes in the wings.
David