My first job didn’t exist when my mother started working. Her job didn’t exist when my grandfather started his career. Tomorrow’s jobs don’t exist today.

My grandfather spent his entire career with Indian Railways, retiring happily as a Station Master. Railways were the high-tech sector of his time.

My mother's career began as a telephone operator in Indian Telephones, connecting long-distance calls in a manual telephone exchange. For her generation, telecom was the cutting edge of technology.

My first job was writing software for a banking application, later coding in Java for the internet—the defining high-tech sector of my generation.

So what about the future in the age of AI?

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote:

“For the moment, the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and bringing difficult problems to solve. Those countries are suffering relatively, which are not in the vanguard of progress.

We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come and that is technological unemployment.

This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”

AI may be new, but the fear of technology taking our jobs is as old as the hills.

I can’t predict tomorrow’s jobs. But I know this: they will exist, even if we can’t imagine them today.

Career advice for young students

1. Learn to work with machines.
2. Learn to work with humans.

Master both, and you’ll be unstoppable.

To be honest, the same career advice applies to both young and old.

Take it easy until next time.

Blogging is something I enjoy, and I share my thoughts on my blog most weekends.

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