The automation of many of our jobs – even those that have long seemed safe – is fully inevitable at this point. One study predicts that about 38 percent of American jobs will be at high risk of automation by the early 2030s, which is not that far away. We’re asked to trust that future work could be ‘liberating,’ but considering the way corporations tend to operate, it’s not hard to see why the masses are terrified that robots will soon leave us unemployed and unable to provide for ourselves and our families.

But at the recent World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in January 2018, experts imagined the kinds of jobs that will be around – and now we have visualizations of what they could look like. In fact, those experts stated that 65% of children in school today will have jobs that don’t currently exist.

In a scene that definitely looks straight out of a sci-fi movie, a worker sits in a glass pod high over a city, overseeing a 3D printer in the midst of building a superstructure. A ‘landfill recycler’ salvages existing materials from landfills to be integrated into new products while sitting atop something that looks like a gigantic vacuum hose. On serene turquoise waters, a ‘blockchain banking engineer’ fine-tunes a floating machine that will give people in remote locations access to secure banking.

It might be a robot operating on this woman in a rural setting, but he’s got the holographic head of the real surgeon who’s carrying out the procedure from thousands of miles away. A ‘public technology ethicist’ evaluates new technology before it goes live to determine its benefits to the public. And finally, the operator of a 3D scanning machine captures entire historically significant buildings to ensure that even if they’re demolished, they’re preserved in perpetuity.

These illustrations were produced by AKQA London together with Salt and Pepper Creative Studio based on the World Economic Forum panelists’ predictions. Concept artist Florian de Gesincourt created the first sketches, and London retouching studio Happy Finish colored and perfected them. The series was produced in a mere 120 hours in the midst of the forum so attendees could see them. They’re a pretty good reminder that the future is closer than we think.

Visions of fictional cities – whether optimistic, realistic, fantastical or dystopian – tend to take on a haze of mystery and grandiosity in Japanese anime, as epitomized in ‘Ghost in the Shell.’ Dark jumbles of nearly-identical skyscrapers lurk over the protagonists in futuristic metropolises, often emphasizing feelings of desolation, industrialization and technology run amok. If you’ve ever sighed over a particularly incredible work of fictional architecture, you might be interested in an exhibition currently on display at London’s House of Illustration.

‘Anime Architecture: Backgrounds of Japan’ is the first UK exhibition of architectural illustrations for classic anime films, featuring over 100 technical drawings and watercolor illustrations. Most of these works come from series that debuted or were most popular during the anime heyday of the 1990s, including Hiromasa Ogura’s paintings for ‘Ghost in the Shell’, Takashi Watanebe’s pencil drawings from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and work from the films ‘Patlabor: The Movie’ (1989) and ‘Metropolis’ (2001) by Mamoru Oshii and Atsushi Takeuchi.

Sure, there are great anime works that came after these with fictional architecture that’s just as beautiful, but these days, artists use computer animation instead of hand-painting the backgrounds. In an interview with It’s Nice That, curator Stefan Riekeles explains that it took quite a bit of nudging and late-night meetings at bars to convince the artists that people would want to see these works outside the context of the films, and that they’d translate well to gallery walls.

“[Ghost in the Shell], released 1995, was the continuation of [director Mamoru Oshii’s] reflection of the Asian mega-city, which he started with Patlabor in 1989 and continued after Ghost in the Shell: Innocence in 2004. Patlabor is set in a realistic urban depiction of Tokyo. Innocence is located in a purely fictional Asian world. The world of Ghost in the Shell is a hybrid of these poles.”

“The idea was to evoke a feeling of submerging into the deep levels of the city, where a flood of information overflows the human senses and a lot of noise surrounds the people. The artists were looking for an expression of a crowded space. They found a blueprint for such a place in Hong Kong, which is exotic enough for a Japanese audience to evoke a feeling of alienation and strangeness but familiar enough to relate their daily life to.”

Anime Architecture: Backgrounds of Japan will be open through September 10th, 2017 at the House of Illustration in King’s Cross.

30 years post-Chernobyl and 5 years after Fukushima, we still haven’t figured out how to deal with lingering radiation in the wake of a nuclear disaster or come up with a foolproof way to protect ourselves from similar incidents in the future. Nuclear disaster-focused concept designs address everything from repopulating Chernobyl and safeguarding against radiation-poisoned seafood from Japan to living in a dystopian post-apocalyptic future where mechanical dogs scout the streets.

Self-Contained Fallout-Absorbing City for Chernobyl

People are beginning to resettle the post-Chernobyl nuclear wasteland surrounding Pripyat, Ukraine whether radiation reaches safe levels or not, and this skyscraper concept is an attempt to minimize harm, creating a sort of self-contained oasis among the fallout. The skin of the building essentially acts as an anti-radiation force field, and the ‘Unexpected Aurora’ building itself filters air and water and harvests solar energy.

HAL Exoskeleton Turned Radiation Suit

Originally designed to help people with muscle diseases, the Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL) suit got a post-Fukushima upgrade to make it a radiation-proof suit for emergency responders. A typical anti-radiation tungsten vest weighs up to 132 pounds, making it very difficult to wear for long periods, but the HAL exoskeleton supports its weight, reducing fatigue and allowing greater access to hazardous sites.

Revitalization of the Chernobyl Zone

Another proposal for repopulating the Chernobyl exclusion zone seeks not to be entirely self-contained, but act as a framework for further development of human activity in the area, with a mono-railroad as its backbone. This rail line leads to modular train stations with emergency shower cabins and a decontamination zone, as well as honeycomb-shaped modular housing and observation towers. The development accommodates stubborn residents and curious tourists alike, providing plenty of opportunities to observe Pripyat in its new form.

Fukushima Plates Detect Radiation

After the Fukushima disaster in Japan, a lot of sushi lovers questioned whether seafood imported from the region was safe, hence this concept by German designer Nils Ferber. There’s a radiation meter built right into each plate, with LED lights to warn you if your food is dangerously radioactive. One glowing white light tells you your food contains low levels of radiation, two white lights advise caution while a large red ring tells you it’s not safe to eat. “In a society that sacrifices reason to profit, security becomes a luxury for those who can afford it,” says the designer. “The plate might become an indispensable tool of survival in the future.”

Mech Suits, Chernobyl Patrol + More by Vitaly Bulgarov

Moscow-based concept designer Vitaly Bulgarov presents a series of digital proposals for ‘The Black Phoenix Project: Chernobyl Patrol,’ ranging from semi-civilian drones to advanced weaponry systems. The artist works for game developer Blizzard and created this 3D visualization as a demonstration on speeding up the process of creating concept art with design software like Brush and SoftImage XSI. The mech designs include robotic Scout Dogs, an ‘Arachnid Tank,’ a missile-launching ‘Public Protector,’ infantry bots and an ambulance/rescue robot, and they’re clearly oriented toward a post-apocalyptic, war-torn scenario in Chernobyl rather than just dealing with radiation.

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Beyond Chernobyl 15 Design Concepts For A Post Nuclear World

All of the books in the world still exist, yet are just out of reach, locked up in an impenetrable fortress or stacked so high we can’t hope to reach them, in this dystopian vision by Shanghai-based artist Jie Ma. The series of fictional libraries renders information inaccessible, teasing us with glimpses of what we could have but always keeping it just beyond our grasp.

Combining futuristic fantasy art reminiscent of movie or video game concepts and architectural assemblage, Ma’s series envisions libraries as stark structures that haven’t quite been abandoned altogether, but aren’t exactly in great shape. Human figures mill around in seeming frustration, stopped from actually finding anything by darkness and disorder.

In some of the images, books are scattered around in spaces that look as if a storm has just ripped through, or they’ve been left to deteriorate for decades. It’s impossible to see the spines of any of the books, and there are no ladders offering access to shelves that tower many dozens of feet into the air. In a bibliophile’s worst nightmare, walkways to rooms full of books have crumbled away.

In others, the libraries are like off-limits military facilities, surrounded on all sides by water or mud, frustratingly devoid of actual entrances. One of these works, entitled ’Eclipse VII: Deep Reverence for Arnold Böcklin,’ pays tribute to a famous painting known as ’Isle of the Dead.’

Yet, in contrast to these scenes are more hopeful ones, in which people examine oversized books with gigantic magnifiers in orderly rooms overlooking concrete landscapes. The series seems to suggest a sense of hope for human curiosity, driving us to keep seeking knowledge no matter how many obstacles we may encounter.

Will the architecture of the distant future be recognizable to us based on what we have built up to this point in human history, or beyond what we’re able to conceive? Take a look at any retro-futuristic architectural visions and you’ll most likely see structures influenced by the era in which they were created, but one contemporary illustrator is attempting to take such speculative creations into deep reaches of the imagination.

Graphic designer Mike Winkelman has created a series of digital illustrations that combine hyperrealism with structures that can seem physically impossible, but in a maybe-someday kind of way. Unlike the kind of fantasy architecture that feels totally dreamlike, such as floating houses, these visions often seem to employ technology that hasn’t yet been created.

Winkelman (known as Beeple) is on his eight consecutive year of drawing something every day, and hasn’t missed a single day in all that time. He uses Cinema 4D, Octane Renderer, X-particles, Zbrush and other tools to build these sci-fi worlds, some of which seem like they could be connected in an overarching narrative.

It’s the kind of work, presented sans commentary or explanation, that really gets your brain going imagining what the story could be for each piece. Dozens of these drawings can be found on the artist’s Behance, and select prints are available on Society 6.