The Future of Work — Introduction
We cannot see the future. At least not yet. We can try to predict it, but even that is hard. We have a say in Hebrew, that loosely translates to “Prophecy was given to the fools”. Still, trying to predict the future, even if it doesn’t end to be how we predicted it, is critical for how we make progress towards it and to how we prepare for it. In this series of blog posts, I am planning to talk about the Future of Work, based on domain reading and giving talks on the subject.
Are we really going to be out of work/jobs?
Let’s start with few predictions from industry experts and futurists:
• By 2020, $1000 PC will match the power of the human mind (Kurzweil, 2001)
• By 2025, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will replace half of the jobs (Rutkin, 2013)
• By 2030, 2 billion jobs will disappear (Thomas Frey, 2012)
• Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are responsible for the loss of ~200,000 jobs (Scott Galloway, DLD 2018)
• In the next decade, 35%+ of occupations could be automated out of existence (Bank of America and the University of Oxford)
• New jobs that will appear might not last for long and will be automated
Any way you look at it, jobs are going away every day, and it’s quite possible they will disappear faster and in higher numbers in the future.
Is this a problem? Does it mean that we will see unemployment rates go up and up, and eventually many people will be without a job?
I don’t think so. With humanity facing multiple challenges of climate shift, energy shortage, financial instability, disease and virus outbreaks, a looming water crisis, cyberwar, terrorism, and other massive challenges, there is certainly no shortage of problems to solve and good work to be done. And I didn’t even mention our need at some point in time to make it to space and to other planets. And while technology will continuously take on more and more of work previously done by humans, we will still have new and hard challenges for some time to come. We will just need to adjust to new workloads.
So what will we do?
There’s a fascinating blog by Thomas Frey that I have been quoting a lot, about the 162 jobs of the future. New job types are coming online every day. For example, there will be jobs around the upcoming commercial drones’ industry, the design and operation of autonomous vehicles, the design and operation of virtual spaces, professional sports, sensor data analytics (IoT), body part and limb making, and more. Sharing economy will introduce more people, location-independent, to the job market. And these are just few examples.
What is becoming clear is that more and more jobs will be Knowledge and Information-related jobs. More and more of us will be Knowledge Workers. A bigger part of our work will require some level of technical knowhow. Programming, initially simple, later more complex, will be something that almost everyone will do. And if this scares you, please realize that even today you are most likely doing some basic programming on your phone, TV set, cable box or web site.
In future blogposts I will talk about specific areas where I expect jobs and the demand for work to grow in the next 20–30 years. If I am a teenager today, or a college student (I am neither…) this is where I would spend my time learning and practicing.
