1 . By day, Robert Titterton is a lawyer. In his spare on stage beside pianist Maria Raspopova — not as a musician but as her page turner. “I’m not a trained musician, but I’ve learnt to read music so I can help Maria in her performance.”

Mr Titterton is chairman of the Omega Ensemble but has been the group’s official page turner for the past four years. His job is to sit beside the pianist and turn the pages of the score so the musician doesn’t have to break the flow of sound by doing it themselves. He said he became just as nervous as those playing instruments on stage.

“A lot of skills are needed for the job. You have to make sure you don’t turn two pages at once and make sure you find the repeats in the music when you have to go back to the right spot.” Mr Titterton explained.

2 . For nearly a decade now, Merebeth has been a self-employed pet transport specialist. Her pet transport job was born of the financial crisis(危机) in the late 2000s. The downturn hit the real estate (房地产) firm where she had worked for ten years as an office manager. The firm went broke and left her looking for a new job. One day, while driving near her home, she saw a dog wandering on the road, clearly lost. She took it home, and her sister in Denver agreed to take it. This was a loving home for sure, but 1, 600 miles away. It didn’t take long for Merebeth to decide to drive the dog there herself. It was her first road trip to her new job.

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This wanderlust is inherited from her father, she says. She moved their family from Canada to California when she was one year old, because he wanted them to explore a new place together. As soon as she graduated from high school she left home to live on Catalina Island off the Californian coast, away from her parents, where she enjoyed a life of sailing and off-road biking.

It turns out that pet transporting pays quite well at about $30, 000 per year before tax. She doesn’t work in summer, as it would be unpleasantly hot for the animals in the car, even with air conditioning. As autumn comes, she gets restless—the same old wanderlust returning. It’s a call she must heed alone, though. Merebeth says, “When I am on the road, I’m just in my own world. I’ve always been independent-spirited and I just feel strongly that I mush help animals.”

10 . From self-driving cars to carebots for elderly people, rapid advances in technology have long represented a potential threat to many jobs normally performed by people.

But experts now believe that almost 50 per cent of occupations existing today will be completely unnecessary by 2025 as artificial intelligence continues to transform businesses. This could put some people’s livelihoods at risk.

“Experts predict that 50 per cent of occupations today will no longer exist by 2025 as people will take up more creative professions,” said Martin Chen, Chief Operating Officer of Genesis. “This means that jobs will develop and so will real estate development.”

Workspaces with rows of desks will become completely extra, not because they are not fit for purpose, but simply because that purpose no longer exists, according to the report. “The next fifteen years will see a revolution in how we work, and a corresponding revolution will necessarily take place on how we plan and think about workplaces,” said Peter Andrew, Director of Workplace Strategy for CBRE Asia Pacific.

A growing proportion of jobs in the future will require creativity intelligence, social skills and the ability to apply artificial intelligence. “And for most people that will be a route to happiness and fulfillment,” the report states.

Data in the US suggests that technology already destroys more jobs than it creates, as GDP has been able to grow faster than employment since 2000. A 2014 report by Pew Research found 52 per cent of experts in artificial and robotics were optimistic about the future and believed there would still be enough jobs in the next few decades.

The optimists imagined “a future in which robots and digital agents do not replace more jobs than they create,” Microsoft’s Jonathan Grudin told researchers that: “Technology will continue to break up jobs, but more jobs seem likely to be created. Although there have always been unemployed people, when we reached a few billion people there were billions of jobs. There is no shortage of things that need to be done and that will not change.”