Opening lines: Soon we will rent out bits of our brain for storing Facebook memories

You can’t go to a conference now without someone putting up on a big screen some variation of the idea that “most of the jobs of the future haven’t been invented yet”.

The prospect of inventing a job is not an easy one unless you’re in a civil service department that refused to be decentralised, so they had to hire another person to do your job in Sligo, and you had nothing to do for a decade apart from play Patience and plan your holidays.

But aside from that, how will we earn a crust?

Data will be big. But data centres are controversial. What about small data? How about storing data in multiple smaller places, distributed? Crowd-sourced?

We can’t be too far away from the day when we rent out unused bits of our brain for storing our Facebook memories. We could just remember it but who’d want to remember a photo of a brunch?

This next one won’t go down well with farmers but eventually they’re going to clamp down on our cows.

When the waters of the arctic are lapping gently half-way up the thighs of the Statue of Liberty and the Big Ben is wearing a WATERPROOF 50M sign on its face, the Big Powers will use it as an excuse to start blaming Ireland’s cows for climate change.

Cows will become a luxury. We will need insect farmers to pickup the slack growing the grassfed Irish insects we know and love that diners might pay a fortune for - hairy-mollies, midges, wood-lice under the mat.

Likewise the wealthy may start adopting rescue cows. Farmers could reskill as Obedience trainers for prospective luxury cow owners. Teach people how to Hup!, Skyhyp! and Cmouttivit!

A huge growth industry will be in outsourcing things we used to do ourselves. Because of a fear that grips us that we are not collecting any meaningful experiences, we’ll want to outsource our mundane work even more.

We’ll hire people to go to museums for us when we are on holiday just so we can tick the cultural box while avoiding getting a pain in our back standing on a hard floor squinting at a Mondrian painting of boxes.

We will hire trusted associates to keep our social media accounts going when we’re too tired or mindful or on holidays to do it ourselves.

Celebrities already do this but what if your nan has forgotten to post a large pink Facebook status wishing everyone a lovely day or shares a story about immigrants that originated from Britain First?

What if your uncle forgets to tweet about snowflakes or whether a man can even flirt now? They’re going to need personalised social media content creators.

Opinions are exhausting. It should be possible to outsource them to others. Pretty soon the whole internet will just be surrogates shouting at each other.

Obviously about ten minutes after all these jobs are invented, an AI will do them but it’s nice to dream.

Speaking of AI, we’re also going to need consultants to help us to deal with all the artificial intelligence in our lives.

Imagine a situation where your hoover, fridge, cooker, toaster were all sentient but made by different manufacturers.

What’s to stop them disagreeing among themselves or with you? We’re going to need AI relationship managers; humans to intervene in disputes between you and your sentient bidet.

Oh and tunnelers. We’re also going to need anyone who has any tunnelling experience.

If we are to believe numerous articles, there’s only about another 100 good years left on this planet before methane bombs and runaway green house-effect turn it into Venus.

And before that happens, we’ll either need to go underground to escape harmful gamma, or some other greek-letter rays.

A few will get off the planet but if you thought the health system was two tiered, wait till you see the VHI premiums to be guaranteed a spot on the Spás-LE Eithne.

And while we’re underground we’ll need the people we always needed: nurses, a fella/wan who is handy and anyone who owns a van/trailer/car with a hitch.