Your Grandkids Grandkids won't be Engineers, Doctors, Lawyers or Plumbers

While these kids will need to be tech savvy, their kid’s future is much less certain.  No level of education can keep pace with the pace of technology.  Employees of 2100 will not perform any function that we think of as work today.

Few people are proposing answers to questions about our future.  Most know that we can't know what the future will bring.  Almost all posts about the future are really just re-asking the question what should we do?  I want to give legs to an idea I had, and I hope others can get passionate about it.

If it will happen is no longer a real question.  We can question when, but that too is of little consequence because we will certainly need to have built a new societal structure before it is absolutely necessary in order to stave off revolution. 

There are at least 5 ways humanity will meet the singularity... please comment with yours.

1)      People will evolve, as we have to include technology

a.      Education

b.      Different jobs

c.      Add internal circuitry

2)      Everything will be free

a.      Just add drugs

b.      Guaranteed Income

3)      Encourage other pursuits, potentially competing, possibly coexisting with technology

a.      Learning

b.      Teaching

c.      Creating

d.      Exploring

4)      Caring for people, expanding the tribe

a.      Human time & companionship as a valued resource

b.      International human relations being valued

c.      Intra racial relations

d.      Intra religious relations

e.      Intra generational relations

5)      People will revolt there is no future

I have very specific reasons for hoping for #4, but I would assume we will have some of all of these things. 

We must focus on understanding fear at a cultural level, then encourage outreach as a bridge to help unite our world.  This will expand on a personal level our ability to empathize and relate to others thereby reducing our fear of differences and any us vs. them mentality.

There is no level of education that can keep pace with the pace of technology.  Employees of 2100 will not perform any function that we think of as work today.  Expanded brains and bodies will not change this.  'Our' work will be insignificant.

'Let the miners be miners, let the loggers be loggers, let the farmers be farmers.'  The facts don't play out well.  I don't need statistics to tell you that these jobs have been automated. 

Even the technical roles for these fields have diminished.  It is true that as we increase performance the technical aspects to these and about any other field change and expand, however as these performance increases progress the level of automation increases, and our ability to use intuition decreases.  Computers can now be programmed to mimic intuition, but more importantly they can assess every possibility, especially the ones we wouldn't think of.

In this new world we will not just rely on computers but our ability to understand our world will depend on our ability to eliminate the barriers between ourselves and our machines.

I constantly see posts that expect history to continue on the same path, assuming that we will develop new jobs that we can’t yet imagine and other ways to ward off the impending machine age.

It is time that we look toward the future with eyes wide open and focus on what can be done not relying on what we have done.

Would a guaranteed income solve our ills?  Please tell me the last time you saw someone live a happy life without spending at least 10 hours a week producing, serving or competing.  That’s not to say that we should stay the same, but expecting everyone to be able to deal with free time in a constructive manner is irrational.

Within 10 years 90 percent of the US population will have expectations that everything we call work today will be replaced by machines in their lifetimes.

Sometime soon, we need to break down the walls, spend time with one another and build a culture where people no longer fear each other, and that is what I think we need to focus on.