As we trend towards full automation, both manufacturing and distribution jobs are likely to be structurally disintegrated. Services will probably also be rendered obsolete, aside from highly personal / human / creative services that rest on the long-tail of AI. So a more realistic prediction might suggest that the majority of "promising areas" will lie in fields like AI, big data, statistics, decentralization, advanced mathematics, etc. The character and arrangement of these domains will depend largely on whether we continue a trajectory of capitalism focused on profits, or whether we begin a shift towards socialism and co-op models that focus on psychosocial and environmental value.

Profit path = more advanced big data and exploitative mechanisms, psy-ops tooling for political power preservation, centralized power, etc (think robocop / cambridge analytica on steroids). Psychosocial path = more innovation rooted in positive psychology, complex systems, decentralization, and facilitating self-actualization (think Her / pragmatic utopia). The overlap between the two seems to be psychology and complex systems thinking, so maybe "complex systems psychology" or even "social engineering" would be solid candidates?

Complex systems psychology would essentially be the next evolution of behavioral economics, where we observe and engineer the emergence of system-level phenomena by motivating individual agents to behave in ways that are psychologically positive (or aligned with a profit/power motif of someone atop a hierarchy) for the individual parts and the whole.

Social engineering is just more the micro version of that - figuring out how to infiltrate / manipulate complex social systems and then equipping organizations with defense tactics and tooling. Maybe even anticipating the emergence of new attack vectors before they can be exploited.

For anyone interested in complex systems, Santa Fe Institute is in the middle of Week 3 of their free online course. Highly recommended.

For anyone interested in positive psychology, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are great places to start.

For anyone interested in social engineering, the SECTF is a goldmine.