Self-Help Author: Robots Are Taking Over So Learn Animation Before It’s Too Late

By Amid Amidi | 02/08/2016 10:23 pm | 39 Comments

James Altucher, an author of books like Choose Yourself: Be Happy, Make Millions, Live the Dream and The Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth, appeared on Yahoo! Finance to discuss American jobs of the future, which he envisions will involve autoworkers and lawyers switching over to creative work like animation.

Here’s the gist of Altucher’s argument: autoworkers have no future because driverless-cars are coming, and there’ll soon be 90% fewer cars on the road since everybody will carpool, so autoworkers should instead learn creative job skills that he believes require little to no effort and pay lots of money, like animation, website design, and illustration.

Altucher also says that Walmart is replacing its employees with robots, while accountants and lawyers are being replaced by artificial intelligence, so everybody from blue-collar workers to legal professionals should become an artist to protect themselves from the impending technological dystopia. You can watch his pitch below:

The immediate solution, Altucher says, is that everyone should start taking online classes in illustration, 3D rendering, and animation to ensure relevance after the robots have taken our jobs. Altucher has even made phone calls to ensure that his theories are accurate. He explained to the confused Yahoo interviewer: “I specifically called up a lot of these companies and I said, ‘What can I learn in 3 months time that can make me several thousand dollars in a few days?'”

Apparently, “companies” told Altucher that animation, CGI, and illustration are jobs that match his desire to make lots of money with little to no training. For people who are looking for easy get-rich-quick schemes, Altucher also recommends drawing children’s books because “children’s book illustration is not the most complicated thing in the world to learn.” That would certainly explain why that crafty Dr. Seuss illustrated so many of the darn things in his lifetime.

Altucher recommends that people should start exercising their “idea muscle” to prepare for their new career as a creative person. “Start practicing coming up with 10 ideas a day for businesses and 10 ideas a day for books,” he says. If you start right now, you should have several thousand ideas for different business and books by the end of 2016.

(Thanks, Andy Arett)

Latest News from Cartoon Brew