At least according to Omni magazine! They published an article about jobs that were supposed to be common by now. They were smoking some good crack. Just look at these job offerings: Some of these exist, just under different names, others of them are merely one aspect of someone's job, and many of them aren't al all common, still, I can't help but wondering WTF they were thinking when they came up with some of these. I mean, "Clone doctor and clone nurse"? We'd yet to clone a single animal at that point, let alone a human being. "Mutation expert"? WTF is that? Some kind of pest control expert after a nuclear war?
I like Maser Specialist. Would those be medical or industrial Masers? "Yep magnetron blew in your microwave, buy a new one, and by 'new one', I mean oven, cuz no one fixes that shit". There, I'm a specialist, gimme a check.
I think "teleconferencing coordinator" is interesting. I wonder if they pictured a switchboard operator, only more high-tech. As opposed to what really happened, which is actually far more advanced -- services like Skype, Go2Meeting and Bomgar making human intervention totally unnecessary.
Here's the one's that I can think of: MRI Operator, they were invented in '73, but almost nobody had heard of them until much later. Mars rover driver LHC technician CNC programmer CNC operator 3D Printer programmer Podcaster Social media expert SEO expert Reality TV star
Well, you've got dirt-farming, water-farming (hydroponics), air-farming (aeroponics) . . . so bio-farming. We will feed the starving masses with fungi grown on, well, let's call it bio-stuff
With slightly different titles or job descriptions, about half that list actually does exist. All the hubbub at the moment about antibiotics becoming useless, how to counteract bacterial evolution, I'd say it covers that.
But there's generally not one person dedicated to handling that job for an entire company. It might be someone's secretary, or it might be a designated member of the group. Problem is, we don't know what the original context was for what they were intending. In some cases, like the above "teleconferencing coordinator," did they mean a person who's sole job at the company was doing that? Because I seriously doubt there's anyone who just does that at any company. Again, it all depends upon what they originally meant by the term. It could be someone like a "genetic counselor" who helps people figure out if they're going to pass on a genetic disease to their children. It could also mean someone who studies the changes in drug resistant strains of bacteria and other diseases. Or, they might have been thinking that our environment would have gotten so screwed up, we humans (and other living creatures) were turning into things like this: And remember, these are supposed to be jobs that are common now. A number of the jobs that they list which do exist (such as Space shuttle repairperson [a few of them are still working on them in the museums, I'm sure], Automatic tunneling expert, and, Underwater archaeologist), aren't exactly common. Certainly not as common as a software engineer, or website designer.
A few other ones around now that didn't make their list: Mobile Application Developer Social Media Liaison SEO Optimizer Network Technician Video Game Tester