PS: No one knows for sure what will happen in the future. This is based on what most experts are saying about the future and my commentary on it.

I write a lot about the current education system and what needs to be done to succeed currently in different fields. Just in the last couple of months, I wrote about a career in law and a career in psychology.

However, today, I want to write a short note on the future of education and work. Is it all doom and gloom or do we have a bright future ahead?

Why does the future look very different from today as far as education and work are concerned? The reason for this is the innovation in technology, especially in the areas of machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and biotechnology (BioTech).

What is this difference? The difference is that the skills of people can become more easily obsolete with these technological advances. For eg. in the past, people could reliably stay in one profession for decades, if not their entire lifetime. This stood well with our education system which took years to prepare us for a single profession. Think about doctors and lawyers; they require a minimum of 10 years and 7 years of post-secondary training to enter the profession. In future, with more improvements in AI and ML, the intelligence of the machine might replace many highly sought after jobs with new kinds of jobs. These new kinds of jobs are very likely to be around building, managing, maintaining, and improving these AI systems. Come 2040 or 2050, I don’t think it will make sense to spend 10 years of postsecondary life preparing for one career.

What should we do then? We should prepare for shorter careers in one area, unless we end up going into the fields with these new kinds of jobs which I mentioned in the previous section. For eg., if you are a doctor who looks at patient’s metrics and offers a diagnosis, you could potentially (not necessarily) be replaced in 20-30 years with AI doctors. So, if you are planning to start studying medicine (Bachelors/pre-med) in 2030, enter the field in 2040 and find yourself obsolete in a few years; it might not be the best use of your time.

Which existing jobs will become more important? It seems that anything which requires comforting other human beings will become more important. While some (of course, not all) doctors could become obsolete, nurses won’t because they physically care for and comfort the patients. Competent teachers will be very important because they will need to retrain the workforce every now and then. Psychologists, Counselors, and Meditation teachers will be in demand because such churning in education, and career will wreak havoc for the mental health of human beings. Elder care and child care will also grow in importance.

Should educational institutes be restructured? Yes, they should be. Learning to learn new skills will be very important going forward. The subject matter should focus more on becoming resilient and learning and retaining new skills in shorter periods of time. Change is hard on human beings, especially when it comes with a pressure of performance. The future educational institutes will focus exceedingly more on the mental health of their students.

What strategies can we implement to be ready? Diversifying our interests is the first strategy I can think of. If our jobs become irrelevant and we derive all our identities from them, we are asking for trouble. The other strategy would be to keep our learning muscles in vogue by continuously learning new things.

Is there a silver lining? The silver lining in all of this is the fact that for the most part, the future will be “objectively” better for humanity. It’s only a guess but even if we become irrelevant, there will be some form of Universal Basic Income (UBI) to sustain our basic needs. We will have the time and opportunity to pursue our genuine interests if we are so inclined. The only problem with this is that this “objective” betterment is usually never the individual goal. It is the “subjective” satisfaction which human beings crave. Becoming somewhat irrelevant and not having an option to succeed in an economic marketplace can potentially undermine human satisfaction.

Despite all I have written above, I am personally very optimistic about the human resiliency. Although the challenges in the future will be more difficult, we humans will overcome them and emerge stronger on the other side, with new ideas and new strategies.

Stay strong!