We aren’t that far away from a rather dystopian world where so much of our lives are monitored and recorded that we will be an open book.

Imagine going for a job interview and before you arrive a digital, AI private detective has tracked every possible video, image, and written document that you’ve shared publicly, and given you a score based on company criteria that you are not privy to. And maybe that tracking will go beyond publicly shared data and reveal even more about you, like medical information scraped from a data breach you know nothing about.

Imagine going into that interviews where you are submitted to a ‘voluntary’ brain scan as part of the interview… that you agree to knowing full well that you won’t get the job if you don’t volunteer.

That scan will check to see if you are being honest during the interview, and it will also do things like measure the size of your anterior medsingulate cortex, which will let the company know if you are someone who does or does not challenge themselves. The company hiring you will know more about you than your friends and family do.

And for a real dystopian plot twist: it’s an android interviewing you for a mundane job that androids consider too menial to do! Even without this twist, I wonder what the job market will look like in 20 years? What role will humans play in the overall work force? What jobs are uniquely human, and what jobs can a brilliant if not super intelligent AI do?

I’m not sure how much the job market will truly change in just 20 years, but at the rate of advancement that I’m seeing in robotics and artificial intelligence, I really think a major disruption in what we call work is coming. The disruption will be uneven at first, taking more jobs in different sectors than in others, but sooner than we would want to envision, the disruption is coming in almost every sector. What will that really mean for humans and the things we define as work?