The Sci-Fi Job Market of 2030
A report commissioned by Britain’s Department for Business innovation and skills has released a report on 20 common jobs of the future, and one of the biggest declared was spaceship pilot. The report analyzes jobs of the future to help universities and other places of learning appropriate resources as well as help analysts get a better picture of where resources need to go next to prepare for the future.
The analysis, commissioned out to a company called Fast Future, first surveyed 486 participants, and asked each what they considered to be the most and least popular jobs they would be interested in in the year 2030. Of those surveyed, ‘Old Age Wellness Manager’ was considered the most popular new job, while the least popular was universally ‘Quarantine Enforcer.’ The job ‘Climate Change Reversal Specialist’ is expected to create a new world of possibilities in environmental recovery, while the most beneficial to world economies was expected to be ‘Farmer of Genetically Engineered Crops and Livestock.’ The most highly paid future occupation is suspected to be ‘Nano-medic.’
Of those surveyed, the five jobs that respondents didn’t want to see developed were “Quarantine Enforcer,” “Personal Brander,” “Weather Modification Police,” “Climate Change Reversal Specialist,” and “Farmer of Genetically Modified Crops and Livestock.” It seems the analysts have taken into consideration a great deal of potential turmoil connected to issues that are unfolding even today.
The report also takes issues which are expected to arise in the next thirty years and attaches occupations created by futurists to deal with the challenges and benefits expected from them. An increase in population and medical requirements followed by an increase in genetic materials development may mean in the year 2030 body part makers will work alongside cryonics developers to create and develop replacement body parts for those who want to trade in, for example, a defective heart for a freshly grown heart equivalent to that of a 20 year old athlete. As the horizon of life extends indefinitely, “end of life planners” may be officers of the state dispatched to help people analyze when they want to pass on. With genetics understood to such a degree that every genetic defect can be removed, designer babies will need occupational “baby designers.” With increases in genetic crop perfection, crops may quite soon be able to grow easily in the harshest of environments making hundreds of thousands of square miles worth of worthless desert suddenly very valuable to farmers. Hence, the rise in need for “Desert Land Rights Traders” and “Water Merchants.”
It looks like the next thirty years will be a bumpy ride into the future, but perhaps once we’re there it will prove to be a more interesting world indeed. But whenever we look at the images of the future broadcast in the 1950’s, our current world is several times more complicated and advanced in many areas, but still lacking in the way of space travel in many respects. Still, it will be interesting to track this prognostication and see if it comes true, or if this report should be handed off to the “Cybrarian” and forgotten.
