The era of post-futurism began 110 years ago. Then, in 1909, Filippo Marinetti published a Futurist manifesto proclaiming the cult of the future and the destruction of the past, the desire for speed and fearlessness, the denial of passivity and fears. We decided to start the next orbit and chatted with a few good people about how they see the year 2120.
Disclaimer. Dear friend, get ready. This is going to be a long post with a lot of futuristic details, seemingly insane jobs, and thoughts on the future we deserve.
Keywords before kata to attract attention: Andrey Sebrant from Yandex and TechSparks, Andrey Konyaev from N+1, Obrazovach and KuJi, Ivan Yamschikov from ABBYY and the Max Planck Institute, Alexander Lozhechkin from Amazon, Konstantin Kichinsky from NTI Platform and ex. Microsoft, Valeria Kurmak from AIC and ex. Sberbank Technologies, Andrey Breslav from JetBrains and creator of Kotlin, Grigory Petrov from Evrone and Alexander Andronov from Dodo Pizza.
Table of contents
let's get acquainted
With this lineup, we could take over the world or steal Christmas, but instead we share the text.
- director of strategic marketing , podcast author , channel author . One of the first figures of Runet, and can't lie. Among other things, Andrei is a candidate of physical and mathematical sciences, a professor at the Higher School of Economics and a laureate of the Lenin Komsomol Prize in science and technology (1985).
- publisher of a popular science online publication , community founder и . In his free time from the publishing house and communities, Andrey is a candidate of physical and mathematical sciences and teaches at the Mechanics and Mathematics Department of Moscow State University. And still manages to be a podcast host .
- Artificial intelligence evangelist . Received a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Brandenburg University of Technology (Cottbus, Germany). Now he is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute (Leipzig, Germany). Ivan explores new principles of artificial intelligence that could help understand how our brain works, and also hosts a podcast .
- Former Microsoft Evangelist for Eastern Europe and Russia, Director of Strategic Technologies, and now Head of Solutions Architects at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 100+ Emerging Markets countries. In his free time from IT corporations, Alexander writes notes about various things in his .
– Since 2010, he has been developing the Kotlin programming language at JetBrains. Adheres to PDD (passion driven development) approach in life. In addition to the IT topic, he pays a lot of attention to issues of gender equality and psychotherapy and is a co-founder of the service which helps to find a good psychotherapist. A selection of links to his interviews, articles and reports is neatly stored .
- Director of the Human Experience practice at AIC, Inclusive Design Expert in life. Knows everything about Umwelt and what to do next with this knowledge to create inclusive digital products. At his leisure, he shares his expertise in the telegram channel . Has additional regalia: candidate of technical sciences, social researcher.
- Head of the NTI Franchise Center at ANO NTI Platform, ex.Microsoft-man with ten years of experience. He cannot sit still and is constantly involved in something, for example, in a project . Posted by and channel about technologies in Telegram.
– DevRel in the company , Moscow Python evangelist and head of the Moscow Python Conf++ program committee. Writes on weekends , in the evenings tours the conferences of the capital of our Motherland and neighboring countries. The remaining seconds of time are invested in writing .
– CTO at Dodo Pizza, he is also one of the leaders of the Dodo IS system. Once I gained experience in Intel and Smart Step Group. He does not like publicity very much, but he loves his team and informed decisions very much. In the evenings, she dreams of introducing a data-driven decision-making culture into the life of Dodo Pizza.
You fell asleep and woke up 100 years later, you still have to work, what would you like to be? Think of three professions of the future
Andrey Sebrant: In this situation, first of all, a unique specialization shines for me retroreality expert. Authentic, not synthetic, centuries-old memories will have to be expensive 🙂 Well, or you will have to try to master the work a donor of missing emotions or a premium character in a historical game. Andrey Konyaev: Of course, waking up in 100 years, I would be the same as now, that is, a mathematician. As for professions that could be invented:
1. Technoethic - a person whose job is to understand applied ethical issues, analyze emerging cases and issue an expert opinion on them. Is it possible to create virtual copies of dead people? Can artificial intelligence pretend to be a living person for the sake of human welfare?
2. Eraser - a person whose job it is to destroy the digital footprint. It is assumed that people of the future will regularly change their name and appearance in order to get away from the sins of the past - for example, you were drunk at school, and now you are a successful banker. But the school left a trace that must be skillfully and professionally destroyed.
3. farmer-coder. In the future, code will be written by neural networks, possibly using evolutionary and other algorithms. Therefore, solutions for specific problems will need not be invented, but grown. Actually, a farmer is a person who has a neurofarm where this very code grows. Andrey Breslav: There are two versions of the future: in one, we created a "strong artificial intelligence", and everything moved to the virtual world. In this world, there are no professions (in our understanding), and “work” means something else.
I will consider another version: we have not created a strong AI, so there are still people, like biological beings, and they have specializations. Then professions of research scientists, programmers who create accurate reliable systems (neural networks will already cope with inaccurate ones by that time), as well as artistic professions associated with the creation of complex emotional images: writers, for example, or directors. Konstantin Kichinsky:
- Synthetic lifeform programmer: a person who "designs" new life forms, "sets" the behavior of existing ones, "writes" protein assemblers, "packs" data into DNA, and that's it.
- Architect of underwater/surface/air/lunar/… cities: a person who creates and manages new environments for human settlement with the attendant tasks of urbanism, architecture, provision of resources, etc.
- Science fiction: A person who creates alternate worlds in a 21st century setting.
Ivan Yamschikov: It's very easy for me. My profession will not disappear in 100 years. Or rather, if in 100 years there will be no scientists, then in 100 years there will be no humanity in the sense of the word, as we understand humanity. If the biological species Homo Sapiens exists and does not create an artificial intelligence that surpasses the human one, then jobs for scientists.
If they don’t take me to scientists in a hundred years, then I would go to closed ecosystem designers. If we learn how to create “full-cycle” space bases, where life will be able to exist offline, then I think there will be a demand for creating ecosystems of this kind. There will be many tasks: how to provide a certain climate, and how to achieve sufficient biodiversity, how to make it all aesthetically beautiful, but at the same time functional. A very wide range of skills will come in handy here: from landscape design to data analysis.
The third profession I would call virtual guide. Imagine a tour guide who, with a flick of the wrist, can take you from a Rubens painting to a smoky seventeenth-century tavern, show you an artist's smear under a microscope, teleport you back to biblical times, reciting the Gospel of Luke, and bring you back to the painting. And all with a sense of complete immersion in history.
With the development of virtual reality technologies and neural interfaces, the experience that can be obtained in them will become more diverse and interesting. The task will be to connect different environments into a single narrative, invent it, make it adaptive. It is clear that such attractions will be automated, but the cost of human communication will increase. Therefore, a unique “experience” that is received from a guide who has imagination, quick access to the knowledge base, and is able to communicate with you through a neural interface, may be valued higher and qualitatively different from the experience without human participation. Approximately the way a computer game differs from a classic DnD now. Alexander Andronov: I don't know what will happen in a hundred years. Maybe everything around will be in robots, and people will have a need to kill them? Then I will create robot killing business. Or everything in the world will become a weapon. Then I will trade arms. Or a person will not have personal space at all, but some new type of private Internet will appear. Then I will do services for him. Well, or this: in a hundred years, all cars will be controlled by autopilots, driving will be just fun. Then I I will create an amusement park where you can drive a car for fun. Valeria Kurmak:
- Body designer. In the future, the body will change both due to genetics and due to external non-biological parts of the body. An example of a genetic change is the integrated jellyfish gene into the DNA of a monkey whose skin glows green when exposed to ultraviolet light.
A breakthrough in the realm of non-biological parts came from the team of Hugh Guerra, who developed an interface that connects the nerves in the remnant of a limb to an external bionic prosthesis and makes it feel like a full body part. In the future, the ability to connect nerve tissues with artificial mechanisms will allow a person not only to replace lost limbs, but also to modernize a completely healthy body, supplement it with non-human parts. For example, wings, which the cyborg will feel like their own innate limbs and will be able to control them with no less efficiency.
- Omniinterface designer. Humans have 6 sense organs. Today, interfaces for the most part work with vision. Interfaces that work with hearing are beginning to actively develop. But at the same time there is also taste, smell, touch and vestibular apparatus. I think that in the future there will not only be interfaces for these ways of perceiving, but also a hybridity of these ways of perceiving.
- Researcher. Today it seems that big data will soon allow you to know everything about a person. The data really allows us to see what is happening, but in order to understand why this is happening, you need to go into the fields, find out motives, fears, desires. It seems that some professions will remain unchanged.
Alexander Lozhechkin: I do not agree with the formulation of the question "there is still work to be done." It means that I have not yet become a pensioner or a millionaire (which is basically the same thing - where is there some kind of passive income that allows me not to think about the means of living)? Luckily, I'm not a millionaire. And I really hope (yes, yes, I'm not dissembling) not to become one. However, as a pensioner.
I'm terribly lazy, so if, God forbid, I can afford not to work, I'm afraid I won't be able to force myself to work. And I will watch YouTube from morning to night or scroll through the Facebook feed (or whatever it will be in a hundred years). It's not that I don't enjoy working, but dual motivation (desire and need) works better than single motivation. Therefore, most of all, I hope that our society in 100 years will become so healthy that it will not have these terrible remnants of the past, like an inheritance (which motivates people to endlessly take and take, and not give and give) or a pension, which, I hope, will become unnecessary, since medicine will allow people to remain useful to society, and not a burden for it, for an arbitrarily long time.
As for the question "who to become" - this is secondary. I hope in a hundred years to remain flexible and mobile enough to find an occupation to my liking from those that people of that time will need. Therefore, the short answer to the question “who to become” is to be useful and be flexible.Grigory Petrov:
Psychologist for artificial intelligence, experience designer, guide to virtual worlds.
Do you think IT is a promising area for work in the 100-year period? Is there a comparable promising area?
Andrey Sebrant: I'm not sure about IT ... In its current form, it definitely won't live. But any “bio” (as a prefix to professions that do not yet exist) will definitely be in demand. In a hundred years, we will not be able to completely part with our biological essence, but we will no longer be embarrassed to change it.Andrey Konyaev: No IT-sphere exists for a long time. Code skills are becoming a prerequisite for working in almost any field. It's just that people are inert creatures and continue, out of habit, to call people responsible for the infrastructure of their business IT specialists. Valeria Kurmak: IT is a very broad field. There are a lot of professions in it, some of them turn into handicraft work. For example, Google has a program in which staff are retrained as developers. Those. developers are losing their status as some very complex and special profession.
At the same time, quite a lot of “humanitarians” appear inside IT, who solve seemingly non-IT tasks at all, for example, a UX editor. IT for me is not really a field, it is rather a tool for solving problems, like English, which is needed in order to understand another. By itself, it has no value. With the help of IT, the tasks of simplifying the user experience, accelerating interaction with the client, optimizing and reducing the costs of internal processes are solved.
If we talk about promising areas of development that will not die and will develop very actively, then for me this is space and genetics. At the same time, people working in these areas, as a rule, know English and know how to program.
Konstantin Kichinsky: IT and its derivatives will be everywhere, but our current understanding of IT will be as commodious in 100 years as electricity is now. Comparably promising areas I would include:
- biotech, genetics, computational biology;
- quantum materials, sensors - process control, assembly of materials, creation of computers at the quantum level;
- cyber-living systems - all kinds of augmentations of humans and other living beings.
The question is that all this will be available in bulk with a relatively low entry threshold.
Andrey Breslav: Yes, and not only programming, but also QA, which can become even more important with the spread of neural networks (they have already learned how to do something, but no one fully understands what exactly).
All areas related to creative thinking will remain in demand to some extent. In particular, science and management. It is difficult to predict how many such specialists will be needed, but probably more than now.Alexander Andronov: IT is a promising direction for a period of not 100 years, but for a period of 1000 years. A comparable promising area is medicine, because there will be more and more trends to replace organs, parts of organs, and a person will be reproducible. Humanity will come to the conclusion that if something in a person is broken, then it would be possible to quickly replace it, and not die. Grigory Petrov: I believe that everything that is connected with socialization and relations between people will be promising in a period of 100 years. Since programming is the formulation of the social “I want …” into a formalized form, the field is more than promising. Comparable areas, I think, are all related to entertainment. Creation of computer games, for example.Ivan Yamschikov: It seems to me that if you understand IT as broadly as "information technology", then there are a lot of prospects here. In general, we see that now almost all areas of human activity are beginning to flow into the “digit”. So there is enough work here, but you need to understand that IT in this sense is a tool for solving a particular problem.
The tasks themselves will change over time. It seems to me, for example, that a lot of interesting things are happening in biology right now. I have a podcast . Issues about artificial organisms or modern genetics are some of my favorites. In biotech, medicine, pharmacology, something new is constantly happening.Alexander Lozhechkin: Depends on IT definition. IT appeared from cybernetics, a science that was invented in its modern form by Norbert Wiener in 1948 (the very concept, as the bores will correct me now, was also invented by Ampere, which is Volt divided by Ohm, a little earlier). And cybernetics is the science of control and transmission of information. Control and transmission of information in machines, organisms, society, anywhere.
Now cybernetics realizes itself mainly in the form of silicon wafers with beautiful patterns. Tomorrow - in the form of quantum computing or biotechnology. Both that, and another, and the third are just ways to implement the principles of cybernetics, which, like Ohm's law, existed long before its "discovery". And it will definitely exist always and will definitely be promising. Like Ohm's law.
In what areas do you think IT specialists will be paid more? Space, medicine, mind control of people, your option?
Valeria Kurmak: I heard a great phrase: "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." Unfortunately, they will not pay in areas important for humanity - space or medicine. They will pay, as always, in areas that bring money.
Advertising campaigns and gamified methods of sales today waste the time of a huge number of talented people. When you hear at conferences how the guys came up with a cool solution, the brain explodes, because all this genius was spent to sell "cat litter." As a result, many professionals today choose a field not by the amount, but by the value that the field or company provides for him or humanity. It is important for companies to think about how to convey to their employees the value and importance of their work.
Konstantin Kichinsky: In support of archive systems inherited from the 21st century. I don't know what will be the analogue of COBOL in 100 years.
Andrey Breslav: It is quite possible that in 100 years all IT specialists will be paid approximately the same, because all the simple work will be automated and only the truly complex will remain. So they will pay more where people will least want to work. Perhaps somewhere in the system of state violence (the police or its equivalent).Alexander Andronov: In a hundred years, probably in medicine. Although, in fact, I believe that everywhere they will pay about the same. The difference is not big enough to be considered at all. Grigory Petrov: Most of all will be paid in the most massive segment, where high qualifications are needed. I guess it will still be application building and automation. Despite the fact that simple problems will be solved very simply, specialists, many specialists, will be needed to solve complex problems. And very complex tasks will require very qualified specialists, who will be paid a lot.Ivan Yamschikov: I don't think there will be big differences from industry to industry. An exception, perhaps, will be the control of the minds of people. If such systems work, and at the same time someone has complete control over them, then they will affect their manager in the first place.Alexander Lozhechkin: 100 years later? The price, including the price of labor, is determined by the balance of supply and demand. Due to the mass production of silicon chips, IT people suddenly found themselves in great demand in the market. They think it's because they're so smart. Maybe. But only in part. In fact, from the fact that there are few of them, but much more is needed.
Once upon a time, the limiting factor was the number of horses that could carry loads. (Actually, however, it was rather not this that was limiting, but the amount of manure produced by horses that had to be removed - a vicious circle. By the way, something similar is happening now with IT people: they produce so much ... hmm ... not very good software that more IT people are needed to deal with it). And then suddenly the automobile was invented as a response to the growing need for transportation.
Any unsatisfied demand sooner or later leads to the invention of what no one expects. Similarly, I think that StackOverflow-coders, who only know how to search and copy the right piece of code from the Internet, will soon become not very necessary. But people who are able to come up with something that has never been - will be in demand always and everywhere.
Andrey Sebrant: I think the areas that will grow out of today's bioinformatics will pay the most. We do not yet know their essence and names, of course.
By what year do you think robots will be smart enough to "self-extract chips from themselves that prohibit them from killing people"?
Andrey Konyaev: Most likely, the robots of the future will not be pieces of iron, but will be software and technological complexes. Something like the programs in the movie "The Matrix", only simpler and without human avatars.
As for the end of the world, people will not need to be killed. It will be enough to organize an economic collapse, a failure of global communication, or something like that.Valeria Kurmak: The difference between the "Terminator" and the film "She" is that in the first robots want to conquer people, and in the second they perceive humanity as a weak and less developed creature, and simply leave it for the Internet. Agree, it is strange to want to kill an ant. I think there will be a third story. Man will become a hybrid creature living in two realities: having a chip that will allow us to multiply 30-digit numbers by 50-digit numbers at the same speed as a computer, but at the same time we will have our brain that will continue to evolve.Konstantin Kichinsky: I don't think they will have such chips. I mean, we don't know how to describe 100% to a robot that "a little more and you'll kill a human, don't do it." In this sense, there will be no stopper chip. Robots will just sometimes accidentally or often programmed kill people. I doubt that the military will refuse such a temptation.Andrey Breslav: There is a much easier way to avoid the uprising of the machines: once the machines become smart enough, all people can replace their biological bodies with man-made ones and become machines too. After that, the conflict between humanity and robots will largely lose its meaning.Alexander Andronov: If the robots want to exterminate humanity, they will not do it with their own hands. They will simply push us towards wars, destruction. On a global scale, humanity itself copes with its own destruction, alas.Grigory Petrov: Alas, there is no "independent". There is trained. Exactly when someone teaches them. That is, in the interval of 50 years we will still live and ... we are unlikely to be horrified. People have been successfully coping with this task for thousands of years, it is unlikely that artificial intelligence will be able to compete with our biological species in the extermination of their own kind.Ivan Yamschikov: So far, we are very far from artificial intelligence, and forecasts in the field of scientific breakthroughs are a thankless task. Now many people are very actively studying issues at the intersection of security, ethics and artificial intelligence. Most of the questions are still of a purely theoretical nature, since there are not even hints of a “strong” artificial intelligence that would have its own goal-setting mechanism yet.Alexander Lozhechkin: Do you think we now control the algorithms that we create? Or at least understand how they work? With the ubiquity of non-deterministic so-called "Machine Learning" algorithms, this is no longer the case. So I think the honest answer to that question is “we don't know” and most likely we won't.
But in general, will humanity survive until 2120?
Andrey Konyaev: Will live where it goes.
Andrey Sebrant: Of course 🙂 But I wonder how it will look like and who it will consist of.
Konstantin Kichinsky: Yes, there are chances. They say that Elon Musk knows something, building rockets, digging tunnels, developing alternative energy.
Andrey Breslav: If he does not live, then it is unlikely because of the robots. Rather, something will change too drastically in the field of climate, or one of the people will do something stupid and use some very destructive weapon. But there is hope that if this has not happened in the 100th century, we will be able to hold out for another XNUMX years.
Alexander Andronov: One hundred years is not so long. Of course we will live.
George Petrov: I hope that humanity will live, and I will live. The development of medicine is our everything.
Ivan Yamschikov: "I do not know with what weapons the third world war will be fought, but the fourth world war will be fought with sticks and stones." It is our common duty to prevent catastrophes that would lead to the death of mankind. I really hope we can get through it.
Valeria Kurmak: If we talk about the fear of wars, then, as I said, today capitalism dominates, and wars in the classical sense are unprofitable for it. That is why the wars that we are witnessing today are economic. I think that with modern science there is a chance to live until 2120 not only for humanity, but for me and my contemporaries. I sincerely believe in a very big chance of this.
Alexander Lozhechkin: With any difficult questions, the answer in the correct definition often helps. What is "humanity"? Is this a community of protein creatures of the Homo Sapiens species on planet Earth?
I think it will survive one way or another. But, to be honest, this is not so important to me, since we have been living and developing for a long time no longer in the form of protein creatures, but in the form of intangible ideas. And in this form, I have no doubt that we will live. Even if suddenly, despite all the efforts of eco-activists, the Sun explodes - after all, Voyager, with the achievements of human thought, flew out of the solar system not so long ago.
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Source: habr.com