The Evolutionary Reality Check: Robot Psychologist
We human beings are doing something backwards that wasn't meant to be: typing on keyboards, wiggling on mouses, even driving cars. We just weren't designed for it, and, to be honest, we aren't really that good at it. That's what machines are for. We're supposed to rub meat together, gnaw our jaws in conversation, and pull our skin in wild, emotional directions — let's make love, let's protest the Iranian election. Gestures, language, emotion: these are the roots of human connection.And yet, over the next few decades, machines will almost certainly realize the inscrutable secret messages that humans use to communicate. The previous generation of human-machine interface — namely, the keyboard — is already headed out the window (thanks, iPhone). I'll put good money on robots learning to recognize hand gestures, understand natural speech, and even pick up our myriad emotions before your grandkids hit college.
But communication is a two-way street. To optimize human-machine interaction, robots will begin gesturing with their steely limbs, speaking human languages, and even (gasp!) using human emotions to convey their cold, robotic inner states. A broken robot may cry, while a threatened robot may put up its dukes. This new form of interface represents a completely natural mode of human communication, honed by millions of years of evolution. It also represents a profound, if necessary and inevitable, revolution in robotics: The automated wannabe human will have issues, and it will need its predecessor as a shrink — the other end of an emotional conversation it's learned from us, that increasingly irrelevant but ever-dominant species.
No, I'm not kidding. The new breed of robots will have feelings, but it will almost certainly lack the "traditional" programmatic interface that current machines have. And these machines will be too complex, too advanced in following our lead for a human being to reprogram on the fly. When a complete re-installation is too costly, we'll depend on our robots to reprogram themselves. And that means that you — a robot psychologist — will be making home visits to deliver therapy to malfunctioning appliances.
An expert on the robot mind, it will be your job to ask a robot what's wrong, find out where the problem happened, and determine how to fix it. Maybe a pool-cleaning robot (they already exist) has been infected with a virus (dissociative identity disorder), or its sensors are picking up imaginary objects (delusions and hallucinations), or perhaps its emotional center has been wiped out entirely (God forbid: a sociopath!).
As you spend countless hours in the garage diagnosing and debugging angsty robots through calm, rational conversation, just remember one thing: never fall in love with your client. Robot sex is a future best avoided
The Entry-Level Mindbender: Augmented Reality Filterer
We all know that the future from Back to the Future II was supposed to be filled with jetpacks and garbage-powered cars and free love and various combinations of those. But it hasn't happened yet, and we can't rightfully expect that it ever will. Instead, the researchers and geeks with whom I speak all too often predict a future filled with hologram ads for McDonald's. Because thanks to "augmented reality" — a technology that's been around for a decade but that's only now coming to fruition — even an ugly word ("augmented," really?) can become a beautiful (if cluttered) experience. Augmented reality overlays additional visual or auditory information on your environment. Right now it's limited to holding up cool shit to your webcam, but by the time we reach Doc Brown's era, a pair of camera-equipped goggles will, I guarantee, be recording the hypercoded billboards and targeted 3-D experiences all around you, filtering them, and delivering whatever advertisement or Uber-Google search or TV show your virgin eyes ultimately desire. (You'll probably have some earplugs playing Radiohead along the way, if you're still into them.)
The problem? That damn filter. Tom Cruise walked through a hallway with creepy voices just screaming at him in Minority Report, and someone's gonna have to channel that information to the right people (here's hoping Cruise is off the radar by then), and channel in it real time. Because Lord knows rich, conservative people of the future (yes, there will be rich, conservative people again) won't tolerate some national anti-abortion law finding its way into their designer 3-D glasses.
Your job, then, or at least someone's, will be to walk in front of those rich, conservative people, experiencing and intercepting the real world so your boss doesn't have to. Indeed, the digital executive assistants of the future will get to see a lot of cool shit so the top rungs don't have to. Alas, class warfare may wage on through the next recession or two.
The Phone-in Day Shift: Telepresence Maid
You thought outsourcing was bad? Get this: Thirty years from now, you'll be able to make a living vicariously from your couch, doing little more than it took to play with the Power Glove on Nintendo thirty years back. Fully autonomous humanoid servant robots will, like the spam-free targeted goggles, be a privilege of the future's upper class. The rest of us? We'll have our houses cleaned and our babies' diapers changed by cheap, brainless bots controlled from very far away by even less-well-off future humans. Their job, however, will be easy as pie in the sky: the "telepresence" maid.
With telepresence, a person feels as though they are the robot by controlling its body and seeing through its eyes. Working in shifts of a couple hours at a time, different people from all over the world will someday be able to control a single robot that "lives" in a specific household. As a telepresence maid, you'll be able to take home a paycheck sitting in your cramped trailer with little more than virtual-reality goggles and movement-sensing gloves. Sounds monotonous, but beats spending all your cash on the next generation of Internet porn.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/best-future-job-careers-061809#ixzz13XMrSbU3
