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Imagining new careers and jobs based on new technologies: example of nanotechnology's possibilities
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The previous article discussed how imagining the effect of new, disruptive technologies could add careers and jobs that aren't currently present in the economy. Transparent transistors may make solar panels better and cheaper--and enable entirely new possibilities in art and marketing. (Imagine the solar panel as a mural for the house, or housing transistors to support networks.) Nanotechnology's relationships to many branches of science may do the same.
There are at least two ways that employment could be driven in a different direction from the current gloom-and-doom (and admittedly probable) scenarios:
- Hope that new technology will create opportunities that we can't see today.
- Change what we value and reward human creativity by valuing people as much things, something a consumption-based value system doesn't necessarily do. We could, as Emily Dickinson wrote, "dwell in possibility."
We already know the first is true. Nanotechnology's house of possibility has been hyped, although not to the point that biotech's possibilities were. However, unlike biotechnology, nanotechnology has pervasive and profound relationships with many other sciences, as shown in the diagram, which leads me to two questions. What-if each connection between the sciences created a need for a new career family? And how would we know if our imaginings were probable? For example, a "bioethicist" function can't exist until the realm of ethics and of biology become so large that a mind (or a group of minds) has to address the issues when science and values collide. Stem cell research, death with dignity, the high price of health care--all these factors, technical and economic, drove the creation of a new need. If technical knowledge doubles every five to ten years, then we should expect that disruptive technologies create new opportunities. That's what could happen if the utility companies lose a monopoly on power. What if that happens other places? The president and CEO of Coca-Cola talked about this effect of rapid technical change last year in an address to the London School of Economics.
Put another way, as a Murphy's Law in technology: new systems breed new problems.
This is what employment and unemployment scenarios by economists don't usually go. Projecting from historical data means assuming things go on as they currently are. Factoring in disruptive changes (the 1918 flu, the Great Depression in 1929, the start of World War II in 1939, the Cold War, the Internet) means forecasting them or counting on them. This used to be one of Murphy's Laws: "Don't expect miracles. Rely on them."
What if we relied on the miracle? If necessity is the mother of invention, and new employment trends are necessary, then what can we invent? And who does the inventing?
Answer the questions in reverse order. We do the inventing. We picture ourselves in the disrupted world where some hallowed belief has just been exposed as an assumption we can change. We can invent is ourselves in that disrupted world. What benefit do your skills and mine bring into that world? What does learning look like there?
If we are the ones we've been waiting for, the immediate need the economy has for us is to help imagine what the future looks like with us in it.
- Not as anonymous employees in vast enterprises waiting for the next layoff--bad when you're let go, worse when you're not.
- Not as people desperately retraining to catch up to jobs that may not exist.
- Not as people trying to cut themselves down to size to avoid being "overqualified."
We belong to that future because it belongs to us. We made it. We made it as unique players whose imaginations create the work that we're fit to do.
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