Jobs that are likely to go away in the next 10-20 years: the kind of routine industrial and administrative jobs that our current education system has traditionally been geared towards.
Skills that are likely to still be in demand: caring for others, communicating with others, creativity – all of which our current education system is bad at teaching, but all of which can be taught as skills.
In the longer term, more and more jobs will disappear, and we may end up in a scenario where income and work have to be decoupled. In the short term, the need is to structure the economy so that people are supported in transitioning from one type of employment to another (rather than try to “protect the past from the future” and prevent industries from changing – which is impractical). This may involve increasing the flexibility of work. Some people prefer greater flexibility to higher income.
There are societal choices to be made, though, to shift from the automation process benefiting a small sector of society rather than the whole of society (as is largely the case at the moment). Having some degree of security (social safety net) increases the likelihood that people will take the risk to be entrepreneurial. Current incentives reward businesses for not employing people (with less complicated and lower taxes); this needs to change.
There are also plenty of opportunities for automation and technology to make existing work easier and more valuable.
There are known negative effects of loss of employment in a society or community, but some of the speakers here argue that those partly stem from the fact that employment is considered the norm; that if there was a shift of perspective, they might be mitigated. Sharing out the available work more evenly, so that people get more leisure but there is still high employment, is another approach. Obviously, this only works well if everyone is still getting a livable income.
Bottom line: technology will continue to disrupt the world of work, but it’s our choice what that disruption looks like. We can (collectively) choose that the benefits are distributed throughout society, if we want to.
fascinating. maybe, right at the end when we’re out of resources and choking amidst the smoke of warring factions, we’ll start to make this imagined society a reality.
fascinating. maybe, right at the end when we’re out of resources and choking amidst the smoke of warring factions, we’ll start to make this imagined society a reality.
fascinating. maybe, right at the end when we’re out of resources and choking amidst the smoke of warring factions, we’ll start to make this imagined society a reality.