Digital creativity: the jobs of tomorrow

November 13, 2024

What new professions are likely to emerge in the next few years and decades? How will work relationships be reinvented, and companies and institutions reorganized? How will our professions change and evolve? What expertise will have to be developed, or even invented? At a time when many players in the cultural and media industries are wondering what impact innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence will have on their professions, we thought it important to take a step back with Catherine Mathys, a futurist and partner at Société des Demains.

In recent months, many professionals and advocacy organizations have expressed concern about the potentially negative impact of the development of artificial intelligence on their professions. Should we expect major upheavals very soon?

Artificial intelligence is currently at the heart of many concerns and conversations. On the other hand, it is possible to observe a decline in the enchantment curve, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, the returns on investment envisaged for artificial intelligence have not yet materialized, and neither have the doomsday scenarios. And yet, some researchers believe that until there is an impact on businesses, and therefore adoption by businesses, there will be no real major transformations. We’re currently at the top of a curve of interest in artificial intelligence, but what’s interesting is what’s going to happen next, i.e. the implementation of productivity and applicability solutions.

On the other hand, and paradoxically, this is not the first time we’ve had the feeling of being confronted with unprecedented situations, where everything has to be invented. This has happened frequently in the course of industrial history, with the resulting challenges of adaptability. With AI, we’re promised a revolution almost as major as the discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel, but the changes are likely to be much more diffuse than we might expect.

How can we ensure that we keep pace with, and even anticipate, these changes in our businesses?

What’s striking about artificial intelligence is the speed with which research is being carried out, results demonstrated and commercialized. We’re not used to this. Even the web took a long time to be credibly implemented in all kinds of industries. In the early days, there was particularly strong interest in the cultural and media industries, even if most of us still didn’t really know what it would be used for. As a result, there wasn’t much significant progress in the early days of the web, so I think we could do things differently with AI.

In particular, I believe it’s important to determine now what we want the future to look like. We’re often in a reactive position. The position of the last 20 years has been: “The giants will decide, and we’ll see what we do with that”. Is it possible to look at things differently? Is it possible to decide that we want to organize ourselves differently? It’s up to us, notably through foresight, to develop scenarios that don’t yet exist, and to give ourselves the time and means to bring them to light.

To this end, and within this framework, needs are changing. Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, has said that when information was more restricted, it came to those who had it, who had the knowledge, who had the resources to understand it, they had to enlighten us. It was, in a sense, the age of the expert. Now that there is an overabundance of information, the future belongs to those who are able to synthesize and understand the links between systems and ecosystems, rather than to those who accumulate a lot of knowledge. The next few years should thus be the dawn of the generalist.

How do you think this could influence the cultural and media industries in particular?

In the cultural and creative industries, certain silos are often maintained by administrative and financial systems, forcing creators to fit into boxes that don’t correspond to what they do. However, it is highly likely that the next few years will see the emergence of more and more porosity between the fields of production and creation, which should facilitate exchanges but also give rise to new content, new ways of doing things, new ways – perhaps not new sectors, but new ways of perceiving certain things. In both initial and continuing training, the challenge will be to train people who are capable of learning from each other and using the tools at their disposal.

Amy Webb refers to us as Generation T, because we are the generation of transition. And it’s not a generation linked to a year of birth, but rather to a moment in history, in our professions. In fact, I teach students in their twenties who have similar concerns to millennials on these issues! We are, in a sense, on a “shear line”, an expression used in the maritime context when two currents of water meet, two forces that don’t necessarily go in the same direction and which must therefore be crossed with great care.

That’s the situation we’re in right now! In my opinion, while we’ve spent much of the last few decades automating our ways of producing and working, even to the point of dehumanizing ourselves, creative skills are going to be at the heart of the coming upheavals. In the years to come, communication, collaboration, creativity, analysis and critical thinking will all be essential to the emergence of new professions.

What kind of jobs can we imagine to get us through this transition period and shape the future?

We know that in the years to come, automated content will become easier and easier to produce. They will surely play a big role in the content ecosystem. I can see how automated content producers could become important people to oversee this type of production, to ensure that it meets needs. Some content will have to be automated, but it has to be done well, and it has to balance content and needs. I could see this type of profile appearing. In the same vein, more and more human-machine managers could appear, with responsibility for human-machine compatibility.

There’s a lot of talk about artificial intelligence, but it’s not artificial intelligence as such that needs our attention. It’s the cross-fertilization of several concomitant technologies that are taking us into an accelerated transformation. I’m thinking here of quantum computing and biotechnology. To support these cross-fertilizations, we could therefore imagine roles for specialists in the fusion of the physical and virtual worlds, facilitating fluidity between the experiences we have in our physical lives and our virtual lives, and this at all levels – purchasing, work, entertainment, for example – in a logic of personalization according to the needs of individuals and companies. We’ll need designers, architects and XR architects, whose main task will be to design this type of circulation.

How do you think, based on what you’ve observed or what you’ve imagined in your foresight work, that a form of self-regulation can be put in place for these professions or these mixed worlds, with a view to social equity and representativeness?

I don’t have any predictions to make, but one thing’s for sure: from this point of view, we’ve missed the boat with the web. My hope is that we’ll learn from these mistakes and manage to do things differently. Many voices are already being raised against bias, for example in the databases that train AI. It’s not perfect. It can be corrected, but it’s never perfect. What can we do to improve this aspect? We’re already having conversations about it, something we didn’t do when we started massively adopting the web. So that’s encouraging.

A number of excellent experiments have already been carried out, and should be continued, such as the development of ways of preserving or archiving certain languages using artificial intelligence, and virtual reality experiments designed to support the diversity of representations. It’s not all plain sailing, of course. There are still very few women working in this type of company, gender bias is rife and there is very little representation of diversity. These are very difficult barriers to break down. What we can hope for, however, is that through analysis, reflection and awareness-raising, we can work towards desirable futures shaped by informed, critical professionals.