Five years ago, I thought seriously about my future for the first time. I was 16 and trying to decide which path to take, toward which subject, at which university and in which country to orient myself. There was, all around me, an unspoken understanding shared by many people: that there are certain jobs of the future and that, if I am a smart girl and start studying early, I can position myself carefully so as to have a successful career. Want money, prestige and short working hours? Get a degree in Computer Science, land a job as a Software Developer, write code with ease, and collect, at the end of the month, a sum considerably larger than the poor souls who made other choices.

In the meantime, a series of spectacular global phenomena unfolded. We went through a pandemic, through inflation followed by a sharp rise in interest rates, through wars around the world, and through the explosion of artificial intelligence. As a result, or, for those who want statistical precision, in correlation, the traditional tech industry has stagnated.

Today's statistics

A recent analysis shows that, in 2024 alone, 150,000 people were laid off, as part of a wave of mass layoffs in the tech sector. In other words, the very people whose careers we were all longing for a few years earlier woke up overnight with an email explaining (more gently or more bluntly) that there was no point in coming back to the office next month. At the start of 2023, IBM announced that it would stop hiring people whose tasks can be replaced by artificial intelligence. Many of my friends in London, Computer Science graduates from prestigious universities, are still looking for jobs. It seems that artificial intelligence writes code and builds slides better than a junior at a large company. Every few months, a new model appears, one that codes even better, executes even faster, and makes us all wonder, at three in the morning when we cannot sleep, what jobs are left for humans.

What conclusions can we draw? If you are a high school student trying to figure out which career to head toward, how do you make a decision?

The first thing to consider is that a substantial reshuffling of traditional industries is coming. A friend who is passionate about technology wrote this article, about how artificial intelligence will replace the jobs called 'white collar' (that is, the people in office buildings, in mid-sized and large companies). His model starts from a simple premise: while you are reading these words, the labs at the frontier of artificial intelligence research (Meta, DeepSeek, etc.) are working on the discovery of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), autonomous intelligence systems that surpass human thinking in the vast majority of economic activities. The people in these labs are optimistic that they will invent such models very soon (some estimate as early as 2026). Even if you adopt a balanced perspective, the principle still holds: whatever the pace of change, the coming decades will witness an explosion of intelligence. What does this mean for large companies, with a predefined hierarchical structure (entry level, mid-junior, middle management, senior management)? Little by little, more and more layers of the pyramid will become easy to replace.

A game of imagination

Imagine the following scenario: each year, company X hires 10 juniors. Over time, it trains them, and in 2-3 years, after some of their seniors resign or retire, it promotes them. The cycle repeats constantly, year after year, people leave, people come. Except that, in 2030, research lab Y builds an artificial intelligence agent that does a junior's work at a similar quality. What is more, because it does not sleep, does not eat, does not take breaks, and costs significantly less than an employee, the virtual agent is an excellent way to cut costs dramatically. The company decides (out of a desire to maximize profit or simply out of the need to stay competitive in the market) to hire only 1 junior the following year, equipping that person with such an agent and achieving the same output that 10 employees produce today.

Over time, if you accept that artificial intelligence models keep improving and if you accept the basic principles of capitalism, you can imagine how more and more people in the company are replaced, until you end up with a handful of people, armed with a series of hyper-intelligent agents and an extraordinary amount of data, stored in some data centers far away. It sounds dystopian, I know. But just think how many people it took two hundred years ago to send a message from Bucharest to London. You wrote it on a piece of paper, took it to the post office (which, in turn, employed a whole host of people), someone picked up the letter, drove it, someone else took it onto a boat, crossed the English Channel, it was received by another person who carried it to the final destination, from where a postman brought it to the recipient. Today, if you want to send a message from Bucharest to London, you need about two seconds, a social network, and a basic phone. This kind of transformation has happened constantly throughout history (at least over the past 400 years).

Where to, then?

One obvious first answer is clear, go straight to the source. Get a job at a research lab, position yourself somewhere close to the frontier of artificial intelligence, and catch the wave while it is still moving. Or try to become a doctor, which is and has always been the safest profession.

Here ends the list of clear recipes. If neither of these two options appeals to you, arm yourself with patience and adaptability. Because many of the jobs that exist now, many of the careers that seem so secure to us, will disappear in the coming decades. One recommendation, perhaps, is to optimize for inherently human skills. The most important (in my view) is creativity. In other words, the ability to connect distinct situations and generate entirely new ideas. Everything repetitive in a job will be taken over in the coming decades, by computers or systems that will be better at repetition than the most talented human in the art of repeating. Ironically, this is exactly the answer ChatGPT gives if you ask it which jobs will be the most popular in 2080. So, if you want to optimize for the careers of the future, develop your ability to come up with new ideas, the bolder, the better.

And yet, how do new ideas come to you? The eternal, nebulous question to which no one has a concrete answer. Steve Jobs recommended taking afternoon walks and spending a lot of time looking up at the sky. Others suggest sitting in a chair, thinking about nothing, bringing yourself into a state of boredom, and an idea will come. There is no clear recipe; it is up to you to go fishing for ideas. If you are a high school student choosing your university, it might be a good idea to opt for abstract fields that wring your mind in every direction and demand that you constantly produce new things, philosophy, mathematics, art. Above all, it is important to give yourself the space to look out at the world, to think carefully about what it is missing, and to never stop asking questions (even if the teacher gets annoyed or loses patience). When you have found an idea you like, think about whether there is a book, a play, a product, or a company in it. The rest follows on its own.

Threat or opportunity?

Let me leave you, at the end, with an optimistic suggestion. Perhaps I have painted a slightly terrifying picture, of a dystopian world in which we are controlled by robots and lose our agency. In reality, neither I nor you know where the future is headed. Artificial intelligence will destroy careers, just as the computer, the engine, and hundreds of other inventions did before it. But (and here is the optimistic suggestion) it can be an opportunity to change our world for the better. In ten years, if you have an idea and some minimal knowledge, you might manage to code a program without needing to hire three programmers for it. You might be able to create a prototype of a product all by yourself, on some random afternoon. Maybe multinationals will be replaced by a multitude of small businesses, by teams of a few people and a great deal of intelligence, working simultaneously on the world's most ambitious inventions. Or maybe we will all work less and have time to read, to write, to draw, or to take an afternoon walk and watch the sunset.