The future of work
Technische und gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen werden auch unsere Arbeitswelt stark verändern. Hier stellt EAMONN FITZGERALD sieben Berufe vor, die unsere Zukunft entscheidend prägen werden.
Scene: Kenneth Durand is jogging on a running track 80 storeys above the earlymorning automated traffic, which is taking workers to their jobs across the island city of Singapore. The year is 2045. “From the traffic patterns below, it was clear that humans were no longer behind the wheel. No stopping and starting, but traffic flowing smoothly, closely coordinated, optimized. Each vehicle informed by its neighbours, and by the whole. These days, you couldn’t drive yourself even if you wanted to.”
After he has jogged and showered, Kenneth Durand will have breakfast with his wife, Miyuki Uchida, their daughter, Mia, and Nelson, their toyger cat. The genetically modified Nelson looks just like a miniature tiger.
Durand will then take a robot car to his job as leader of an Interpol team fighting genetic crime, finding and shutting down the illegal clinics that perform “vanity edits” on embryos. For a price, they offer human “improvements” such as perfect beauty, super-strength or extraordinary intelligence, as opposed to cures for diseases.
Kenneth Durand is the main character in Change Agent, a science-fiction novel by Daniel Suarez. Before it was published in 2017, Netflix bought the rights for a film of the same name, to be produced by Josh Bratman.
What would it mean for human identity if people could change their DNA and nearly every part of their bodies as well? In Change Agent, Daniel Suarez has tweaked today’s technologies and created a future world filled with ethical dilemmas and fascinating jobs. Science fiction is, of course, fiction, but it gets us thinking creatively about the future and the present, and it’s often an uncanny indicator of things to come.
Take this BBC story from 15 October titled “Why gene editing could create so many jobs”. Science journalist Richard Gray writes that, as medical treatments based on gene editing move from research laboratories into hospitals, the demand for genetic engineers will rise.
“The UK government predicts there could be more than 18,000 new jobs created by gene and cell therapy in Britain alone by 2030, while the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates it will see a seven per cent increase in jobs for biomedical engineers and a 13 per cent increase in medical scientists, together accounting for around 17,500 jobs,” Gray writes.
This is good news for graduates in genetics, medicine, molecular biology, virology, bioengineering, chemical engineering and business. The National Human Genome Research Institute in the US says that medical geneticists can expect to earn up to $134,770 (€118,000) a year, while a bio-informatician, who helps to interpret genetic data, will earn from $35,000 to $101,000 a year.
Turn to the next page for seven jobs that could shape our lives in future.
“It was clear that humans were no longer behind the wheel”