Disruption Rules
More than expertise in a single field, students need the skills to master new ones.
By Vivek Wadhwa
When parents ask me what careers I recommend for their children, I tell them the particular field young people choose hardly matters — they should pursue their passion. The most important skill of the future is the ability to learn — and to reinvent oneself. Gone are the days when we would work in a chosen profession for a lifetime. Advancing technologies will wipe out entire industries — and create new ones — in less time than it takes to complete a Ph.D. The jobs that college freshmen aspire to may not even exist by the time they graduate.
Note the way the Internet already has disrupted industries such as publishing and travel and made possible new industries such as e-commerce and global IT services. The disruptors don’t necessarily come from the lower end of the market, as management guru Clayton Christensen postulated in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma; they come from other industries — or out of nowhere.
Fields such as computing, medicine, artificial intelligence, 3-D printing, robotics, nanomaterials, and synthetic biology are advancing at exponential rates, and combining these technologies allows one industry to disrupt another. That is how Amazon.com, a technology company, disrupted bookstores; how Apple shook up the music industry; and how mapping apps on cellphones have displaced GPS devices. And that is how, in the number of beds it can market, Airbnb has become the fifth-largest hotel chain in the world, and how Uber is shaking up the taxi industry.
Not only will industries disappear, but so will jobs. Self-driving cars will be commercially available by the end of this decade and will eventually displace human drivers. Just as automobiles displaced the horse and buggy, these new vehicles will eliminate the jobs of taxi, bus, and truck drivers. Drones will take the jobs of postmen and delivery people. Industrial robots have advanced to the point at which they can do the same physical work as human workers. With the operating cost of some robots now less than the salary of an average Chinese worker, these will transform manufacturing into a highly automated, local industry. After all, unlike human beings, robots don’t complain, join labor unions, or get distracted. They readily work 24 hours a day and require minimal maintenance. Robots will also take the jobs of farmers, pharmacists, and grocery clerks.
Medical sensors in our smartphones, clothing, and bathrooms will soon be monitoring our health on a minute-to-minute basis. Combined with electronic medical records and genetic and lifestyle data, these will provide enough information for physicians to focus on preventing disease before it occurs rather than on curing it. And yes, artificial intelligence will increasingly perform much of what doctors — along with data analysts — now do.
Futurists and technology gurus say we will create many new jobs — just as we did in the past during the industrial, green, and Internet revolutions. I worry about human employment in the long term because technology will start advancing faster than our ability to generate new jobs-but in the short term there will surely be many opportunities. There are already shortages of workers in new professions. Manufacturers who want to bring production back to the United States say that they can’t find enough skilled workers here to run their automated factories, and Silicon Valley companies are battling each other for talent.
There are big challenges ahead in retraining workers who will be displaced from existing industries and graduates who studied the wrong fields. We also can’t predict what the emerging industries will be, so how can we develop university curricula and train our aging professors to prepare today’s students for what’s to come?
This much we do know: The jobs of the future will require a mix of creativity, adaptability, and technical competence. Cross-disciplinary knowledge will provide a major advantage. The humanities will play an important role because these build creative skills and empathy — a critical ingredient in design. Workers will need to be able to constantly acquire new expertise. To remain employed — and productive — our students will need to keep up with technological advances and emerging opportunities. As educators, we’ll need to show them how. But first, we need to reinvent ourselves.
Vivek Wadhwa is a scholar of entrepreneurship and director of research at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering. He is also affiliated with Stanford, Emory, and Singularity Universities.