Here are some kinds of jobs that I can think of:
1. New kinds of general programmers
A lot of people tend to believe that programmers might be replaced by AI. I feel that the nature of work for programmers will change. Consider the training and the nature of work of programmers few decades back — there used to be punch cards, and the programmers needed to write assembly code. If they were to be told about “software”, which would allow typing programs instead of punching and had the functionality of backspace, and “compilers”, which would convert high-level code to machine code automatically, there might have been a sense that the programmers would not be needed in the future. However, we still have programmers. They have more sophisticated training, they are more efficient because of these tools, and consequently, the complexity of the programs and the expectations from the programmers have gone up.
I think something similar is going to happen due to the machine learning “revolution” in the foreseeable future — we will be able to write programs at an even higher level, maybe something like pseudocode, the data and hardware will evolve, and the applications will become more sophisticated.
2. Big Data
Estimates tell that of all the data generated so far, 90% were generated in the last two years. With the ever increasing data and applications that use them, we will need people who can manage huge amounts of data.
3. Hardware
As we can already see, there has been work on developing hardware geared towards AI, like Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) developed by Google and Drive PX developed by Nvidia. So, newer kinds of hardware [and people who can develop them] might be needed as AI evolves further, both to process large amounts of data and store large amounts of data. As robots evolve, there’s a scope for growth in hardware in robotics too.
4. Network
Again, as data increase, we will likely need to send and receive huge amounts of data to/from central servers to make the most of AI applications. Further, with concepts like internet of things, where smart devices communicate with each other, we will probably need new protocols for communication, new network-related hardware, and new algorithms for efficient multi-way communication.
5. Security
As we automate more and more things, they will become more vulnerable to attacks. We will need more security people to take on these attacks.
6. Nano technology
As our devices start handling more data, we will need more energy-efficient ways to charge them. For instance, nanogenerators, which are being actively researched on, are going to be one way to use your normal body movement to generate electricity for charging devices.
7. Biotechnology/ Medicinne
Combining AI with medicine has been giving some promising results recently, like ingestible robots. In the future, this might bring a lot of new job opportunities in the field of medicine, where the goal is to find biocompatible materials and use them to develop new kinds of robots for disease-specific treatments.
