| What skills have stayed the same over 20 years and provided the same standard of living over that entire period of time since we passed the industrial revolution? Nurses, doctors, pilots, have all needed to become competent with computers. Financial people needed to learn Excel. Farming requires more mechanical and chemical skill. That is not to mention entire categories of jobs that no longer exist (telephone operator, appliance repairperson, non-luxury travel agent, etc) or jobs that only came into existence in the past few years (social media director, devops engineer, prompt engineer). You also never know when a new technology will come along that disrupts everything. Being a cabbie used to require an incredible level of study and diligence to understand the roads of your city. That understanding is now worthless, as we all have the equivalent in our pockets. Somebody writes the weekly jobless claims articles at news agencies. A human won't be doing that in 5 years, if they are already. I am playing around with Midjourney and I can see a lot of lower level freelance work like logo design getting utterly annihilated by it. Spinning up basic web apps is pretty easy with ChatGPT, even if you don't know very much code either. So there is no skill I would be comfortable relying on to earn a living for 20 years. You might work for a company that doesn't update as quickly and get away with it as a result, but that is luck of them not firing you. The jobs that are the same as 20 years ago are the ones that do not require training or skill to do. |