Maybe…? Honestly, there are almost no career sectors that are immune to the influence of technology. So the question is not “will” but “how” technology is going to affect your career and how do you get ahead of it. It really depends on where you’re at in your career journey, how much of your job functions are repetitive and how expensive it might be to replace you with automation. As much as many of us love how technology has simplified our work, we need to remember that technology’s adoption by business is an effort by businesses to reduce costs which often means reducing the workforce. 

For example, I have a few friends in the property appraisal business and when they started they spent a lot of time going to government offices looking for property records. Now everything is available online, which is great for them but also means fewer clerks who used to work the desk fielding property records requests. Clerks who were good at scanning documents and maintaining the related databases probably kept their jobs, and the others were transferred or “aged out” and not replaced. More likely the scanning was eventually completely automated and the database management farmed out to a third-party, probably overseas where technicians are paid significantly less. So technology adoption helped the appraiser but meant fewer governmental employees and because the whole process now required less time traveling to check records the number of appraisers would also fall. Yay Technology!

So, where are you at in your career journey? Of you’re midway through your journey it should be pretty obvious that there are very few jobs that are “learning one thing and do that the rest of your career” or have an expectation that you’re going to work for the same organization for your whole career. Working for a public utility, like the phone company, used to be like that. Back when I was hired at Pacific Telephone in 1979 they were still using electro-mechanical machinery for their switch technology and it required an army of technicians to maintain the “machine” 24/7. As they replaced the old switch with electronic switches the number of technicians required also dropped such that instead of an army working every local office, only a few were assigned to roam a collection of offices. Being among the lowest seniority in my work group I took an early-retirement offer because I didn’t want to risk being transferred to a remote office in the desert somewhere. I had 15-years service. I imagine that most Central Offices are completed unmanned. 

1990-06 COMM217 BW Photography - Architectural-PacBell -25
1990-06 COMM217 BW Photography – Architectural-PacBell -25

Those of you starting out, I don’t know what to tell you. But going in blind like I did is probably not the way to go. Duh. Just know that technology will play a role in your job no matter what you do. It is a bit hilarious to think about how wrong many predictions were over the past 50-years because they were based on the huge post-war leaps technology made from the 1940s through the 1950s. Alas, we don’t have our flying cars or colonies on the moon or Mars, but sci-fi failed to predict mobile and wireless technologies or even suburbia. So, it’s probably best to tread lightly when laying out the potential future career markets. 

Thinking about my (former) middle-school students, all I know is that when I was in middle school it was several years before one could even purchase a home computer that didn’t require either thousands of dollars or thousands of hours to assemble, the use of a soldering iron and an affinity for all things Radio Shack. A couple of years later, when I was in high school, architectural drafting was all done by hand, there were no electronic musical instruments, looking something up required going to the library and finding a physical book and manufacturing cars and household goods were still being done in the United States. Oh yeah, there still were viable labor unions too. Even looking back to try to anticipate where technology might go next is problematic. Funnily, except for my masters degree, none of my other college degrees have anything technology component. Add to that, the vast majority of my teaching career was based on the need for students to become technologically literate and the emergence of “being good at tech” as an employment requirement. So, without technology becoming a thing from the late 1970s forward, my teaching career as it turned out wouldn’t have existed. Yay technology!

Let’s just say that, except in the event of some civilization ending catastrophe (not a given), technology is going to continue to shrink the workforce needed to do most jobs. Manufacturing, retail, banking, communication, all careers that used to require armies have shrunk, in part, due to advances in technology. And now the creative arts, the jobs that we used think that a computer could ever do, are feeling the pressure. Writers and actors are currently on-strike, in part because of how streaming has changed how they are compensated and the threat that A.I. may have in their work going forward. My beloved journalism as a healthy career choice has all but disappeared due to loss of revenue from advertising moving to other media (thanks “social media”!), and the emergence of Large Language Models like ChatGPT affecting the need for wordsmiths. 

I might be a bit bias, but, even for those involved in the arts, if you are early in your career, experiencing a mid-career slump or looking several years into the future, programming, designing and maintaining automation systems, A.I.s and robotics is going to continue to be a thing for the foreseeable future. You can continue to resist it, like the English Luddites or Belgian workers from over a hundred years ago, but eventually someone is going to find a way to digitize or replicate a process and then the job that used to require armies will be reduced to those who know how to maintain the “machine.” It shouldn’t be an existential problem unless you intend to ignore it until it’s too late or assume thing everything will stay the same over the course of your working career. Either way, good luck in your pursuits and don’t assume that Siri or Alexa won’t eventually be in-charge of making sure you get your needed medications when or if you survive the coming “changes.” Yay Technology!

2015-08-17 FSL Wk11 Robotics
2015-08-17 Full Sail Labs Wk11 Robotics

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