future job

Editor’s note: In 2020, a working group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology produced a comprehensive Report Regarding future work.Since then, the global pandemic has had a major impact on jobs and businesses. future job, By the same author. The book is adapted from the following excerpt and will be published by MIT Press on January 25, 2022.

Ten years ago, powerful mobile phones were still a novelty, driverless cars never appeared on public roads, and computers did not listen to conversations or answer verbal questions. Except for one or two assembly lines, the possibility of robots taking over the work seems far away. But as the emerging capabilities of robotics and artificial intelligence began to make headlines and the public’s imagination, researchers and commentators began to warn about jobs that have long been considered unaffected by automation—those that require expertise, judgment, and creativity. Powerful and experienced work-may soon be better done through the machine. Citizens of industrialized countries have noticed this, and their reaction has become increasingly frightened.

Our research has not confirmed the dystopian vision of robots taking workers out of the factory or artificial intelligence making human expertise and judgment redundant. But it does reveal something equally harmful: In an economy where the technological ecosystem increases productivity and creates a lot of jobs (at least before the covid-19 crisis), we have discovered a labor market where the distribution of results is so unequal, The most important thing about this bias is that most workers only taste a small part of the huge gain.

For most American workers, the trajectory of productivity growth is different from the trajectory of wage growth 40 years ago. This decoupling has harmful economic and social consequences: low-paying, unsafe jobs performed by uneducated workers; low labor force participation rates; weak upward mobility between generations; racial disparities in income and employment continue to worsen , And it hasn’t improved significantly in decades. Although new technologies have led to these terrible results, these results are not the inevitable result of technological change, globalization, or market forces. Similar pressures from digitalization and globalization have affected most industrialized countries, but their labor markets have performed better.

We know that history and economy have no inherent conflict between technological change, full employment and income increase. The dynamic interaction of task automation, innovation, and new job creation is always destructive, but it is the main source of increased productivity. Innovation has increased the quantity, quality, and variety of work that workers can complete in a given time. In turn, this continuous increase in productivity can improve living standards and the prosperity of human undertakings.

However, when innovation fails to bring opportunities, there will be a fear of the future: doubt that technological progress, even if it makes the country richer, will threaten the livelihoods of many people. This fear has paid a high price: political and regional differences, distrust of institutions, and distrust of innovation itself. In American politics, the gap between the “rich” and the “poor” is getting wider and wider, and the country is becoming increasingly divided on the issue of how society should respond to the needs of people at the bottom of the economic ladder.

The core challenge of the future—in fact, the job of the future—is to promote labor market opportunities to satisfy, complement, and shape technological innovation. This drive will require innovation in our labor market institutions by modernizing the laws, policies, norms, organizations, and enterprises that set the “rules of the game.”

The impact of technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics on the labor market will take years to become apparent. But we don’t have time to prepare for them. If these technologies are applied to today’s labor institutions designed for the last century, we will see effects similar to those shown in recent decades: downward pressure on wages and benefits, and an increasingly fragmented labor market.

Building a future job that reaps dividends from fast-developing automation and more powerful computers can provide workers with opportunities and economic security. To this end, we must promote institutional innovation that complements technological changes.

The core challenge of the future—in fact, the job of the future—is to promote labor market opportunities to satisfy, complement, and shape technological innovation.

Long before the pandemic was interrupted, our research on future jobs showed how many people in our country failed to thrive in a labor market that created a lot of jobs but lacked economic security. The pandemic’s impact is more clear and public: although many low-wage workers are officially designated as “essential”, they endure the most dangerous working conditions in the face of covid-19 because most of their work cannot be done remotely Finish.

Some predict that robots will soon take over these roles, although so far few have done so. Others see the indispensable role of human flexibility, because it is the adaptability of humans, not machines, that allows us to reorganize work in real time during a pandemic. Still others see covid-19 as a forced automation event—a catalytic force that will push technology from the future to the present when we learn to deploy machines in tasks that humans cannot safely perform. Regardless of the outcome, the impact of covid-19 on technology and work will last long after the pandemic, and the changes it will cause may look completely different from anyone envisioned in 2018.

Other forces are still in the vision for the future in 2018, including the rupture between the world’s two largest economies and the surge in political turmoil and economic nationalism. These people were defeated by the U.S. Capitol in the 2020 election of President Joe’s in 2020. The violence attacked Biden. These pressures are reshaping alliances, splitting and reorganizing global business relationships, and spurring new forms of cyber warfare, including disinformation, industrial-scale espionage, and electronic compromise of critical infrastructure. The United States and China have had friction before, but there is no rift like what is happening now. The trade war has evolved into a technological war. The all-government approach adopted by China to address major industrial and technological goals poses a competitive challenge to Western economies, which usually adopt a decentralized, usually enterprise-led approach. It remains to be seen whether China’s focus on government-led data accumulation will lead to technological advancement, rather than just creating powerful tools for monitoring and controlling its own population.

The conflict with China is affecting the economy and may hinder innovation. As researchers work across national borders and time zones, such innovations are increasingly appearing in countries around the world. How do we ensure that technological progress, whenever it arrives, will bring about a broadly shared prosperity? How can the United States and its workers continue to play a leading role in inventing and shaping technology and benefiting from it?

There is no convincing historical or contemporary evidence that technological progress is pushing us towards a future of unemployment. On the contrary, we expect that in the next 20 years, industrialized countries will have more job vacancies than labor, and robots and automation will play an increasingly important role in bridging these gaps.

Tremendous advances in computing and communications, robotics, and artificial intelligence are reshaping industries such as insurance, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, and transportation. But we have observed that from the birth of the invention to its extensive commercialization, assimilation to business processes, widespread adoption, and the impact on the labor force, there is a large amount of time lag, usually as long as several decades. For example, the pace of new industrial robots entering small and medium-sized enterprises is slow, and autonomous vehicles have not yet been deployed on a large scale. In fact, the most far-reaching impact of the new technologies we have discovered on the labor market is not so much robotics and artificial intelligence as it is the Internet, mobile and cloud computing, and mobile phones for decades (although they have been greatly improved). Continued to spread.

This timescale of technological change provides opportunities to formulate policies, develop skills, and promote investment to constructively shape the trajectory of change in order to achieve the greatest social and economic benefits.

If we are willing to make the necessary changes, what is needed to reshape and readjust US institutions and policies to create possible common prosperity?

We first study how workers can be trained to succeed in a rapidly changing economy. To keep employees productive in the ever-changing workplace, they need to be able to learn new skills at all stages of their lives (in elementary and middle schools, vocational and university courses, and ongoing adult training courses). America’s unique worker training system has shortcomings, but it also has unique advantages. For example, it provides many entry points for workers who may want to reshape their career paths or need to find new jobs after layoffs. We believe that the United States must invest in existing education and training institutions and innovate to create new training models to make continuous skills development easy, participatory, and cost-effective.

But even well-trained and motivated employees need and deserve a basic sense of security. Increases in labor productivity have not translated into widespread income growth, because labor market institutions and policies have fallen into disrepair.

From Sweden to Germany to Canada, other countries face the same economic, technological, and global power as the United States, and enjoy the same strong economic growth, but bring better results for their workers. What sets the United States apart are the specific institutional changes and policy choices that have failed to weaken and in some cases amplify the impact of these pressures on the labor market.

The United States has allowed traditional workers’ voice channels to shrink without cultivating new institutions or supporting existing institutions. It allows the federal minimum wage to fall to an almost irrelevant level, lowering the bottom line of the labor market for low-wage workers. It accepted the policy-driven expansion of free trade with developing countries, especially Mexico and China, which increased gross national income, but failed to address the loss of employment and the retraining needs of workers displaced by these policies. .

There is no evidence that this strategy of embracing growth while ignoring the plight of ordinary workers has paid off for the United States. The United States has a long history of leadership in growth and innovation—the country has been a world leader throughout the 20th century, and especially in the decades after World War II—and the labor market ills recorded here are recent. These failures do not inevitably result from innovation or constitute costs that are worth paying for the other economic benefits they ostensibly provide. We can do better.

Recognizing the importance of good jobs for human well-being and the importance of innovation for creating good jobs, we began to think about how to use innovation investment to promote job creation, accelerate growth, and respond to increasingly severe competitive challenges.

Innovative investment to expand the economic pie is crucial to coping with the challenges posed by the global economy marked by fierce technological competition. In our research, we found the direct result of the US federal government’s investment in research and development in the past century or even longer: the Internet, advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence, robots, and autonomous vehicles, to name a few. These new goods and services have spawned new industries and occupations that require new skills and provide new income opportunities. The United States has an excellent record of supporting the innovation of inventors, entrepreneurs, and creative capital to support and create new businesses.

Adopting new technologies will create winners and losers, and will continue to do so. Seeking input from all stakeholders—including workers, businesses, investors, education and non-profit organizations, and governments—can minimize harm to individuals and communities and maximize their benefits, and help ensure the future The labor market provides advantages, opportunities and economic security measures for all.