71 - Future Roles In the book The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, author Richard Susskind lays out 12 different roles that will emerge from a “post-professional society”:
- Craftspeople - people who “craft” stuff that require a difficult skill set, such that they can’t be easily replaced by para-professionals or crowd sourced.
- Assistants - people who aren’t experts but help out the above mentioned craftspeople (e.g. associates in law firms).
- Para-professionals - will take over the spot of experts with the help of ever increasingly competent systems and tools.
- Empathizers - people with extremely good people skills, which will always be important because we have a sociality that is ingrained in our evolutionary biology. Machines will fill the gap, but people who can afford the help of other people will prefer doing so.
- R&D Workers - research and development will always be desired for the creation of new technology that can allow for a greater reach of solutions or make them more effective.
- Knowledge Engineers - people who will be designing systems that draw on the sources of existing expertise to disseminate knowledge to the wider public and para-professionals. Early examples may be wikipedia or thoughtCo.
- Process Analysts - will be the ones deconstructing the work of experts to create the systems and tools used by the above mentioned para-professionals.
- Moderators - people with deep insight who will help guide the centralization of expertise knowledge either from the masses or a pool of experts. Essentially making sure the quality of “the body of knowledge” stays high.
- Designers - People who think up and design the various systems described above. If a service or system isn’t well made then people aren’t going to want to use it. You see this with the high salary and importance of UX designers.
- System Providers - people who are actually providing the systems that the knowledge base is built on, whether it be a foundation (e.g. Wikipedia) or a private company (e.g. Quora).
- Data Scientists - pretty straight forward field. People who are able to work with big data and come to insights. Two of my data related products are pudding.cool and quid.
- Systems Engineers - are the people creating our dumb machine helpers (AI, Big Data Systems, etc) or AI overlords