I don’t have a particularly complicated job. I’m a copywriter and sometimes I create content that ends up on the internet. You would imagine this would be pretty simple for my parents to explain to their friends. Not so – the other day I caught my mom telling someone that I do ‘something with websites’. Although I would like to claim the wide variety of awesome this mysterious website-ery must entail, it’s simply not true.
No ad to show here.
You can’t really blame her though; modern-day career options are much more diverse than they were a generation ago and it’s hard to keep up. Doctor, lawyer, engineer, teacher, those are simple to explain and understand. But when it comes to titles like ‘User Experience Designer’, ‘Online Reputation Manager’ and ‘Social Media Content Editor’ things go a bit wonky. I sincerely think my grandparents must secretly wonder whether we’re making all this up to cover for the fact that we spend our days tinkering on a glorified typewriter.
It’s easy to scoff at the older generation for failing to keep up with the times, but the truth is that the wheel turns and one day you’ll be the one harking back to the good old days of yore. Here are a few jobs your kids could most likely be explaining to you amidst a lot of eye-rolling:
Vertical/Urban farmer
As land becomes more and more crowded and the demand for agricultural produce increases, we will necessarily have to come up with more nifty ways to grow food. Statistics tell us that, by 2050, 80% of the world’s population will live in urban areas and that the total amount of humans on the planet will swell to a whopping 10.5-billion. That is a whole lot of mouths to feed.
Cue the vertical farmer. Vertical farming is typically practiced in big industrial buildings where crops are grown on top of each other and fed artificial light. This informative TEDxTalk by Charlie Price from Aquaponics UK discusses a method that takes this concept even further.
He provides insight into the applications for vertical farming but more specifically a new approach to urban agriculture, turning wastes into resources and transforming disused urban spaces to provide not only food, but resilient communities.
Organ Agent
Advancements in surgical science will make organ transplants even more commonplace than it already is, but the sourcing of compatible organs will remain a problem. Organ agents will specialise in finding healthy, willing donors and manage a compatibility database.
Think in terms of a recruitment agent, only they source corneas and kidneys instead of clerks and CAD operators.
Experience Architects
In his book Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey, Chuck Palahniuk postulates a future in which all audio-visual entertainment is experienced (and gathered) by means of a ‘port’ that is inserted into the backs of people’s necks. People no longer become filmmakers, but instead study ‘experience architecture’, a type of art that involves taking “outported” experiences and manipulating it by means of “structured re-experiencing”. Quite the mouthful I know.
How it would work is essentially like this: a person (the primary source) would go about a particular experience (e.g. a walk on a sunny afternoon), and outport all the sensory information they gather to an external storage device. The Experience Architect then takes this sensory information and tweaks it by running it through secondary sources to heighten certain sensory elements. E.g. to increase the ‘taste tract’ you would run it through a known supertaster, to turn up the dial on the ‘tactile tract’ you’d run it through a blind person, etc. You then market and sell the resulting product like you would a film.
This industry would of course come with its own set of ethical conundrums. I.e. would you be willing to have a port installed in your infant and rent out their sensory equipment to Experience Architects who want to instill a sense of wonderment in their work? Would you, as an Experience Architect, have any qualms running your work through drug users to heighten the adrenaline tracts or mellow out a certain portion of the experience?
Garbage Miner
As the population continues to skyrocket and we continue to plunder the planet for resources there exists a very real chance that we may have to turn to mining our landfills for metals and other minerals that we carelessly tossed in times of abundance. A Garbage Miner would head up these operations by identifying rich deposits and extracting it using innovative mining methods.
Child Designers
You knew this one would be on here, right? It’s only a logical deduction when it comes to the next big scientific step we’re all waiting for – designer offspring.
Child designers will be involved in the process of genetic manipulation. Genetics will eventually get to a point (some conspiracy theorists believe it already has) that will allow parents to choose their kids’ genetic traits, e.g. body type, skin tone, hair- and eye colour and height. Propensities towards certain illnesses, like Cystic Fibrosis, Sickle Cell Disease and Down’s syndrome, could also be managed. In fact, it may even become possible to ‘cure’ genetic diseases in utero by swapping out bits of DNA.
Your friendly local child designer will be the one you sit with when you pick and choose what your kid should look like. Yup, Gattaca might just come true.
So there you have it, five jobs that could totally be a thing in the future. Now you won’t have to look like an idiot when you meet your future daughter’s completely inappropriate hypothetical boyfriend, Xyvier the Experience Architect.
