Future Jobs: The Rise of Interdisciplinary Thinking
From our humble beginnings as hunter gatherers, it took us thousands of years to create words with enough meaning to define the discrete schools of thought that make up primary sectors within society. Economics, law, medicine, philosophy and physics, to name a few. In the time since inventing these fields, we are in the middle of the next radical shift in the way we operate — the main-streaming of interdisciplinary thinking and processes.
In the past, innovations have been discrete and specific to an individual industry or application. For example, in the 20th century we invented electric power tools to replace manual tools. With the ability to compute things with consumer technology, ubiquitous access to high speed internet and the vast amount of knowledge and help that is on the web — the 21st century has burst out the gate with a new wave of professionals and hobbyists who are empowered to research and develop their ideas to their maximum potential.
From idle curiosities to lifelong passions, people are increasingly expressing their own personality and uniqueness within their careers and this has had a profound impact on society. My personal experience has been that working on creative and technically challenging work that interests me has improved my ability to produce high quality work in an efficient way. My career, and clients, have befitted from strategic and technical discoveries that I’ve made on my journey towards making video games and other interesting things.
I’m not the best artist, but there’s a clear progression and improvement in my webcomic from the first page to page fifty one. Since starting that process I’ve developed a better sense for how to conceptualize, estimate and produce creatives assets. I’m fairly confident with time management in web and software development as it’s my main area of work but I rarely get asked to draw something or come up with creative writing at work. I want to have a serviceable set of creative and design production skills so that I have my own capability and so I’m better able to communicate and collaborate with professionals in those fields.
Automation and artificial intelligence are going to reduce complexity and altogether remove repetitive tasks — this is a great thing and ties into my thinking about where careers are going. While in the past we may have needed a team professionals to produce a deliverable like a TV commercial or new car design — new tools and interdisciplinary skills could achieve the same work with just two people or even one person. The jobs of the future are ones where we approach problems with a mindset that everything can be solved with technology, because that is actually true. We have barely scratched the surface of what can be achieved with big data, machine learning, natural language processing and other artificial intelligence technologies.
The application of creative design to convey information is known as Infographics. The first known Infographics were made by astronomers in the 17th century to map the sun’s rotation. In 2020 we are surrounded by Infographics from informative dashboards at work to interactive maps in public spaces to a printed map of a train network. As the tools to collect data and display are becoming easier to use, we will see an even greater immersion of Infographics in our lives in the coming years — parents will be able to track their children’s diet and gadget habits with complex dashboards, their children might copy that dashboard but use it to track the number of ladybugs in the garden using Computer Vision and the house security system.
Despite all I’ve said, I think mastery of a single discipline will always be an invaluable asset for a successful professional and personal life. It just seems that most of us want more for ourselves and that’s great, I hope that everyone leans into their passions at work to find ways to keep things interesting. As the saying goes — if you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life. By 2050, many of the jobs we find common today will have been consolidated due to three decades worth of innovation and discovery of interdisciplinary approaches so why stick to what you know when you’re probably more curious about what you don’t know.
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