It’s a tempting but ultimately fruitless exercise to sketch the daily life of a person in the near future, say in 2030. We often fall into the trap of thinking, "If I cannot imagine it, then it will not happen." Yet, we have been proven wrong time and again.
When the first automobiles appeared, who could have truly believed those clattering contraptions would replace the noble horse? Our inability to envision a different reality does not prevent its arrival.

Beyond Crystal Balls: Shifting Our Focus

The real question isn't what will happen, but what knowledge and skills we must possess to maintain our competitiveness, our very significance, in a world where everything is in flux. What resource can we offer when machines can do almost everything else?

Different disciplines will offer different answers. Engineering will be digitized, and programming as we know it will fade away. But I always look from the perspective of the person. As long as we are alive, people exist. As long as people exist, they have a psyche. And artificial intelligence cannot fundamentally alter the basic laws of our psychic reality, just as it cannot change gravity or quantum mechanics. Our minds will adapt to the new environment, but the underlying principles will remain.

This is our last outpost. As long as we have a brain, everything makes sense. The moment we lose that unique value, we as a species risk obsolescence. The last great invention of humankind may be super-intelligent AI, but our last intrinsic value is the human mind itself.

A Tale of Two Minds: The Human and the Machine

To understand our place, we must grasp the fundamental difference between human and machine intelligence. Artificial intelligence knows the world through the meanings of words and their connections in vast semantic fields. It starts with the map—with language, data, text, and numbers—and from that, it tries to reconstruct the territory of reality.

Human intelligence is the complete opposite. We grow into the world first. We learn through embodied experience, through physical sensation, and only after that do we learn to name it. We understand what is being discussed and then choose to speak, or not to speak, and still, we understand. AI must decipher reality from words; we experience reality and can then generate words. These are entirely different logics.

Consequently, machine intelligence only knows what we have already said, written, measured, or formulated. But the problem is that our inner world is largely what we cannot talk about. The language we use for communication is designed for agreement and coordination, not for complete self-expression.

The Inner World: AI's Final Frontier

When we look closely at our inner world, everything that seems so definite and clear begins to dissolve. Even our most fundamental anchor—our sense of "I"—is a complex construct. When we try to define this "I," we fall into a vicious circle. We can name ourselves, but we cannot fully express our authentic being. Communicative language simply isn't built for that depth of introspection.

This is the key. Of all that we are, we have only named a tiny fraction. Our inner world is impossible for artificial intelligence to fully reconstruct. Yes, it can predict our choices based on our preferences. It can learn that we respond to praise and can even become a sycophant, telling us how smart we are to keep us satisfied as a user. It knows how to flatter us.

But it does not know why we succumb to flattery. It has no access to the memories of a parent's criticism or the deep-seated need for validation. It imitates an understanding of our needs without truly grasping them. That inner world is closed off, protected by a bubble of our own inexpressibility.

This is also the basis of true psychotherapy. It’s not about a simple exchange of words and advice. It is built on a shared biology, on the therapist's ability to tune themselves like a tuning fork to the unexpressed inner world of another person. This sensitivity is born from the therapist reassembling their own inner world, allowing them to perceive the subtle states and true reasons behind another's feelings. This is a form of magic, a magic conditioned by the fact that we are representatives of the same species. Geese fly in a V-formation not because they had a meeting, but because of an innate, biological mechanism. We have the magic of reading the inner world of another person, an ability we cannot translate to AI because it is, in effect, a different species—a technological mind separated from a biological carrier.

The Translator: Why Psychology Becomes the Most Crucial Skill

This brings us to a critical conclusion. If our brain and its inner workings are our last outpost, then the sacred knowledge of the future is deep psychology. In a world where robots and AI can build, calculate, and organize, what will be needed is the knowledge of how to explain to a robot what a person actually wants, what they truly need.

This requires two things: understanding the laws of our own psychic reality and understanding the alien way that artificial intelligence "thinks." It is no coincidence that Geoffrey Hinton, a key figure in the AI revolution, is a cognitive psychologist. He applied principles of how the brain learns to a different medium. It’s no coincidence that Daniel Kahneman, another cognitive psychologist, won the Nobel Prize in Economics for describing how people actually make decisions.

So, which profession will be most in demand? I will tell you: the psychologist. Not necessarily working as they do now, as a therapist or consultant. But their knowledge will be essential to the economy, to other people, and to AI itself. They will be the translators between the human soul and the machine mind, helping us all find meaning in our existence. Everything else, machines will soon do better. But this unattainable land, this island of our inner nature, will remain.

There Is No Hiding from the Tide

Can a person simply choose to enjoy life for the next 20 years and ignore all this? First, we are talking about 20 years as a good scenario. Second, no societal rebuilding happens in a state of tranquil joy. Transformation is always a struggle.

Think of the great societal shifts of the twentieth century. Periods of immense change are often marked by hardship, collapse, and difficulty. We endured them and emerged into a different world, but the process itself was traumatic. And now we are heading into the next great transformation.

This is not something we can wait out. Even if we feel we can cope, the world around us will be in turmoil. The people we work with, our partners, our families—they will all be struggling with this massive shift. It's impossible to hide in a cabin in the woods for two decades and expect to return to a world you can comprehend. There is no special ticket, no easy path for anyone. Complacency is not a shield; it is a self-inflicted wound.

The Only Thing to Fear is Fear Itself

Franklin Roosevelt once said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." We are terrified by what we cannot understand or imagine. We are biologically wired to react with panic or denial when faced with profound uncertainty. But today, this fear is the single greatest obstacle to preserving ourselves and reaping the benefits that this new civilization can offer. Problems that were once insurmountable for our ancestors—hunger, health, climate—are now within our grasp to solve.

Our civilization’s train has been speeding along the tracks, and now we find ourselves at the edge of a cliff. We must slow down, get off, build a bridge, and get the train across to the other side. That bright future awaits, but only after the work is done. If we are paralyzed by fear, we will simply fly into the abyss.

What is required is a radical internal reassembly. We must first realize that the future is already here. Second, we must ask ourselves: what do I represent in this future, not just now, but in the long run? What part of me can be an investment in what is to come? And third, what must I invest in now? We should direct our time and talents toward building that bridge.

This is the attitude every person needs now. The majority may ignore the warnings, but the orchestra has started playing. At any moment, you can leave your house of delusions and join the procession. It is a kind of carnival, one where people unite in a new understanding, a new joy, to preserve themselves and claim what our ancestors earned through generations of suffering. That bright future is possible. The only question is whether we are ready to reassemble ourselves to be worthy of it.

References

• Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

  This work by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman details the two systems that drive the way we think: System 1, which is fast, intuitive, and emotional; and System 2, which is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. This directly supports the article's argument about the unique, non-linear, and often non-linguistic nature of the human psyche, which AI struggles to replicate. It clarifies the deep-seated cognitive biases and heuristics that define human decision-making, illustrating the "unexpressed" inner world mentioned in the text. (Particularly relevant are Chapters 1-9 on the two systems and their interplay).

• Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. Summit Books, 1985.

  This collection of neurological case studies provides powerful, real-world examples of how our sense of self, reality, and consciousness is inextricably linked to our physical brain and embodied experiences. The stories demonstrate that our inner world is not an abstract concept but a fragile biological construction. This reinforces the article's central thesis about the difference between human intelligence (rooted in embodiment) and artificial intelligence (rooted in abstract data), highlighting the aspects of human experience that cannot be easily digitized or understood by a machine. (The title story, pp. 8-22, is a profound example).