What Jobs are Safe from automation and will pay well in the future?
Nobody has a crystal ball that can tell the future, but some people don’t need an ancient relic to foresee what’s going to haven, because they are currently building the future in which we will all live.
It’s true that AI and Automation will wreak havoc among the workforce rending a large part of the population useless and without economic value.
Not only they will take your jobs, but they will make the rich even richer.
If you are looking for job opportunities which are less likely to be affected by AI or automation, well you’re in the right place.
That said, it might be wise to consider some of the fields which will see an uptick in productivity in the following years.
As always, here’s the video version of this article if you don’t feel like reading this long piece:
Here are 15 Jobs That Will Thrive in the Future:
Number 1: Robot Manufacturer & Service Management
People look at the likes of Boston Dynamics and scratch their heads. Although impressive, their robots are nowhere near close to what a human can do. What you should understand is that it’s not about the end goal, instead it’s about progress. If you focus on how much progress they’ve made in the last couple of years and assume the industry will keep at it at a similar pace, you might be out of a job fairly soon.
The biggest ecommerce stores and factories already employ large amounts of robots. 40% of the world robots are currently in the auto-industry, but other sectors want in.
As of 2018, on average, 1 droid equals 5.6 paid workers according to research. The number of robots in the work space is expected to triple in the next 10 years.
Where do you come in? Somebody will have to build those robots. The thing is, it’s probably going to be a robot that builds them as well, so your only shot is to be one of the people that builds that robots which builds robots.
If you don’t make the cut there, you might want to focus on robot maintenance. These things will require, upgrades, updates and have their oil changed. Somebody’s gotta take care of the robots. This might not sound glamorous, but it will be a highly lucrative business.
Number 2: Raw materials management
Ok, there will be Robots in the future doing most of the things. A productive way to approach this issue is: What are robots made of? What about the world we will live in? Break that down and you’re off to a great start.
Raw materials is the new name of the game. We’re already seeing countries like China use the money earned from selling you all those plastic toys to purchase everything they can get their hands on in terms of raw materials.
As of 2018, China continues to gobble up the world’s commodities, setting new records for consumption of everything from crude oil to soybeans.
China surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest oil importer in 2017.
It also dominates when it comes to iron, coal, copper and mineral fuels.
Although the entire chain from extraction to delivery to refining will be impacted by automation, there will still be a great need for skilled workers that can manage and make sure everything is on track. That’s your angle
Number 3: Big Data & AI Scientists
Algorithms will take over analytics. They already are able to crawl through massive quantities of data and pull out relevant summaries.
Where do you come in? Somebody needs to program the AI what to look for, and what we need it to bring back from the mountains of data we are currently feeding the internet.
People from the IT industry will see the rise of AI pretty quickly, not in the way most people expect it to be, but in a massive improvement in how quickly everything can be done. In just a few years, a single person will have a suit of simplified tool which he can use to replace an entire division.
You’re either going to be that guy that uses the new tools or you’re going to be out there looking for work.
Number 4: Artificial Bodies Manufacturer
Artificial bodies is likely to be the most lucrative industry of the 22nd century.
The market is likely to be split between augmented bodies and full on artificial ones.
Think of it like this: if someone cut your arm of, would you still be you? What if we continue this process, how much can you remove from your body and still be you? Some might say, almost everything except for your brain. Ok, let’s work with that.
Your biological body is a pretty fascinating tool, which was developed over millions of years and has worked great so far, but to be honest it has its limitations. It wears off pretty rapidly, after 50 you start feeling weird, if one of the internal components fails, pretty much your entire system shuts down, it’s not super resistant, it needs constant fuel and shelter and we can go on and on for days.
People are already using transplants and are augmenting their bodies. When it comes to how well we see, we either go the cyborg way – meaning you buy glasses – or you augment your body by getting eye surgery. This type of behavior will move on throughout the body. We no longer will be restrained by the limits of our physical bodies. Disabilities will be something of the past.
Every aspect from production to implementation to maintenance of these new tools will require someone. Find your place in this new world and you should be set.
If this is as fascinating for you as it is for us, we recommend you pick up an incredible book called: Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari, which takes a realistic approach at what the future might look like from a technological perspective. The audiobook version is pretty expensive at $35, but if you go to alux.com/freebook and sign up, you can get it for free thanks to our partnership with audible.
Go sign up and listed to Homo Deus in the car or while you’re doing repetitive work that will soon be outsourced to robots.
Number 5: eSports
eSports is going to be huge, some might say it will eventually overtake traditional sports. World championships take place on the same arenas the Fifa world cup does and in both cases, every seat is sold out. Universities now offer eSports scholarships and money is flooding into this space. People will get mad rich off of esports, both investors and actual players.
eSports as an industry has been growing by more than 50% year after year, as of 2018 passing the billion dollar mark, and it’s not mainstream yet.
The eSports industry is the new gold rush in terms of of potential and fairly low barriers of entry. The main 3 type of investors in this space are:
current sports teams which want to make sure they remain relevant – see what Manchester United is doing right now;
celebrities – who look at it from a risk reward perspective as a great place to park some cash Shaq, Magic Jhonson, Steve Aoki are just a few of the growing number of celebs you are picking up esports teams
and lastly Moguls – who understand the growth of the space and how big this will be from an advertising play alone – here you have the likes of Comcast, Mark Cuban & Ashton Kutcher
We could spend hours talking about the potential of it all, but if you want to learn more watch our dedicated video on 15 Things You Didn’t know about the eSports industry below:
Number 6: Psychologist & Therapist
Mental health is becoming more and more of a mainstream topic. The fast pace of everything around us is causing us to be more stressed than ever, social pressure to perform is at an all time high, while we’re being bombarded by picture perfect lives everywhere we go on social media.
This will all get worse and we will need more tools to deal with the reality of our existence.
That’s where professionals come in. People who can tailor an approach to your individual situation, who can connect with you on an emotional level and help you heal yourself, or at least manage your emotions better.
If we look in the west for how things are going:
42% of U.S. adults have seen a counselor at some point, while 36% are open to it
Those numbers are likely to go up!
Number 7: Gene Designer for Babies & Pets
Yep, designer babies are just around the corner. Before you start freaking out about how we’re playing god and doing the work of the devil, let’s dive a little bit deeper.
What if you or your partner got pregnant and identified that the baby will be born with poor sight or hearing, but you could choose to fix that pre-birth without any other side effects. What if you could offer your child a normal life through gene editing? Would you do it? Of course you will.
We have a brand new technology called CRISPR which allows us to remove certain genes and replace them with new ones. This is probably the biggest leap and technological breakthrough of our century, but it’s still in its early stages. The thing is, we already proved that it works, now we have to figure out what we can do with it.
Once we start correcting for unwanted defects in the human body, there’s a very small step towards adding things we might find useful, like better physicality, better metabolism and other attributes in general.
Probably the first sector we’re going to see this implemented is around pets. You will be able to design your own perfect pet the same way you create a new character in SIMS or what other MMO people are into these days. Damn we’re old..
Number 8: Virtual World Designer
VR & AR are the new frontier. An unexplored land filled with potential and awaiting to be built. That’s where you come in. Somebody will have to design everything in our newfound worlds, from buildings to chairs, to what inhabits it and more. Even better, you are no longer limited by the restraints of the real world.
Currently, 4.2 billion people are connected to the internet. Meaning they have some sort of virtual footprint in a digital world.
Adoption of immersive VR will be slow and its likely to start with entertainment at first. But Virtual Worlds will not be for gaming purposes alone. It will be a lot more cost efficient to use virtual worlds as our main transactional and interactive environment. Why spend 2 hours in traffic to get to a meeting when we can just put on our goggles and meet at a virtual office? We’re already doing most of our interactions with others in the virtual space, you talk to people on whatsapp, you look at their travel pics on instagram and consume this article on our website. You don’t need to leave the house for any of these.
Virtual worlds is the natural progression of these technologies and will be a part of our lives sooner than you think.
Number 9: CyberSecurity & Private Data Brokerage
As we live more and more of our lives in the digital realm, cybersecurity will become more and more relevant to all of us.
We’re already seeing world-wide debates about how our data is handled by big corporations. People have been giving away their data for free because they do not realize how valuable this type of information actually is.
Before social medias and cookies, You had to spend millions of dollars to get your hands on this type of info, but now, people give it away for free in exchange for memes and funny videos.
Social platforms got the bargain of the century, making billions of dollars off of your data and governments have no idea what’s actually happening.
On average a US consumer’s data is worth at least $240 per year to companies like facebook or google.
Data brokerage is already a billion dollar industry, but it’s not as public as the rest, so people ignore it. Cambridge analytica was just a glimpse into what kind of impact this type of brokerage can have on the world and everybody started freaking out.
Number 10: Entertainment
Entertainment is at an all time high. Never before we’ve been so obsessed of fitting as much entertainment as possible into our daily lives. People binge watch entire seasons of netflix, we are at the 9th fast and furious movie… who needs 9 of these?!
Streaming is blowing up, people spend hours watching other people do things. Why? Because it’s entertaining.
We’re living busy lives so the option to disconnect for even a few minutes – which eventually turns into a couple of hours – has become a world-wide phenomenon which has survived through the ages.
Entertainment is evolving with technology so it’s a safe bet that it will still be around.
Speaking of, you know what might not be around for long?
Actors.
Actors are really expensive, prone to getting themselves into trouble in real life which leads to financial tensions on studios. Disney has figured this out super early, it acquired Pixar for exactly this reason. Incredibles 2, Frozen, Finding Dory, all grossed over 1 Billion dollars without 1 actor in sight. Even the avengers movie rely more on CGI than anything else.
In a very near future, popular actors like Robert Downey Jr. will sign away their rights to their personas, their looks, voice and behaviors. Through hyper-realistic 3D rendering of their bodies, studios will put actors in movies without the need for actual humans to be involved.
We covered this in our video 15 Jobs that Will Disappear due to Automation and AI. It’s super interesting what’s going on right now.
Number 11: Real-Estate Developer
Getting back to the concrete – pun intended – we’re closing in on the 8 billion population number. We’re a lot of people and they all need shelter. Let’s look at the most populous country in the world, for the second time in this article.
China middle class is seeing a boom in earnings, this correlates with their ability to spend money and people are moving from the countryside towards cities.
This trend is just beginning in India and we’re expecting a similar result in the following years.
People in what were once considered poor countries, now have a ton of money that they wish to spend. Everything is booming, and real-estate is the main index of how well these countries are doing.
Sure, there’s new, more efficient and effective tech to build now, but the demand is so big, that developers can’t keep up.
Same trend is happening in the middle east, with places like Qatar and Dubai, literally pulling themselves out of the desert in just the past 20 years.
Number 12: BioChemistry & Tech Engineers
What’s all this fancy talk about anyway? Well it boils down to a few basic necessities, energy and materials. We need better ways to create and store energy as well as new materials that are cheaper to produce but stronger, because we’re building higher than ever.
The battery industry alone has seen a massive increase in the past 2 decades. Everybody has a smartphone, a laptop and soon an electric car.
Even today, your entire life runs on electricity and we’re seeing major improvements in all aspects of capturing it with the least amount of collateral damage.
There’s still a lot of room to optimize what we currently have. We’ve been living in a world of opulence producing inefficiently and in large quantities, because there wasn’t a need for us to limit anything.
This type of behavior has had alarming effects on the environment with the most prominent example being Plastic. We made everything out of it and now we have so much that we don’t know what to do with it. We need new materials and once these are here, entire industries will be reshaped.
Number 13: Private Services for the Rich
The rich will get richer or at least stay rich. They’ll have enough money to afford dedicated services for their personal needs. Starting with private security and ending with people taking care of their kids.
Tailoring to the rich has been a lucrative industry because the demand is always there. Some faces might change, but new clients will always be coming up. There are entire segments of private business which exist only to cater to the super wealthy.
While the masses will enjoy the benefits of standardized cheap products created by the robots, the rich care about that extra step, the person touch, the need to have something only few others have, and that’s why they spend the extra money.
Find a way to deliver value to the rich and you’re in business for the long run.
Number 14: Elderly Care & End of Life Management
With such large population numbers, we’re seeing records when it comes to deaths as well. People are simply growing old, needing of special attention until the day they eventually die.
Eldercare is one of the fastest growing industries in the world and funeral homes have been in business since the beginning of human time.
Until now, there’s been a culture clash between the west and the east, because west was focused more on the individual while in the east, the elders lived with the family until they died.
Because of the way things are evolving right now, even the easterns are starting to find alternative ways to this, because the last thing parents want is to be a burden on their children and the children want their elders to get the proper attention they deserve.
Number 15: Small Jobs that are not worth Automating – Yet
Another segment which is likely to do ok in the future, are the small niche industries where automation doesn’t make sense.
In addition to those, there’s the situation of how remote the marketplace is and the number of customers you are servicing. Being a veterinarian in a remote village is a pretty safe bet, compared to being an accountant in California.
There are also segments where the added value comes from the personal touch. A simple example would be going to Rome or Venice and sitting down in a restaurant. You still want the pasta to be prepared by an italian chef, that drops by the table and checks to see if everything is ok. You can automate the process of making the food, but that’s not where the value lies.
Whatever industry you find yourself in, figure out which are the value points and if people would be willing to trade your personal touch for convenience. If they would do that, you might want to start thinking.
We’re curious to know, what’s your profession? What do you do for a living? Do you think your job will be done the same way that you do it 50 to 100 years from now? We’re really interested in knowing your opinion on how things are changing.
