A Massive Power Gap Will Open by 2050

The question is, what will you do to be a part of the future?

With the 4th industrial revolution (Artificial Intelligence) on it’s way, the world will be subject to unprecedented amounts of development. The catch is, most people aren’t prepared for this change.

Currently, the education system shapes it’s students to learn mathematics, science, literature etc. Why? Because these skills are in demand. The industry needs more people who are good at these things. The better you are at one of these things, the more likely it is that you will be hired & payed. However, there is one critical point which most people are not aware of.

Just because these skills are in demand currently, doesn’t mean they will be that way in 30 years.

As of today,

• The only thing that can write code is a computer scientist.
• The only thing that can design a rocket is an engineer
• The only thing that can produce medicine is a biologist.
• The only thing that can write bestselling books is an author.

In the future,

• AI will write code. It already can
• AI will design rockets. It already can
• AI will create medicine. It already can
• AI will write books. It already can

As AI is on its way to conquer many industries, it is more than likely that it won’t make sense for humans to do these jobs, making a lot of what we are taught ineffective.

The reason AI is not yet widely used in these areas is due to the technology being primitive. AI is still in its early days, but with its current pace of growth, we can understand how competent it will be in the future.

What I’m trying to get at, is that even though the skills we are taught today are in demand, jobs like these will be quickly occupied with Artificial Intelligence in the future. Even if you are extremely competent in the area, it will be impossible to compete with your AI counterpart, since it was built for such a job. AI will be better than you at you job. It will work for more hours as it does not need sleep. It will even be cheaper to deploy, as you can clone neural networks but not humans.

The problem here is obvious. The education system is spending years of people’s lives to specialize students towards a job that will soon be obsolete in terms of human employment. Millions, maybe even billions of people will graduate only to not get hired because AI assistants can do their occupation a thousand times better than they can.

So what would happen to these people?

They would have to re-invent themselves. As they will be unemployed due to their lack of relevant skills, they will have to work hard to gain new useful skills, proving them valuable to the industry. In other words, they will have to ignore the years of school training they received to be competent in more modern fields. An alternative is, the education system adapts right now to prepare students to the future state of the world rather than the current state of the world.

It isn’t spoken of often enough, but this is a constantly recurring problem.

The education system generally lags behind modern developments, making it inefficient in a way.

For example, the third industrial revolution (computers) started 50 years ago, yet schools still don’t have programming as a main course. A big question mark on the effectiveness of these institutions.

The power gap which this will cause becomes evident when we start talking about visionary innovation. As AI will be a fundamental part of humanity in the future, it is important to understand that a large sector like AI will also require a large amount of deployment, and will open new opportunities for jobs, and even more innovation.

For example, big AI (consequently intelligent) like GPT-3 takes up huge sums of resources to train, and use. As the usage of AI will exponentially increase, so will the demand for a platform which uses relatively minimal resources compared to modern ones. Huge companies, even bigger than today’s titans, will emerge as a result of innovations like these.

So it’s not really a bad thing. Yes, many people will be unemployed, but even more jobs will be created. Most importantly, humanity will be taken to another level. So it’s actually a good thing.

All I’m saying is that the future will open up vast opportunities. Invest in yourself accordingly. Will you be a part of the 99% who follows convention only to be average in the future, or will you pursue innovation to participate in the future’s top 1%?