Rui Ma asks the obvious follow-up question: “how are parents of high schoolers approaching career guidance for their kids in light of this?”
The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller offers his own unhelpful, but very honest, response:
Miller’s sentiments echo those of Yuval Noah Harari, who claimed in a widely shared clip that “today nobody has any idea what to teach young people that will still be relevant in 20 years.” [Full disclosure: I work at Sapienship, the company co-founded by Harari.]
Most of the responses to Harari involved people trying to isolate those things that they thought would still be relevant in 20 years: “Try Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas for a start”; “Home economics… athletics… math… ancient philosophy”; “The treasures of revealed religion, philosophy, and laws and institutions.” These are all good things! Things that most people should spend more time learning about! But, in the immortal words of Wayne Campbell, they’re “nothing I’d call a career.”
Happily, there is an untapped resource that stumped professors, anxious parents, and ambitious students can all make use of… Science fiction!
Science fiction authors have been thinking about the future of work for ages, and we can all benefit from their foresight. What follows is a career guide for the near future inspired by sci-fi: a compilation of job titles that don’t exist today but may be in-demand professions in the years to come. Descriptions of these speculative jobs are followed by suggestions for courses of study that will prepare today’s students for these occupations of tomorrow.
Planetary Ecologist
Source: Dune by Frank Herbert
In Frank Herbert’s 1965 classic, Doctor Kynes is a planetary ecologist (or “planetologist” as he prefers to be called). On the desert world of Arrakis, Kynes is busy supervising a secret terraforming project. His trade is the study of the innumerable interactions between the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and the biosphere.
Science fiction authors have been thinking about the future of work for ages, and we can all benefit from their foresight. What follows is a career guide for the near future inspired by sci-fi: a compilation of job titles that don’t exist today but may be in-demand professions in the years to come. Descriptions of these speculative jobs are followed by suggestions for courses of study that will prepare today’s students for these occupations of tomorrow.
Planetary Ecologist
Source: Dune by Frank Herbert
In Frank Herbert’s 1965 classic, Doctor Kynes is a planetary ecologist (or “planetologist” as he prefers to be called). On the desert world of Arrakis, Kynes is busy supervising a secret terraforming project. His trade is the study of the innumerable interactions between the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and the biosphere.
Back on earth, we are beginning to identify the “atmospheric bridges” and “oceanic tunnels” that transport matter and energy across the hemispheres, linking distant regions. A study published in 2015 based on lidar data revealed that phosphorous-rich dust swept from the dry bottom of an ancient lakebed in Chad travels on winds across the ocean to eventually settle in the Amazon basin. Once deposited, the dust-borne phosphorous helps replace nutrients lost to runoff and erosion. Given this interrelationship, it seems appropriate to speak of a meta-ecosystem containing both the rainforest and the desert. (I propose we call it “the Sahamazon.”) This ocean-spanning desert-forest is simultaneously arid and tropical, at once barren and biodiverse. One job of the planetary ecologist would be to spot these meta-ecosystems hiding in plain sight.
It is entirely possible that AI systems could one day manage ecosystems autonomously. Bradley Cantrell has drafted a blueprint for an AI “wildness creator” that “creates and maintains wild places independently of humans.”
But as I wrote in an essay some years ago:
As opposed to a game such as Go, which, despite its complexity, has a clear method for assessing victory, it remains an open question what exactly a “winning” ecosystem ought to look like.What goals should an AI ecosystem-optimizer be given? Carbon sequestration? In that case, expect endless hectares of acacia trees.
As with most discussions about the natural world, our aesthetic commitments tend to masquerade as ethical ones. So even if superintelligent AI systems come along to manage the planet for us, we will still need people with good taste to decide what kind of earth we want to craft.
Recommended college courses for the aspiring planetary ecologist:
complex adaptive systems, climatology, evolutionary ecology, environmental history, synthetic biology, landscape architecture, aesthetics of nature
by Jason Rhys Parry, Blueprint Canopy | Read more:
Image: X; and, uncredited via
