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Not long ago, schoolchildren chose what they wanted to be when they grew up, and later selected the best college they could gain admission to, spent years gaining proficiency in their fields, and joined a company that had a need for their skills. Careers lasted lifetimes.
Now, by my estimates, the half-life of a career is about 10 years. I [Vivek Wadhwa] expect that it will decrease, within a decade, to five years. Advancing technologies will cause so much disruption to almost every industry that entire professions will disappear. And then, in about 15–20 years from now, we will be facing a jobless future, in which most jobs are done by machines and the cost of basic necessities such as food, energy and health care is negligible — just as the costs of cellphone communications and information are today. We will be entering an era of abundance in which we no longer have to work to have our basic needs met. And we will gain the freedom to pursue creative endeavors and do the things that we really like.
I am not kidding. Change is happening so fast that our children may not even need to learn how to drive. By the late 2020s, self-driving cars will have proven to be so much safer than human-driven ones that we will be debating whether humans should be banned from public roads; and clean energies such as solar and wind will be able to provide for 100 percent of the planet's energy needs and cost a fraction of what fossil fuel– and nuclear-based generation does today.
In other words, every industry is disruptible by technology. Presumably, banking and punditry are forever?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:15PM
That would only work if we either abolish capitalism or give everyone a baseline living wage. There also needs to be a change in social perception that it's perfectly okay to be unemployed.
Ideally, we tell all of the pencil-pushers to stop coming to work and hire a few thousand decent programmers to automate away all of that bureaucratic Excel spreadsheet nonsense. Boom, we've instantly rendered some 30%-60% of all jobs unnecessary.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:26PM
Isn't it sort of already here? Among younger generations, establishing a proud career for a steady employer and having a large, expensive-to-support family is no longer a necessary path in life to avoid scandalizing one's fellow citizens. Having enough money to keep a social life going might be important, but I already do that by picking up odd jobs as a freelancer. None of my friends are particularly interested where that money spent on our activities together is coming from, so if suddenly its source were replaced with a baseline wage and I no longer did work, it wouldn't make much of a difference.
Indeed. My wife once worked in an office where her workflow might have seemed complex and taken hours each day with the Windows apps that the company mandated, but it could have very easily been replaced with some Unix piped commands. Some people here might have read the The Two Cultures of Computing [pgbovine.net], a.k.a. "How Ya Gonna Get 'Em Down on UNIX After They've Seen Spotify?". It's funny if we might have to thank ignorance of four-decade-old computing technologies for the fact people still have jobs so far.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:39PM
Talking about Unix when everyone here loves Linux? You must be some kind of Troll.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:47AM
There are places hiring people to print things out from one computer and then type it into a second...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:46PM
Some people here might have read the The Two Cultures of Computing [pgbovine.net], a.k.a. "How Ya Gonna Get 'Em Down on UNIX After They've Seen Spotify?"
There's an interesting parody of that, which I can't find by others might recognize, where the author analogizes with the building trades and points out the carpenter thinks nicely cut roof trusses are artistic and interesting and are his job, whereas the average end user likes housing bubble bullshit like stainless steel appliances and granite countertops, and this is CLI vs GUI argument from that essay.
Then it runs off the rails by mixing in a second analogy that most non-building trades people have no idea WTF is going on, so you end up with WTF pics getting circulated about comical construction projects done by amateurs that a real carpenter would do better in five minutes, but billy bob aint no carpenter and doesn't know what he doesn't know about carpentry, so he looks like an idiot to a carpenter or even a merely average craftsman.
And that is the root problem of MBA types trying to run a world being eaten by software, without understanding the basic concepts of software.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:41PM
If you really think that 30-60% of payroll can be eliminated easily by a few programmers, then do it. Get contracts. Make billions. What kind of an idiot MBA wouldn't beat down your door to reduce their employment costs by 30-60%?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:39AM
What kind of an idiot MBA wouldn't beat down your door to reduce their employment costs by 30-60%?
The idiot MBA that your program will replace.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:49AM
If he is an idiot, he would not realize it until the contract was signed. If he isn't an idiot, he will only sign a contract for others to be replaced.
There really is no way to lose...if it can be pulled off. There is no evidence that it can't be done save for the weak evidence that it has not already been done.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:10AM
The kind of MBA with even a tiny bit of political sense. Removing the jobs of thousands of people is not how you make friends, especially when those people depend on that job to feed their family. No amount of sugar coating will protect you from half your working class, more or less, coming to remove your head from your body.
If we took care of that problem by making it possible for those people to feed their family without a job and remove any existing social stigma from being unemployed, by all means I will try to answer your challenge.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:03AM
I think you are equivocating MBA's with politicians. MBA's sole purpose is to make money. That's it. They don't care about making friends and no one has ever had the hordes of people they layoff en masse every day come back and cut their head off.
You are asking for a world changing event where your hypothesis wont be necessary anymore before you are willing to test if it is even possible. It could make you so very rich right now if you speak the truth that you could be the change you want to see.
Honestly that saving-face gesture of making your willingness to try conditional is very easy to see through.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @11:31AM
Its already happened in many companies. Now its all about making the drones generate custom meaningless completely unactionable reports that no one reads, but as long as the empire grows and the number of reports increases for status reasons because meaningless manipulated numbers increase, its all good for everyone.
Not that I'm bitter or speaking from personal experience, LOL.
Numbers can be tracked, graphed, analyzed, and competed with other divisions, but if they're gamed, meaningless, and unactionable, its just empire building.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:48AM
That would only work if we either abolish capitalism or give everyone a baseline living wage. There also needs to be a change in social perception that it's perfectly okay to be unemployed.
What's supposed to be perfectly ok about being unemployed? Who is paying for this baseline living wage? And what are you doing either to deserve this baseline wage or make it happen?
I see yet again a lot of talk about what we should be doing, but not a lot of talk about how to make it work. Capitalism for all its faults just works. Even if we were to accept the claim that capitalism leaves a lot to be desired, that still leaves the equivalent of an ancient but reliable mainframe that is kept running because it does the job while no one can be certain that a modern replacement would. So we're supposed to abandon a working system for something new that hasn't even been tried yet.
There's plenty of horror stories about huge upgrades failing in the real world. We need a demonstration that this works and is affordable.
Ideally, we tell all of the pencil-pushers to stop coming to work and hire a few thousand decent programmers to automate away all of that bureaucratic Excel spreadsheet nonsense.
I'll note here that the spreadsheet nonsense has already resulted in a vast increase in productivity. For example, I work at Yellowstone National Park as an auditor for a concessionaire. Back in the 80s, the two largest hotels in the park used to employ about a dozen to fifteen people each for comptrolling, mostly to handle money and manually shuffle paper. Now, they employ about five each with greatly reduced money handling and paper shuffling. A significant part of that reduced load is your spreadsheet nonsense, translating data between computer systems (that weren't in use in the 80s) that don't talk to each other via putting sales and audit data into spreadsheets and having those spreadsheets pass the data around.
Sure, a few good programmers in the right places could moot a lot of the current work load (I suppose, if you combine that with elimination of cash and a few other things, you could push the staff down to say two people - I think you would still need some level of comptroller coverage), but the low lying fruit has already been taken. There isn't a lot of jobs left to eliminate here. The new jobs that were created in the company are more analytical. Those won't magically go away just because we have more data, more efficiently delivered, to analyze.
Boom, we've instantly rendered some 30%-60% of all jobs unnecessary.
And create a bunch of new jobs in the process. No one has yet discerned what's supposed to be different this time than the last half a millennium. Devons paradox and comparative advantage still apply.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @11:56AM
The new jobs that were created in the company are more analytical.
There's a seedcorn / bootstrap issue here. You used to have a culture, a country, where 15 people were employed, admittedly in low end paper pushing, but they were employed. And their property taxes paid the school system to generate a spectrum of kids, where apparently 2 to 5 of the next generation are smart enough to be analytical enough to operate a dramatically more complex, yet more efficient, system. Now there is a side effect that only employing 2 people in a village of 15 people means 13 unemployed people. Maybe a couple can get McJobs in fast food, lets face it, they're the bottom cognitive 13/15ths of the population they're not going to be scientists and 13/15ths of the population can't be entrepreneurs or CEOs under the existing system. So the village turns into Detroit. The kids school teacher only gets 2/15ths of her previous salary because only 2 of 15 are still employed, so she quits or moves elsewhere. The next generation after that, they need two of the fifteen grandkids who aced math to become employees and F the poor they can bootstrap like us rich kids did... whoops, when the culture turned into Detroit now 0 out of 15 got the education and parenting to ace math and become one of the very few remaining employees. Whoops. Well you could put any random village idiot into an advanced math position, but that'll fail. Ever wonder why failed states and failed cities seem to be run and staffed by morons? Its because they are. Everyone who could leave, because they were smart enough, did. What happens when you can't leave anymore because there's nowhere to leave to, uprisings, riots, civil disorder...
The problem with sweeping people under the rug is eventually you get an elephant sized pile of (pissed off slightly inferior) humanity. Another way to look at it, is it seems "natural" and "normal" to us to have a culture that only rewards the top richest people and the cognitive elite and the top entertainers and F the poor prosperity gospel style because that's what we've had for so long. However, looking at history, those societies usually end up militarily wiped out by a better run society or end with guillotines. So "F the poor" is a nice strategy that works great until it doesn't, and then someone elses troops are marching down main street or the village square is full of chopping sounds. So that seems to inevitably be our future.
From a practical matter I don't think there's anything terribly ethical or moral about designing a society to screw over all its members except the richest and smartest. In other words I don't feel much pity for a crappy design that produces pragmatically bad results. The true believers in capitalism don't realize it doesn't work with corruptible humans, most people in it have to be losers for it to work and they're going to be pissed off. They sound as bad as the true believers in communism. "Well in theory it works great, even if in practice it always failed"... was that a quote about the commies or the crony capitalists?
If something like a military swept in, "red dawn" style and said "we're gonna take all you own, and all your jobs, and you're all gonna go back to being poor uneducated feudal peasants" then there would be a mass uprising. So the PTB have been implementing it piecemeal, say 5% to 10% of the middle class per decade gets wiped out. So far they've been pretty successful at implementing it. Its hard to have an uprising when only 5% of the population is being screwed over and I'm sure if I'm a good quisling and vote for it, they'll never screw me over or I'll be the last. However, the whole point of recent stories is its gonna happen to like 50% of the population all within one decade for unregulated technological reasons blah blah. "Its OK to screw people over as long as its a tiny minority" sells pretty well when 5% of the population is screwed over per decade, but doesn't sell too well when its 50% over five years. So may as well start stockpiling guns and investing in guillotine manufacturing companies, gonna be an exciting time coming up.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:21PM
Now there is a side effect that only employing 2 people in a village of 15 people means 13 unemployed people.
This side effect hasn't manifested in half a millennium. What's special about now? I really don't see the point to the rest of your post since there's no indication that we're building up a pile of unemployable people.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:05PM
there's no indication that we're building up a pile of unemployable people.
Yeah we're certainly in a vibrant economy, LOL. Technically you started it, with replacing a large number of lower level people with a small number of higher level people. I agree thats a great idea for that small little department. Its a disaster at civilization level. Like many things, something thats good for a very few is often a disaster if everyone does it. I'm just scaling your small example up to an entire country.
That works great for one department at one site, but doesn't scale civilization wide unless you engage in ruthless genetic engineering to boost "everyone", or at least enough, to a higher level of performance and intelligence, so they can get a job elsewhere in the new "only smart people now get jobs" economy. Assuming there is enough economic activity after all that firing for there to be any jobs at all, surely they're only going to be jobs for, say, IQ > 120, where the criteria only ruthlessly increases each year. And the point is that we're not putting any effort into fixing the population at all, and even if we were, human biological generations are an order of magnitude too slow to keep up with the economic changes on the way. If people live for a century, and the economy is kicking out absolutely everyone with an IQ below 140 out in a decade or so, genetic engineering isn't going to save us. Now if we downsized all the dumb people in a century instead of a decade, we'd stand a chance if we actually went thru with the genetic engineering project, which doesn't exist and is just a pipe dream anyway.
Here's a new theoretical discussion model. Lets get all the politics and theories out of the way. Lets talk about supermarkets. So the shelves are all different heights, but for the sake of argument, due to flooding caused by global warming, we're going to stop using the lower shelves. Flood water ruins little debbie snack cakes, after all. In fact we'll have the feds set a legal lower food store shelf height above ground level, and adjust that upward with coal burning and global warming, because we're not gonna stop, or more accurately trying to stop will cause more net systemic damage than the floods. Agreeing to the above for the sake of argument... Well at first its no big deal. Midgets can't buy twinkies anymore, oh well. Then the bottom shelf gets higher and five foot people start having trouble reaching food. Sucks to be them, according to prosperity gospel if they donated to the right church god would make them taller so F those heretics. Eventually only, lets say, 5% of the population can reach the shelf thats seven feet in the air. Well technology blah blah it hasn't been a problem for past years so it'll never be a problem in the future, send them back to tech school for ladder climbing and ladder manufacturing class... Eventually the bread riots start when the bottom shelf gets too far in the air for "most" of the population to ever get food. You can tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps all you want, but when they're too poor and hungry to build a ladder to get up there, out some the guillotines and the revolution is on. Some things just don't scale, like assuming human primates have an infinite capacity for height (or intelligence, or training), or that they will accept arbitrary criteria for the rich to get richer while they and their families starve to death in a land of supposed (average) plenty.
On average, one multi billionaire in a gated community in a 3rd world slum of 100K starving citizens has great average financial stats, although on average its also a pretty bad place to live, at least until the revolution. This is the economic model the USA idealizes, and is headed toward as quickly as possible. Its gonna suck. The road to hell being paved with good intentions, its going to be a continuous stream of "shoulda gone to college" "shoulda got more training" "shoulda had med insurance before getting sick" "shoulda worked harder" every step of the way, right up to the pitchforks molotovs and guillotines.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 30 2015, @12:15AM
Yeah we're certainly in a vibrant economy, LOL.
You treat it as a joke, but that is a true observation.
Technically you started it, with replacing a large number of lower level people with a small number of higher level people.
And then creating new lower level jobs.
In fact we'll have the feds set a legal lower food store shelf height above ground level, and adjust that upward with coal burning and global warming, because we're not gonna stop, or more accurately trying to stop will cause more net systemic damage than the floods.
Interesting model. The problem here is federal regulation strongly interfering with the ability of grocery stores to provide for their customers. That matches well the developed world's approach to unemployment, including the usual blaming of the problem on climate change rather than spectacularly bad government policy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @08:54PM
Starting about 1980, after every recession, employment comes back to "normal" levels SLOWER each cycle. It takes ever longer to return to normal. If the trend continues, then the ramp up span will last longer than span itself between recessions.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2015, @12:34AM
Starting about 1980, after every recession, employment comes back to "normal" levels SLOWER each cycle.
That is coupled with massive disincentives to employ people. China and India don't have those problems.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:46PM
If something like a military swept in, "red dawn" style and said "we're gonna take all you own, and all your jobs, and you're all gonna go back to being poor uneducated feudal peasants" then there would be a mass uprising.
Hah... you and what army? All the guns in your safe that they so 'graciously' let you keep because of the 2nd amendment? Good luck with your leadpopper against a predator drone hovering over your house armed with a hellfire missile. Same thing with your assault rifle against an abrams tank.
You people are a bit too optimistic about this whole 'mass uprising' and 'overthrowing the tyranny with the help of our guns'.
If they sweep in 'red dawn' style then you will be dead. You will be dead before you even knew it was happening. You know why? Because you've been on a list for years, you've been monitored for years. Heck they even know where you are in real time because you tagged yourself with an ankle-brace... woops, I mean cell phone.
Face it buster, you lost!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:01PM
Capitalism for all its faults just works
...until it completely falls on its face--which it does about every 80 years.
Capitalism is still a thing only because the Fascists in gov't keep using taxpayer money to bail out failed Capitalists.
Screw the boom-and-bust cycle and the accompanying bailouts.
abandon a working system for something new that hasn't even been tried yet.
The new thing (and it isn't all that new) -has- been tried and it works GREAT.
Mondragon: Successful Socialism since 1956 (aka Democracy in the workplace).
Yes, there is an alternative to capitalism: Mondragon shows the way [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [rdwolff.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:28PM
...until it completely falls on its face--which it does about every 80 years.
It falls on its face more often than that. That's part of what makes it work so well. The instability removes inefficient parts of the economy.
Capitalism is still a thing only because the Fascists in gov't keep using taxpayer money to bail out failed Capitalists.
The process you describe is by definition not capitalist.
The new thing (and it isn't all that new) -has- been tried and it works GREAT. Mondragon: Successful Socialism since 1956 (aka Democracy in the workplace).
Two things to note. First Mondragon is immersed in a capitalist society. Second, it falls flat on its face too as it did during the latest economic downturn. I can't yet tell whether that is more or less often than 80 years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:49PM
Capitalism is still a thing only because the Fascists in gov't keep using taxpayer money to bail out failed Capitalists.
The process you describe is by definition not capitalist.
I disagree, you seem to think that capitalism and fascism are mutually exclusive. Sadly they are not.
The fascist capitalists are handing money to themselves to keep the status quo.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 30 2015, @10:49PM
you seem to think that capitalism and fascism are mutually exclusive
There's an obvious reason I disagree. What does private ownership of capital mean in a fascist society? Whatever the glorious leaders feel it means. A capitalist society protects private ownership. You don't have that in a fascist society.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:48PM
Top lel. How can you be so sure that capitalism "just works" (too bad about those pesky externalities, time to invest in house boats) if it's not being implemented anywhere?
Except maybe Somalia, where things like roads and police forces are maintained by rational self-interest. [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2015, @12:31AM
How can you be so sure that capitalism "just works" (too bad about those pesky externalities, time to invest in house boats) if it's not being implemented anywhere?
It's being implemented in plenty of places. The logical fail is to assume that a number of situations where you are precisely breaking capitalism is somehow a fault of capitalism. Let's look at the sentence that kicked this off.
Capitalism is still a thing only because the Fascists in gov't keep using taxpayer money to bail out failed Capitalists.
Screw the boom-and-bust cycle and the accompanying bailouts.
Fundamentally, the problem, "bail outs" described here is that people with power are taking stuff from people without power. That's a universal problem with all human societies, not just capitalist ones. The question shouldn't be whether capitalism has this problem, but whether the problem is worse than other approaches. I would argue that capitalism performs relatively good and has a number of advantages in addition.
Second, the fundamental characteristic of capitalism is private ownership of capital. If I'm taxing your ability to acquire capital for the frivolous purpose of bailing out my fail buddies, then I'm breaking that characteristic. What other economic or political system is attacked on the basis that when you deliberately break it (sometimes with considerable effort), it doesn't work quite as well?
It's also worth noting that most of the breaking has nothing to do with capitalism. For example, the majority of federal level spending is entitlements for the masses and the military. Eminent domain was a top down approach for public works which turned out to be very graft friendly. And there's a long history of anti-capitalist ploys used to keep people from getting drunk or high. All of these things provide opportunities for enrichment at public expense. Once again it is demonstrated that private companies which focus on a particular thing (be it making something useful or milking the public teat) succeed better than some top down managers who don't have a clue what they're doing. Good though not very capitalist intentions have morphed into crony capitalism and fascism.
The complaints about capitalism are remarkable understated as well. After many decades of these anti-capitalist shenanigans in the US, we have slightly worse income and wealth equality? Maybe slightly worse employment rates? What other system can meet this sort of high expectation and still perform well?
And unlike a lot of fantasy systems, capitalism is implemented to some degree everywhere with considerable success. We don't have to like China's or India's implementation of it to see that it has helped hundreds of millions in each country escape poverty. Capitalism has a powerful resilience and adaptability. Perhaps, we should fix what is broken rather than continue to break capitalism more while complaining that it's not working like it should.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday July 30 2015, @05:10AM
The 2010 US Census found that the overall poverty rate in the US is 15.1%. In 2007, the top 1% owned 40% of wealth. Yep, just works. Resources are being distributed fairly. All hail economics! All hail capitalism!
I'd like to extend this quote: If the automobile had followed the same development as capitalism, a Rolls-Royce would be constructed entirely of tinfoil, except the hood decoration, which would be made of pure platinum and encrusted with the highest quality gemstones. The car would drive automatically, perfectly safely, for ten minutes at a time, before spontaneously combusting and driving into the nearest streetlamp. After inserting a credit card and charging $1000 dollars to a central account, the car will extinguish itself and again be ready for ten minutes of safe driving.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2015, @12:38AM
The 2010 US Census found that the overall poverty rate in the US is 15.1%. In 2007, the top 1% owned 40% of wealth. Yep, just works. Resources are being distributed fairly. All hail economics! All hail capitalism!
US capitalism is growing further impaired by a bunch of anti-capitalist policies and ideologies, frequently implemented by the very people who claim to be concerned about income inequality. Further, the US is competing with the developing world, which has vastly lower labor costs. The poor's wealth is in their labor while the rich's wealth is in capital. One would expect, no matter the system, that the poor would fare worse under that situation.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:04AM
My employer uses a third party payroll service, which makes a lot of mistakes. If you can automate that for us, improving reliability and undercutting the current system, you can has money.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:28PM
There also needs to be a change in social perception that it's perfectly okay to be unemployed.
It mostly already is.
Kids, retired people, students. All perfectly OK. Used to be socially acceptable to be a wife, then more specifically a mom, then a mom of young children... Still kinda OK somewheres in some peoples opinions. In the old days when I was a kid it was assumed college students like me had a part time grunt labor gig, which I did, which darn near paid my way, but illegals and student loans got rid of economic model so students mostly sit around and play video games now. Soldiers are kinda in between. When I wasn't deployed in the field we had nothing to do so we consumed donuts and coffee and sweat it out in PT and didn't really "do" anything. I suppose having soldiers do nothing is generally a net societal good and doing nothing while getting paid for it is a pretty good description of unemployment LOL.
This is before we get wanna be jobs. In middle america, in most of the country, most part time minimum wage bartenders, waitresses, real estate agents, salespeople in general are liberal arts degree holders, education degree holders, etc. For them its the closest thing to a real job they'll ever have, even if it is just a grown-ups version of a teens McJob. HOWEVER in LA those jobs are held by wanna be actors, wanna be screenwriters, wanna be whatevers in the greater hollywood coprosperity sphere. I predict the growth of wannabe. "Well, yeah, technically I work for the county picking up roadkill corpses from the side of the road for three hours a week at minimum wage, but what I REALLY am is a high frequency trading algorithm designer, its just I'm starting out and trying to break into the industry, ya know, get my big break." You also see this with artists, particularly crafty touristy crap where they don't really try to make a living off it but they carve bird decoys in front of the TV all day and then try to sell them to tourists at the farmers market, but they're not really artists, or more accurately they're not really good, but they don't really care and it doesn't matter so its all good. The world of the future is gonna have a metric shit ton of painted plywood cutouts of a fat woman bending over in her garden for sale, probably online. I actually saw one of those once on a drive thru the country. "I'm an artist!" Uh sure.
So I predict that socially everyone will be studying (for some small, slow, half way value of study) on free internet classes to become a computer programmer aka they're "students", or they'll have a wanna be trade or craft which they may or may not be any good at and may or may not spend any time at but it will be their identity none the less, and if they look young and glamorous enough they'll have part time minimum wage wannabe "press the flesh" jobs like receptionist at a hospital or whatever.